We talked with the Colorful Hopes Association (RUMUD), which works with the children in Sur district of Diyarbakır, about how the children perceive the epidemic and as well as the Home Form of Solidarity campaign that they have launched in order to reach the children who have to get out of the street with the epidemic.
One of the first measures taken in the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak, which broke out in December in the World and in March in Turkey, was the closure of schools and the transition to the distance education system. During the epidemic, the children were removed from both the school and the streets. Unfortunately, the feelings of the children about the epidemic, what they live in their emotional worlds and what they can understand have not been brought up.
Yeter Erel Tuma from RUMUD, which was established to empower children affected by conflicts during the period of curfews in Diyarbakır, stated that the children in Sur lived and made sense of the quarantine coming with the epidemic differently from many children, and that this made them responsible for not being able to go out on the streets and this triggered their previous traumas. Stating that they act quickly in the first days of the epidemic and have talks with children, Tuma said that they decided to continue their work with the teleconference method over the current conditions of the children.