Leyla ve Sibel Turunç: Leyla and Sibel are now at the tandoor to send their children to school!

Leyla is the eldest of seven siblings. She was interested in athletics during high school. She ranked first in Hatay province, second in the Mediterranean region and won numerous medals. She had the opportunity to study on scholarship. Her father was told, “She is a girl, why should she study?” She left school and sports and took care of her siblings.

“I never stopped struggling with life. I brought four children into this world and I am responsible for them. I send them to school. I never accept not sending them to school because they are girls. Let girls go to school!”

There is constant work in the village, don’t think of salaried jobs! Leyla started working outside the village six years ago. As her children grew up and started university, she faced financial difficulties. First, she started working as a baker in a bakery, then she worked as an elderly care service. After the earthquake, she became unemployed.

Sibel is a mother of three children. When her husband became ill and stopped working, she had to provide for the household. She started to work as a cook at a workplace in addition to her gardening business in the village. She became unemployed after the earthquake. Depremden sonra dönüşen hayatlar

Lives transformed after Earthquake

“The child will prepare for university. We are going to enroll him in a tutoring center, the fees are very high. Travel costs are another problem, and when you calculate them all, you can’t get out of the business. We have to do business in order to educate and raise our children.”

They state that they did not lose any family members in the earthquake. But their houses were not in a condition to enter and live in. They think that if they lived in the city, they would not have survived the difficult period after the earthquake. “We are used to drawing water from the well, heating it and bathing with it, we lived outside for nine months after the earthquake. Maybe we were able to endure because we stayed as a family. We took turns guarding the door of the house and bathing. We had a five-minute time limit, all the doors are open, whoever comes in has five minutes, you wash and go out.”

They received job offers after the earthquake, but they could not recover. They also received offers from outside the city, but they said “we can’t live anywhere else” and stayed in the village. “One cannot leave one’s hometown. Everything smells of memories, you cannot leave this place. This is where you were born. When you go elsewhere, you feel like an outsider,” Leyla says.

Both of them own their houses on their own land. But they didn’t want to sell it and leave. “Just as it was left to us, we want to leave it to our children. When you sell it, you use up that money in a few years. But we need to think about the future of our children.”

“Starting your own business is very enjoyable. It has many difficulties. I would say I would never do it, because tandoori work is very difficult. We realize when we make a mistake, we don’t give that product. We decide this too. When I get the money, I don’t think about whether I deserve it. (Sometimes the other side – the boss at work – makes you feel this.) It is very nice to produce work on your own. I hope we will get to better places.”

“Aid started to arrive from the second day of the earthquake. But it was hard for us to wait in the queues. I went twice to get aid and my eyes filled with tears. Where are we? Why are we going through this when we can do something about it?”

Leyla and Sibel always had this question in mind; “we can do something, why don’t we do it?”They decided to get involved so that they would not be dependent on aid. When they saw the bazaar announcement in the village group, they thought about what they could do. Bread, washcloths, hairpins, tandoori katıklı, pickles… whatever they could do! They announced that they wanted to take part in the bazaar and they started. Their work started to be heard through the people who came to the bazaar. They opened an Instagram account. At first, they had sales from outside the city, but it was difficult to cover their expenses due to shipping costs. For this reason, they mostly sold to those who came to the bazaar. They sold bread, katıklı, pickles and vegetables from the garden at the bazaar.

mavikalem ile karşılaşma ve yeşeren umutlar!

Encounter with mavikalem and blossoming hopes!

They saw mavikalem’s brochure in the bazaar area and the announcement in the village group. “When we applied, we thought that it would be good if we received items that would make our work easier. The dough machine was something we absolutely needed to continue our work. Without it, we would have quit, we couldn’t continue.”

With the arrival of the dough machine and the freezer, they were able to start producing more. When they go to the bazaar, they can go with plenty of products and sell them, and if there is excess, they keep it in the freezer. This way, none of their hand labor goes to waste.

“The tandoori business requires three people: one to hold the dough, one to take it out, one to roll it out. Before there was a machine, we used to do as much as we could, just one or two basins. Also, when there is one less person to knead the dough, the tandoor gets cold and you have to relight it. Now we can make as much as we need according to demand.”

Apart from tandoori bread, they also continue to make pickles. They even have an agreement with a restaurant from out of town! They pickle beets and cucumbers and send them to Eskişehir. They put their pickles and canned food on the bus and send them to the restaurant. They continue to go to the bazaar. They continue to share their products both on Instagram and WhatsApp.

“It is very difficult, but at the same time enjoyable. Because we are doing our own work. We work without being under anyone’s pressure. This is comforting. We do it whenever we want. It’s a very nice feeling!”

 “You have to be determined, you have to hope. We have to start again from where it ended. We shouldn’t say it’s over, we need to research, find and produce other things. It is necessary not to give up.”

Finally, when we asked what you would like to say to those who read your story, they said: “Women are strong”!

Their Instagrams: https://www.instagram.com/turunc.sibel/