As Bulgarian social workers assist thousands of Ukrainian refugees, CSD’s Aytakin Huseynli is leading a group that offers global support.
Aytakin Huseynli knows about living through war. Growing up in Baku, Azerbaijan, she was a child when the Soviet Union collapsed, protesters demanded Azerbaijan’s independence, and the Soviets invaded. She remembers people hiding in basements, her parents lucky to escape massacre. A year later, Azerbaijan was at war with neighboring Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. The war resulted in thousands of displaced people and refugees in Azerbaijan.
I have connected with Ukrainians. I visited the country when working on my dissertation. I kept thinking, ‘What can we do right now? How can we be a support for these people?’
Aytakin Huseynli
This chaos and upheaval, though terrifying, allowed Huseynli to find her calling in social work. It was a field that did not yet exist in her home country: a field she helped to create in Azerbaijan years later, after obtaining her master’s from the Brown School at Washington University. She eventually returned to the Brown School as a PhD student, where she began her work with the Center for Social Development (CSD).