One Month, Four Countries, One Transformation
Growing up in Turkey means growing up with disasters. Earthquakes, floods, wildfires — these are not abstract concepts for us. As a young Turkish person, I had already completed fire safety and first aid training on my own initiative. I thought I was prepared when it came to disaster awareness — or at least, that’s what I believed.
The You FuTuRe project shook that belief. In the best way possible.
I learned how disasters are approached not just in my country, but across the world. A disaster is never just a single moment: there’s before, during, and after. Preparedness and risk reduction, response, recovery and reconstruction — each phase demands its own knowledge, its own responsibility. Disaster communication is no different — misinformation spreads faster than fire in a panicking society. We took on different roles in earthquake scenarios: risk manager, local administrator, journalist, disaster survivor. Seeing the same crisis through so many different lenses makes you stop and think. We played games with children in schools in Sultangazi — you learn while you teach, and being able to pass something on turns out to be a skill of its own.
Before this project, I always thought about disaster awareness in terms of my own country. Now I want to think about it for every person on this planet. That shift sounds small, but it changes everything.
And yet maybe the most beautiful part of the project was this: sharing a 90 m² apartment in Istanbul and picking out wedding outfits with a French girl. Losing sleep because late-night conversations with your Spanish roommate are too good to cut short. Sitting on the hallway rug for three hours laughing with four girls about a Ukrainian friend’s family stories — even though every room in the house was free. Riding a tractor in a farmer’s garden, paddling a canoe with zero coordination, eating lahmacun on the rocky shores of Yeşilköy as the sun went down, and discovering Istanbul together in Üsküdar, Süleymaniye, Nakkaştepe. Taking them to a Turkish wedding — and watching four foreign girls try to snap their fingers to Ankara folk music is something I simply cannot describe. You just had to be there.
There was a song that followed us through every moment of that month — the one that goes “I wave goodbye to the end of beginning.” That’s exactly how it felt — that strange, beautiful feeling of something closing while something else quietly opens.
On the day we said goodbye, as they boarded the airport bus, I thought of that song. I hadn’t expected it to be this hard to say farewell to people I hadn’t known a month ago. I had shared my life, my secrets, with people I’d only just met. And I had made four real friends.
You FuTuRe wasn’t a project for me. I tried on different roles, touched different cultures, and my whole perspective on disasters shifted — this is no longer just my country’s issue. It’s the world’s.
If you ever come across an opportunity like this — don’t hesitate. Pack your bags. Come.
Hatice 
