Village Life in Kurdistan

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Although I haven't written in about a month I have been working and playing like crazy. I believe the last time I wrote I was in Antep staying with 4 Muslim university students and getting a better picture of what life is like for religious women trying to lead a public life in this country so devoted to secularism. After spending almost a week with them I decided I wanted to skip all of the touristic sights and instead went straight to my friend's village in Mardin on the Syrian border. I spent a little over a week with a wonderful family getting to know what village life was like in the Kurdish region of Turkey. The family I stayed with consists of a matriarch and patriarch, their three daughters, one son, his wife and their four children aged 2 - 10. The week I stayed there their oldest daughter was in İstanbul having dental surgery so I didn't get the chance to meet her. In the connected house lives their other son, his wife and children. The patriarch spends his time driving a dolmuş to and from the neighboring cities and their other son in the neighboring house collects the tariffs from the various dolmuş drivers. They also have about fifty sheep, chickens, a vegetable garden, and two wheat fields.

Life is difficult - particularly for the women who wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning to care for the animals and get them ready for the shepherd for hire who takes them to the mountains everyday at 5:30. Then they clean the barn attached to the house and look after the sheep who are too young or too old to go to the mountains. The youngest daughter sleeps until about 6:30 (although she wakes up and prays at 4:30 with her sisters) when she starts cleaning up the bedrolls which they set out the night before and prepares breakfast. After breakfast all of the daughters have a different chore, cleaning the whole house for an hour or two. Meanwhile the son's wife takes care of her children, milks the sheep (at 4:30 in the morning with the other sisters), prepares the milk for cheese, yogurt, and anything else you can think of. She also prepares the food for the day. At about 9 or 10 all the chores are finished and the sisters sit and knit or crochet while watching Kurdish television. The children go to school at 11:30 so the women also spend the time getting them ready for school. Finally the whole house quiets down. After lunch they usually go for a walk or visit their friends or relatives' houses. The sheep come home at about 6 and they milk them again and we eat at about 6:30 or 7. The evening is usually spent sitting in front of the television which never seems to turn off, talking about Kurdish politics or watching Turkish sitcoms. In the summer and fall the pattern because they have to harvest from the fields and garden.

The people here are really kind but also very loud; always talking over each other in a way I am just not used to. The children run around playing all the time which whatever they find - balls in various states of wear and tear, stones, and lots of plastic things made in China. The women spend most of their day cleaning and sitting as there is no work as we westerners would think of it in the village (no offices, factories, or even mills). Some women work more than others as not everyone has children and animals running around their house. The men who don't have a job driving a dolmuş or working at a corner store mostly wander around to their friend's houses' drinking copious amounts of tea. In some ways they have it worse than the women because, although the women work constantly, the men have less self confidence because they cant find a job. In this culture (much as in old western culture) the men are supposed to earn money and women take care of the house. The women have the opportunity to do their assigned role but the men cannot because there are no jobs, thus their self confidence starts to deteriorate.

You notice as you travel further east in Turkey that there are actually no factories at all. In fact, east of Antep I haven't seen a single factory and just a few mills. This means there are almost no jobs at all for the Kurdish men which is interpreted as a further oppression of the Kurdish people. Beyond language rights, cultural rights, and religious rights for the Alevi and Christian Kurds, the unemployment and economic neglect has - as I see it - directly contributed to the Kurdish nationalist movement by stripping a very proud group of people of all their strength and leaving them with shame. Anyhow, I digress from describing the village life here. Continuing...the village, although considered a municipality, is so small that everyone knows everyone else and most of the people are related in some way. This removes any possible freedom of privacy through anonymity, which was very difficult for me to adapt to. The men are generally very conservative but even more so are the women who hold to their culture religiously. Even though the culture was difficult for me to get used to (in fact I saw a greater cultural difference between the cities and villages than I did between Kurds and Turks if you disregard the language aspect) I really liked and respected them. The people are very kind, honest and genuine. It made leaving very difficult.

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