With the arrival of the summer, Kurdish seasonal agricultural workers began to leave their homes and reach their destinations to work throughout the summer.
A group of workers, consisting of fifty people from Turkey’s southeastern province of Urfa (Riha), reached Ankara to work on the fields during the summer, MA reports.
During the time they will work in the Turkish capital, workers reside in tents near fields located in Polatlı district, which is one-kilometer away from the closest clean water source, the Dumrek village.
As the tents of the workers are also not provided with electricity, workers spend the evenings in complete darkness, almost as if they are stuck in the middle of a desert.
Since there is no electricity, all the meals and food they prepare can easily go rotten under the hot sun. The workers are not able to meet their personal hygene needs properly due to the lack of water.
“I have to walk 2 kilometers a day in order just to reach water, going to the village and coming back again,” said Nuriye Genç, an agriculture worker. “Sometimes the dogs in the village attack us and the villagers do not seem happy about all this.”
“I sometimes have to walk to the village three times a day to reach water. It is really challenging for me, because I have serious heart problems, I had brain surgey before as well,” said another worker Ferihan Soysal.
Soysal works in the fields together with her two children. “Before we arrived here, noone informed us about the lack of water and electricity. Our living conditions here are so grim and they need to be improved,” she said.
Şaibe Genç is another woman who reached Polatlı to work in the fields. She is 68-year-old, but despite her elderly age she says she needs to work. “We have been suffering from these outregaous conditions more than a month. We can use electricty only for an hour a day,” she said.
Genç has to walk kilometres of road just to wash her clothes. “I have to collect wood to cook as well. I am elderly and I cannot afford all this. All we want is to live in humanitarian conditions” she said.
