withTen thousand dollars is a proud price to pay for despair. Omeid Soleimani Zaida paid more to leave his hometown: his house in Kabul, his work. “A good life,” as he said. But the victory of the Taliban pushed him away. That was two months ago.
The family is now trapped in Fan, a small town in the Far East of Turkey, which is one of the poorest areas in the country and is one of the gathering places for smugglers. Refugees were taken from here to cities such as Ankara or Istanbul. Fan has always been a place for smugglers to conduct business. It used to be cigarettes or tea from Iran. Today it is mainly people. There is even a separate cemetery where refugees who often die in accidents find their final resting place. Most of these tombstones are under unnamed foreign tombstones.
Smugglers give children powerful sleeping pills
Zaida’s family survived. But you still clearly see that this is a journey of scarcity in your bones. They had to cross Iran on foot. Omed described how one of the smugglers gave young children a powerful sleeping pill so that they could keep quiet during the long journey without being noticed by crying. How his wife was caught by barbed wire while crossing the border into Turkey, her clothes were torn and her skin was torn apart. How they climbed over steep cliffs, they could only be overcome by turning his wife’s turban into a rope, and how some people broke their bones. How he spent the worst day of his life, locked up with dozens of people in a stinking stall somewhere near the border: “We lost my little son in the chaos.” Only one day later, they It was discovered that another refugee was taken care of by a four-year-old child. When Omed talked about these long periods of anxiety, his wife looked at the ground and inserted the tip of her thumb into her forearm again and again until she lost her calm and started crying softly.
When he and his family left here, Omed didn’t know. In Turkey, it is almost hopeless for a family like him to obtain a protected status. He couldn’t work, they sold his wife’s jewelry, and they made a living out of it. You are afraid of the day when the money runs out. They are still very lucky. A benevolent resident provided them with an apartment where they could hide. In a dilapidated house on a side street, this is a dark, sultry place, sour everywhere, and countless mold stains on the ceiling and walls.
