By Laura Bower

Help-In-Hands is well-known around Didim for its work raising money for good causes in the area.

Voices met with Lynn Cole, one of the founding members, her husband Phil, and treasurer David Tomkins to talk about fundraising efforts and the successes and challenges Help-In-Hands has faced over the years.

We meet at The Box, a small bar popular with local residents, and start chatting about how and why Help-In-Hands was created. Sixteen years ago the council wanted to open an advice centre to support the huge influx of British expats settling in Didim at that time, but it petered out within a few months.

However, Lynn and Phil were struck by the number of disabled people they saw, and wondered if there was a way to unite British expats and Didim council to do something to help the community.

Lynn approached Şebnem Öz Tezel from Didim Town Council, who was also part of the advice centre, to see if there was any way they could set up a charitable organisation for disabled people. Şebnem introduced Lynn to Eyüp Çabuk, head of Didim’s disabled association, and the rest is history.

Today, Help-in-Hands has a network of around 30 volunteers who dedicate time and effort to raising money to improve the lives of disabled people in and around Didim.

Help-In-Hands volunteers run a fortnightly stall at the Saturday market. I stopped by to meet the volunteers: Dean, who sits on Help-In-Hands’ board; Pam Gee, who also raises money by listing and selling donated clothes on Facebook; Carol Goddard, Pam Christiansen, Alison Hoyte and her daughter Ellen, who lives in the UK but helps out when she comes for a holiday, and one lady who wanted to stay nameless.

The stall sells clothes that have been donated to help raise money for Help-In-Hands, and was surrounded by Turkish ladies looking for a good-quality bargain. I joined them and ended up picking up a Primark jumpsuit and a top from Papaya for the grand old price of 60 lira!

Help-In-Hands also runs a monthly auction, summer and winter, at Cash’s bar, behind Migros. “It’s the first Tuesday of every month”, says Lynn. “I love the auction. We always have just over 100 items and it’s fast, because you’ve got to sell one item every 1.5 minutes.”

The auction at Cash’s is also staffed by volunteers and items are donated mainly by the expat community in Didim. Help-In-Hands is always looking for clothing and household items to sell, and any donations can be dropped off at Cash’s.

Another regular fundraising activity is run by Dee and Alan Hoare, who organise popular quiz nights at some of the bars. “Mavi Kitchen, Just4U, 2day bar, Royal Blue, and Palace Gardens are our main supporters, as well Al-Dantas and Shona at Charlie’s Bar,” said Lynn and Phil.

How many people have benefited from the work done by Help-In-Hands? “You can’t say”, said Lynn. “You do all the windows in a school and then you’re stood in front of 200, 300 kids.”

“During Ramadan you did 100 people with the food parcels”, David points out. “Yes, and there have been a lot of social projects which we’ve supported. And someone wrote a book, it was part-sponsored by Pinar, and we part-sponsored it as well.

“We gave Ibrahim a computer. He’s disabled. And then the week before that we did an electric wheelchair for a young lady that we’d helped years and years ago. That’s the second electric wheelchair that we’ve done for her, because they don’t last forever. We’ve done quite a lot, over the years.”

Help-In-Hands also played a key part in Didim’s effort to support victims of the earthquakes in southeastern Turkey in February 2023. “I went there to Defne, outside Hatay. And it had been completely isolated, because all the roads and infrastructure had gone, everything had gone. It was awful. And the children were hanging onto you.

“They were doing 44 houses then, small containers, mainly for single women with disabled children. They were doing allotments there, and children’s playgrounds. It was lovely. Then we visited 10 families and just gave them a handout. This woman was absolutely sobbing. She couldn’t stop crying because she owed somebody 2,000 lira and she didn’t know how she was going to pay it back.

“We went to one place, they were living in tents. Their farmhouse was completely flattened. When the earthquake happened, they got them strawberry cloches, two of them. They had 37 people living in each one. We went up there happy and smiling and laughing, and I don’t think we spoke to one another coming back.”

What motivates Lynn to put so much time and effort into Help-In-Hands? The simple answer is seeing people struggle, and wanting to do something to help.

Lynn describes two occasions where a chance encounter transformed the lives of Turkish families struggling with disability. “I was walking in town, and a poor girl, she was pushing this guy, and he was a lot heavier than her. She was only tiny. And he’d got a baby on his lap, and a child at the side, the shopping hung on this wheelchair as well.

“He explained that he was a deep-sea diver. And he’d been out working, and he came up from the sea too quick and got the bends. It had left him paralysed. So we got him an electric wheelchair.”

Lynn describes a similar moment, seeing a woman struggling to push a man in a wheelchair up one of the steepest hills in Didim. “We got him an electric wheelchair as well”, she says. But most referrals come via the disabled association, the council, social services or the neighbourhood muhtars. Potential beneficiaries are screened to confirm their need is genuine.

It’s clear that there’s no shortage of people who need help. Help-In-Hands also assists foreigners who need their support – although as Lynn says, “we can step in with wheelchairs, walking frames, anything like that. But we can’t just give someone else’s money away. They’ve got their own villa with a swimming pool, and they expect it, and you can’t do it”, of pressure to use fundraising to support those who are maybe less in need.

Long-time Didim residents may also know Lynn and Phil as the people to turn to at their most vulnerable time – having lost a loved one.

“Phil and I have done over 75 funerals”, says Lynn. “Phil will do the mortuary side and I’ll do the paperwork side.”

They keep it separate from Help-In-Hands, Lynn adds, and I wonder where they find the time and energy as Lynn describes sourcing coffins from Söke, or having them made by a local joiner, getting handles fitted, and lining the coffins themselves – not to mention drawing up the order of service and liaising with the local church for those wanting a religious service.

Lynn and Phil have also become a key point of contact for the British Consulate, and have been asked to step in when a lady who was the sole carer for her disabled husband died unexpectedly while on holiday in Didim. Another time was when an elderly British couple resident in Didim were left penniless by their son, who sold their house from under their feet, leaving them to pawn their wedding rings to scrape money together to try and return to the UK.

I ask Lynn what she would do if she could wave a magic wand. Unexpectedly, the answer is crazy golf, on the seafront at the site close to where the tour boats come in.

I’ve always thought that looks like a crazy golf course, I say. “It’s already laid out. We thought it could be run by the disabled association, and they’d be able to make money out of it as well, and it’d pay a couple of people a wage, and they could do parties for children,” says Lynn.

But as with many things in Türkiye, there are political obstacles to making that dream come true. Aside from that, she’d love to see more entertainment, like the dinner dances that are still in demand.

It’s clear that Lynn is, whether by duty or choice, a keystone in Didim’s community, and her energy and organisational skills are much-needed, whether helping the recently bereaved, coordinating fundraising for wheelchairs and equipment for disabled people, supporting expats in time of need, or travelling across country to visit earthquake victims.

If you’d like to support Help-In-Hands and their community activities, then please donate clothes and household goods (they can be dropped off at Cash’s bar behind big Migros), attend the quizzes and auctions, or even organise a fundraising activity of your own.

Help-In-Hands can be contacted via WhatsApp on +90 537 945 1029.