Hill School students going to Turkey to help refugees

Their classmates may be at the pool or on the beach this summer, but seven Hill School students plan to be in Turkey, volunteering at a Syrian refugee camp.

The students, all girls, will travel as part of the Give A Hand program, started last year by Hülya Kösematoglu, a sophomore at the Pottstown boarding school.

In addition to helping the refugees, the goal of the girls is to learn about local life and Turkish culture.

Kösematoglu, who moved to the United States two years ago from Istanbul, said she realized the Western world has a drastically different view of her home. So with the help of her parents and their contacts, she formed a partnership with Hasan Kalyoncu University in Gaziantep, Turkey, near the border with Syria.

The university is to provide the Hill School students and eight Turkish students free room and board during their two-week stay starting June 1. In addition to their work at the refugee camp, students are scheduled to attend lectures on Middle Eastern politics at Hasan Kalyoncu. They also plan to visit historical Turkish cities and landmarks.

Hill School sophomore Rachael Filzen of Collegeville was interested when she heard about Give A Hand. She said the volunteer work with Syrian refugees would give her the opportunity to "impact someone's life in a really real way."

"I am expecting my sense of privilege to change," Filzen said.

Not every student was as eager. Kösematoglu said many classmates were worried about their safety. Turkey, with cities she described as "history and the modern world together," is thought of as "super hot, unsafe, and filled with sand and people killing each other," she said.

Kösematoglu said she hoped her peers would better understand life in the Middle East through volunteering and cultural immersion.

Kösematoglu said she was also surprised and grateful by how the Hill School community had supported Give A Hand. With the help of Amy Lehman, the school's experimental education coordinator, Kösematoglu and the six other students sold snack packs as a fund-raiser for the refugees.

"Students are buying the exam-week care packages for each other, and the money goes towards the refugees," Kösematoglu said. "So it's giving from hand to hand to hand."

The girls raised $275 through the three-day snack-pack sale. They also reached beyond the school in their fund-raising efforts, creating a website, donation page, and social-media accounts to broadcast their message to the wider world. As of Friday, they had reached $220 in donations online.

"The girls have had so many different learning opportunities - outreach, pricing, business," Lehman said. "Just an outstanding effort."

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This is a corrected version of this article.