(Her: Joanna)
I randomly came across a trip advisor review about a Kurdish
village home stay when we were loading up maps of the next city we are heading
to. Both Charlie and I were thinking
“Cool!”. That’s exactly what we want to
see. We decided to squeeze in a night at
the home stay and email the organizer.
Likely, she replied almost instantly.
Not knowing how to get to this town and the schedule of the buses,
smartly, Charlie asked the owner of the place we stayed (via Google
Translate). Sweet!
Unexpectedly, we were picked up by a really nice Fiat
mini-van by a guy dressed in traditional Kurdish pant, sharwaal (like what
Charlie was wearing in the pic) but speaks really good English. I was a bit confused. After a 15 minute drive from the town Hilvan,
we arrived the village of Yucavali.
We were greeted by the host, who is a 19 year-old local boy
and speaks really good English, his mom, and dad. We were invited to sit in their garden filled
with fruit trees (and chickens and turkeys running around) and had tea, of
course. It wasn’t anything fancy but
really raw and neat. There were 2 other
guests from California joined us. Though
the host was so young, he was very composed and organized. He gave us a briefing of the village, their
tradition, and the history of the community project, which the Home Stay is
part of it.
Kurdish people used to be nomadic until 7-8 generations
prior. You can still see some tradition
from their currently living style. Even
though they live in a house, they sleep outside the house in the summer time or
on the roof. The house is sparsely
furnished with essential equipments.
Surprisingly, the living/dining/napping room has AC. Thank God to that as it was crazily hot in
the middle of the day which the AC made the heat a lot more bearable.
The main living area is lined with carpet and cushions. During meal time, the area will be lined with
a table cloth where we ate. There’s no
shower or bath. It is plain old school
pouring hot water into a bucket, mix with cold water, and splash yourself
clean. It is my first time washing
myself like this. We have access to
steamy, hot water to shower anytime in the day.
Often we forgot that it is a lot of effort and a lot of energy is being
used to bring us such luxury and comfort.
It seems like that most work end up on the shoulder of the
women in the household. I woke up at 6
am to check out what the mom does in the morning. The host’s mom was already awake by the time
I got out of bed and finished sweeping and cleaning the front porch, and
gathered a bunch of branches. She
quickly fed the chicken and milk the cow with well trained skill and speed
before she set up to make bread on the mud ground in front of the house. You can see the strength of the host mom just
by how she kneads the dough. Not an easy job being a housewife in rural
area. The host mom showed me how to roll
the dough into bread. Though I thought
my first Kurdish bread was a success, I
am not even close to her amazing skillfulness in multi-tasking between roll the
bread dough, keeping up a steady fire to bake the bread while baking the bread
on the metal plate that requires constantly flipping and turning to avoid it
from being burnt. My piece of bread
never made it to the breakfast table but a nice meal for the chicken.
From the eye of a city person like me, the life of these
villagers is tough and they seem to be very poor. However, they get to spend a lot of time
around family and friends versus spending the bulk of your time at work; caring
for and helping each other versus socializing with people that don’t truly
matter; spend time in nature, breath air
and equally respecting nature versus spending time indoor with little exercise
and develop all sorts of chronic disease; enjoying food they made organically
versus constantly worried about the source or safety of food we purchase from
supermarket where the bulk of our food are genetically engineered or mass
produce in farms that ran like manufacturing.
Everything has its pros and cons.
Are city people really wealthier than villagers like them? Like the host’s father said with a satisfying
laughter, “I’m just a small farmer.”
When we ask the host whether he will inherit the farm and
continue to live in the village, he gave us a shrew and said he wanted to work
in the tourism industry while other family members can help his father
out. Though these villages are mostly
secluded, as they get exposed more and more to the outside world and man-made
needs, more will give up their lives in the villages. Less and less of them will appreciate what
they have.
