Serkan Eren

— Serkan, how did you decide to found STELP?

- I was in a serious, almost fatal car accident - my heart even stopped for a minute. Then I started thinking differently, and that was the first change in my mind. The second one happened a few years later: I asked myself what my value to society was. Through lively discussions with guys who I thought were thinking wrong, I realised that my value to society remains the following I had zero, despite what I thought was the right thinking. So I spontaneously decided to rent a van and go with a friend in the Balkans to provide any help I could children who had nothing. The campaign generated a lot of media coverage, which led to a lot of offers, such as: „We have 100 blankets from IKEA“, „I have €200 - do you need it?“. And we thought: okay, we'll take everything they give us and go on the second round - to the Greek islands where the refugees arrived. At that time, I was still a teacher. Every time I had a school holiday, I would go on a trip. Thus, the charity gained momentum, and then STELP was born.

We are now active in 12 countries on 4 continents, supporting, for example, children who would otherwise go hungry, or taking girls off the streets who would have been sold into brothels. And now we are working in Ukraine.

— Can you tell us more about your mission in Ukraine?

- Less than a day after the start of the full-scale war, we were already at the Polish-Ukrainian border with the first two trucks filled with humanitarian aid. The picture we saw at the border is forever etched in my memory. Thousands of women lined up to leave the country with babies in their arms, holding their older children's hands tightly. They were carrying a couple of bags. A few hundred metres away, I saw fathers saying goodbye to their families - maybe even forever, because they didn't know when they would see them again, or if they would see them at all. And just when I thought I had seen it all and it couldn't get any worse, we reached the east of Ukraine. I have never seen such cruelty to civilians in my 6 years of work: limbs blown off, children just killed by a bomb, trucks full of corpses... I was in Beirut the night of the bombing - it was the worst night of my life. But the worst mission I've ever been on was actually in Ukraine.

— What would you like to say to people in Germany?

There are many heroes in Ukraine who are defending their country. There are also heroes in Belarus who blow up railway tracks because they do not support this war. But I can't stand the fact that society distinguishes only between heroes and cowards, and there is nothing in between. There are many people who are not heroes, but they are not cowards either. And when a mother with three children tells me that she does not want to flee because she and her children will be considered traitors to the Motherland for years, I do not approve of this. People who want to leave the war zone because they are sick or wounded, or simply because they cannot stand the war, should be able to flee without prejudice from society.