Say Yes, 60th Anniversary Edition: Breaking the Silence

Sumru Kutlu is one of UNICEF’s longest serving members of staff in Turkey, having been active in the field of health since 1991. Her father’s army career and her mother’s profession as a school teacher involved frequent relocation and Sumru and her two sisters grew up in some of the most difficult and challenging parts of the country as a result.

After studying Management and Social Science, at university in İzmir, Sumru moved to the USA for eight years where she studied Special Education for Children at the University of Austin, Texas, and where her children were born. Returning to Turkey at the end of 1988, Sumru settled in Şanlurfa where she began working with the Southeastern Anadolu Project (GAP), her work bringing her into daily contact with the problems of rural life.

It was quite a shock for me when I began to work with the GAP project because that was when I realised how much remained to be done here in Turkey. Many villages were hard to reach and often had no schools, no health centres or utilities like tap water. People were ruled by tradition — old ways but not necessarily sound methods that had helped them get by over the centuries.

Child mortality was so much a fact of life that my neighbours hardly questioned it. Diarrhœa was common but many thought it was best to treat it by withholding liquids, which of course is absolutely the wrong thing to do because very young children can easily die from dehydration. I took to carrying items like a thermometer and some aspirin in my pocket because it was so common to enter a home and find a sick child suffering unnecessarily for the lack of some basic care.

After a couple of years of this, I decided in 1991 that I wanted to work with UNICEF because the well–being of children has always been so central to my life and I wanted to help improve the ‘big picture’ for the children I was seeing on a daily basis.

I was successful in my application and it was arranged that I would start in a few months time. But while I was working out my notice with GAP, Turkey had a big emergency situation. It was the time of the Gulf War in 1991 and half a million men, women and children had just picked up their mattresses, some food and basic items and rushed over the border into Turkey. Every second counted with so many children in distress and UNICEF called me because I was closest to the scene, asking me to pick up some emergency supplies in Diyarbakır that were coming from Copenhagen. I literally just grabbed my purse and went to Diyarbakır.

I was there for four months in the end — not only in Diyarbakır but in Hakkari, Uludere and Şemdinli. Winter had set in and there were so many people who needed help. I would get home for an evening now and again but my own children were telling me Mummy go back, they need you more than we do!

So that was my induction into UNICEF — as emergency staff. That experience was where I understood that this was ‘it’, I want to do this!

For the first ten years I worked on reducing rural/urban disparities. We tried to show provincial authorities that with a little bit of effort and very little money they could make big changes in rural areas by planning and acting with communities at the local level. I very quickly got an idea of the scale of the problems the Government was facing when I visited a couple of villages in Harran. When you would fathers how many children they have, they wouldn’t often talk about girls. You had to be specific and ask How many girls do you have? Because they wouldn’t count them in the first place — only the boys. In one village I asked a man who had thirty–six children Do you know their names? and he answered their mothers can tell you.

Gender equality has always been the bedrock of everything we need to achieve in health, education and children’s rights but this was not recognised until comparatively recent times.

People just didn’t see that if a girl goes to school she will get married much later, she will be healthy and have a healthy family.

Many still don’t: the women stay in the background at home, doing the housework, getting pregnant but having to work harder than anybody else nevertheless — that’s one of the main things we’re working to change.

How come their children can be healthy otherwise? How can a woman raise her children in a healthier, better environment, if she didn’t go to school and learn how to look after herself for a start? The short answer is that it’s fairly easy to persuade women of the need to educate girls for everybody’s sake but it’s much harder to break through the ‘silent resistance’ of men on this issue.

Neighbours and friends used to complement our parents on their three beautiful daughters, and our parents would say to us We will be proud of you and you can be proud of yourselves if you are well educated and able to make something of your lives as good citizens, as mothers, as individuals — these are the things to be proud of, not beauty. So it was amazing for me to see this disparity between the genders with fresh eyes and I can really appreciate why UNICEF and the Government are working to change this.

I could see that some things were changing by the time I started working in mother and child health in 2000. For instance, the 2003 TDHS showed a much bigger drop in infant mortality than we had previously expected. So these projects with local communities were making a difference. The TDHS also made the connection between higher levels of maternal education and lower child mortality rates very clear. Also, because of these findings, there is a better focus on maternal mortality rates now.

This is very much our strength as a partner in development: having earned the trust of our counterparts in what we have achieved together with them. They can see by the results that we have the well–being of children at heart, just as they do, and everything we say and do is towards that aim. They know that we are here to support them and that everything is for the future benefit of Turkey.

Just a few weeks ago, I was back in Şanlıurfa, visiting a maternity hospital as part of the Baby–friendly Hospitals initiative (BFHI), and a 22 year–old mother confided her sadness about losing her seventh child. This young woman was so tiny and thin, undernourished, and I was so upset for her. I said Look, you are far too young to have six children, you are wearing yourself out because this situation isn’t right for you in the first place. But who is going to take care of your children if you make yourself so ill that you can’t cope?

Being uneducated, this young woman couldn’t see that having so many children at such an early age, being unable to nourish herself properly, puts the health of her children as well as her own health at risk. As UNICEF staff, we don’t discuss family planning in depth with people but it is important to stress factors such as education, good nutrition and later marriages that will help women to avoid this situation. They shouldn’t be in this position.

These days I’m working on early childhood education, which includes the parenting programme, designed to help mothers and fathers take care of their children’s emotional, physical and cognitive development. It also encourages them to have fewer but much healthier, happier children and to look after themselves properly while they are doing so.

I hope that in ten, twenty years, people will be more aware of their responsibilities towards child rearing. I’ve never lost hope that this change in attitudes will happen — that’s what motivates me. Sometimes in our work we don’t have time to eat, to stop and even have a drink of water — there are so many things to do while we are ‘in the field’. But if I see even the slightest change, then I sleep peacefully.

I always recommend that my colleagues spend a little time in field work, and as often as they can, because that’s where motivation comes from: seeing the effect of change for the better in people’s lives.

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