“Yuva Association CfW Project Toroslar Municipality June-December 2017- Salma KESİMİ”
Salma is one of thousands of people having hit the pavement from amid the war and come to the soils of this country as refugee. Another important identity she bears is the fact that she is a woman and mother. Now, she lives together with her two children and her mother-in-law who is seventy years old in Mersin to where she had come. Her husband is still in Syria due to problems he experienced in crossing the border gate, hardships during official registration and economic bottleneck.
32-year old Salma is within the first beneficiary group starting in Toroslar Municipality pillar of the CfW Project. Salma has been working as sanitation worker in the Municipality for about six months. The fact that women had not been included in the working life in any way depending on cultural life of Syria poses an impediment before Syrian women having come to Turkey. At the start of the project, we have faced this impediment all together. Same timidity is revealed also in Salma being one of these women. In spite of many question marks in her mind, Salma chooses working instead of giving up. During this short period of time we have spent together, all our women beneficiaries utter all of us the happiness they feel from their works and work life together with their appreciation wishes. Now, they are the people keeping up their families by working, feeling themselves valuable and standing on their own legs.
In the middle of all these experienced, a striking story, a focal point, maybe a detail that may be overlooked catches our eyes. The work she started at Home Textile Decoration Workshop in one of the vocational training centers is the first work experience Salma ever have had during her entire life. In her spare times, she imprints a drawing onto embroidery as her first experience. In this first work of hers, she shows us her first hand labor, her first work, extending it: a house!
At the point where words leave themselves toward feelings inside the human at some point, that warm home of the past and memories of Salma in her hands, the home she fits in the walls, where she took shelter in this geography, her home in the middle of her memories refreshed in her mind during her life simply stands there. Before being able to ask where Salma’s home is, Salma’s home in her palms looks at us.
Özgür YILMAZ | Social Worker
CfW – Mersin
