Scholarship Stories

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İnci Gülsüm İnal

 

The Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Scholarship offered me an opportunity to study "International Development: Social Policies and Social Development" Graduate Program at Manchester University, which I was accepted for in 2009. On the one hand, I was researching about the effect of sport on social development and health education; while, on the other hand, I was playing tennis on the tennis team of the university. I can never forget the support and understanding of the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation when I had to take a break from school due to a serious injury during a match.

In the summer of 2012, I graduated with merit for my dissertation titled "Does the Use of Sport as an Instrument in Health Education Help Social Development? Case Study of Giving HIV/AIDS Education to the Youth in Zambia" and returned to Turkey. Thanks to my education, just one week after my return, I started to work at the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC). For one year, I conducted pre-interviews with more thanfour hundred refugees referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to the UnitedStates Refugee Admission Program (USRAP). At the end of one year, I was promoted to the department manager assistant position and, the same year, I was one of five people among the world who were granted scholarship for the Harvard University's Refugee Trauma and Recovery Program. For the dissertation, I analyzed the dynamics between culture, belief - religion and trauma recovery in my short film on the refugees and the Chaldean Church that provides service in Istanbul. A short while after successfully graduating from the program in May 2014, I started to work at the Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants. For the last two months, as the coordinator of the Emergency Response Team in Suruç, Şanlıurfa, I have been organizing the distribution of non-food humanitarian aid of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for the Syrians escaping from Kobanî.