I landed in Istanbul on a late Spring evening.
Just hours later, I found myself walking into a modest building that stood as makeshift landing spot for orphans.
As soon as I walked into the door, I heard the laughs and little voices of children. Children I did not know by name or by face, but that summoned halfway across the world to meet.
I peered around the small room, where toys and coloring books were scattered atop an old and ragged carpet. Before I could look up, several kids rushed in and brought life to a sullen space.
Girls and boys. And they kept racing and rushing in, keen on greeting the new faces that walked in.
Some of the children were as young as three or four-years-old. All of them were Uyghur. Their visages proudly represented their Turkic heritage of their people and, some of the young girls, donning hijabs that tied them to Islam.
Most of the children were orphans.
Many of them were born shortly after their parents were arrested and imprisoned. Unfamiliar with the very faces of their parents, I learned, never knowing the voice or touch or love of the very figures that gave them of life.
Survivors of genocide in China, these children were robbed of their mothers and fathers. Their families were forever fractured, with disintegrated and globally disseminated parts.
Orphans, alone in the world, with strangers tending to them as best they could.
Some of the older children endured the ominous brainwashing schools in China. Vile places where the Communist regime instructed them that Islam was a “mental illness,” and that parents and loved ones who practiced the faith were “extremists.”
These orphans survived. But “survival,” their little faces exposed, is a layered concept. Most of the children wore the scars of imposed Communist indignities and the imprints of lost innocence, which shadowed them as they darted around the room playing and punching falling balloons.
They surrounded me, hugging my leg and racing about the modest space that stands as a makeshift school and orphanage.
We met at least eighty children that day, who are part of an emerging population of at least two-thousand Uyghur Muslim orphans in Istanbul – a center of the Uyghur Muslim refugee diaspora.
A rising population of lost children, unseen by much of the world and the hand of humanitarian organizations, in dire need of adequate housing and care.
A rising population of unseen children in dire need of a permanent orphanage. In Istanbul, around and amid the string of Uyghur civil and religious organizations that lack the resources to effectively care for them.
This Ramadan – I have led an effort to build a sustainable and safe home for these orphans. To help Uyghur leadership purchase a building that houses a standalone orphanage for these children, equipped with the comforts and conveniences of home.
An orphanage that will serve as a good home for these children, until they are able to find a permanent one with a loving family.
That is our Ramadan goal – and one that I urge you to support as donor. In fact, more than a donor, but a pioneer investing in Uyghur Muslim children, our children, forging a difficult life alone in a new nation, without one or both parents.
These children, victimized because they are Muslim, are our children. We must see them that way and stand with them as the world continues to turn a blind eye.
As I reflect on my time with the orphans, with their small faces and smaller voices still ringing in my head, a sobering reality set in like the Ramadan sun sets on these final blessed nights:
If we don’t help our own, who will?
As Muslims, on these final days of Ramadan, the responsibility falls squarely on our shoulders.
Otherwise, these Uyghur orphans will remain imprisoned inside the bars of anonymity and the walls of erasure.
Trapped as unseen orphans, without a home to make their own. We can change that. We must change that.
While stopping the genocide inside of China remains out of our hands, providing these children with hope is squarely within our reach.
Support these orphans and be a building block in the orphanage that will stand tomorrow.
Give Here.