In Turkey, women left behind savour their first earnings

Born into poverty and normally destined to die in it, "virtual widow" Gulustan Ircap says she now has a glimmer of hope in her life in the hamlet of Sahgeldi, set amid the gentle slopes and rugged cliffs of Turkey's remote eastern region. Suddenly, she owns three sheep, courtesy of the Telefood Fund.

Soon, she expects to sell their milk and cheese to earn money for the first time in her life. Gulustan, a mother of four, is a typical Anatolian "seasonal village widow," owning and earning nothing. Her husband Kutbettin wanders in search of daily work in Istanbul, some 2 000 kilometres and a world away.

"What he earns when he finds work is hardly enough for him," Gulustan said recently, breaking tradition and talking to a male stranger face-to-face. "If he can save something, he brings it here and stays with us during three winter months."

Mostly, the diminutive and smiling Gulustan and her children survive on milk and cheese from a cow the family has inherited, plus bread and occasional meat from neighbours in the tightly knit hamlet of 375 people (almost all women and children), with no shops because nobody can afford to buy anything. Here, trees are grown to supply roofs over mud and stone huts; cow manure is packed for heating and cooking; water from a single village pump is shared.

The TeleFood project provided Gulustan and 29 other Sahgeldi women with four sheep each (one of Gulustan's died). They will not only raise and breed them, but also fatten them by growing animal feed on nearby government land. Ironically, Gulustan's travails are the exception rather than the rule in Turkey, a country noted for its farming prowess and potential. Turkey ranks alongside the United States, India, Canada and France in wheat production and is the world's top hazelnut producer. Half of Turkey's workforce is involved in agriculture, producing a great range of foodstuffs. Hunger is confined to pockets of poverty.

Some 1 000 kilometres west of Sahgeldi, the scenery is different in the villages of Kupluce and Dulgerler, south of historic Konya. But the problem of forest villages along the towering Toros Mountains is the same: rural poverty with "seasonal village widows".

There, with a small contribution of just US$2 000 from the TeleFood Fund, some 160 families have been given seeds and scions to grow cherry, peach and apple trees. They are being trained to grow them in a nursery and will sell them for the equivalent of slightly under US$20 a tree. The farmers who buy them will replant them for maturation and fruition that could bring up to US$300 per cherry tree a season.