Baladi News
Every morning, Maya comes in to work in a small hair salon in Istanbul’s historical Eyup neighbourhood. From 9am until 6pm, she busies herself bringing necessary equipment to the barbers, sweeping the floors and bringing water or coffee to the customers - none of whom realise that the 12-year-old girl is Syrian.
Maya has learned Turkish very quickly since she started working at the salon three years earlier, after a year spent begging on the streets.
Thousands of other Syrian girls in Turkey are not going to school either, whether because they have started working or because they've been forced into marriage at an early age.
As students across Turkey returned to school this week, some 350,000 Syrians between the ages of six and 18 are out of education in the country, according to a UNICEF humanitarian situation report that points to endemic poverty, language barriers and trauma as just some of the obstacles standing between Syrian children and Turkish schools.
Turkey is home to the largest number of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers in the world, standing at almost four million as of April 2018. Nearly 3.6 million are Syrian refugees, of whom 1.7 million are children.
Among them are Maya and her family - seven of her siblings, her father, and his two wives - who fled the northeastern Syrian city of Aleppo for Turkey in 2014, moving in with an aunt in an apartment in Eyup.
The girl’s two oldest brothers were left behind in Syria to join opposition groups fighting against pro-Bashar al-Assad forces. Only later did news reach Istanbul that both brothers had been killed.
After arriving in Turkey, Maya’s stepmother fell very ill, leaving her mother to take care of the children while her father and brother worked in construction. Money was tight, as the family struggled to feed 11 people on two meagre salaries.
It was then that Maya, eight years old at the time, and her then 12-year-old sister Nour started to beg on the streets of Istanbul in hopes of contributing to the family’s livelihood.
After a year of seeing the two girls beg in front of a neighbourhood mosque, Buket Erisik, the 60-year-old Turkish owner of a hair salon, stepped in.
“I always walk by the mosque when I close the shop and go home at night, and I would see these two girls every night in front of the mosque,” Erisik told Middle East Eye. “I didn’t want to meddle in their family affairs, but I felt very sad every time I saw them - two little girls on the street, God knows what will happen to them.”
“One night, it was snowing and it was so cold that I was freezing in my overcoat, and they were still there! That was the point where I decided not to wait anymore,” she remembers.
Erisik took Maya and Nour indoors, fed them soup, asked them about their situation - and decided to give both young girls jobs to keep them off the streets.
When she first met with Maya and Nour’s parents, Erisik asked their father why his daughters were out begging instead of studying.
“They didn’t want either of their children to go to school, they put the burden on their shoulders to make money,” the salon owner said. “And after a certain age, they force their daughters to get married.”
“When I saw there was no way for these girls to go to school after I spoke to their father, I asked him how much money they made. Now I am paying them the amount he told me,” she added.
“But I am pretty sure they will take Nour and force her to marry very soon. She is already 16 years old, and the only reason they haven’t done that before is that she makes good money here.”
Nour declined to speak in depth to MEE about her situation.
While the teenager said she was not particularly eager at the idea of continuing her studies, her younger sister Maya still dreamed of going back to school.
When she brought up the issue to her family, Maya’s mother told her that she could only attend classes if she continued to work after school - a condition the young girl agreed to.
But Maya faced an unpleasant surprise when she first tried to register for classes in Turkey in 2014. She was told that, because she was on the records as being 13 years old, she was expected to enter seventh grade.
Only problem: the Syrian girl was in fact eight, and hoping to start third grade. But her protestations were in vain.
“There was nothing I could do, so I started seventh grade,” Maya told MEE. “But they were teaching very heavy math, and some history that I didn’t know. I could only go on for three months.
“Then I returned back to the streets the next morning.”
The reason why Turkish authorities erroneously thought she was five years older than her actual age turned out to be quite grim, Erisik explained to MEE.
Upon entering the country, the Turkish woman found out, Maya’s parents had told officials that all of their minor daughters were older than their actual age.
She suspects that this deception may have been an attempt to circumvent Turkish laws, which forbid marriage for minors younger than 17.
According to the UN Population Fund, early marriage often becomes an “economic coping mechanism” for refugee families in dire financial straits - albeit with dire consequences for young girls, who become more vulnerable to abuse, face heightened risks during pregnancy, and often see themselves deprived of further schooling.
While the scope of the early marriage phenomenon in Turkey remains unknown, the country was shaken earlier this year by the revelation that a hospital in Istanbul had witnessed more than 100 teenage pregnancies - including at least 39 Syrian girls - in the span of only a few months. This, after all, is a region in which childbirth outside of wedlock remains rare.
While Maya remains determined to one day pick up where she left off in third grade, some young Syrian refugee women and girls have been able to pursue their education until university level in Turkey - despite numerous setbacks. Fatima Abdulrezzak, 22, is one of them.
In 2012, she fled the Syrian city of Latakia with her mother and two sisters, leaving their father behind until 2015, when he joined his family in the Turkish border city of Gaziantiep.
“Gaziantep was the best city for Syrians to make money back in 2012, so we stayed there,” Abdulrezzak told MEE. “I knew I had to go to school. I had already completed half of my high school education in Syria. But we couldn’t think about it - we didn’t even know if we would stay in Turkey or go back home soon.”
At 16, Abdulrezzak said she was working in a store 12 hours a day. After a year in Gaziantep, her family came to terms with the fact that the war in Syria wouldn’t end anytime soon.
“As my mom and sisters continued to work, I insisted on going to school,” the young woman said.
At the time Syrians weren’t admitted into Turkish public schools. Abdulrezzak joined a recently opened high school in Gaziantep that taught the Syrian curriculum, from which she graduated.
As a Syrian Turkmen, she already knew the basics of the Turkish language, but she still needed to learn the alphabet and grammar to reach the level of fluency necessary in order to apply for universities.
After taking Turkish courses, Abdulrezzak was admitted into Selcuk University in the city of Konya in central Anatolia, with a scholarship.
Earlier this year, Abdulrezzak graduated with a degree in journalism and now works as a freelance fixer for foreign media in Turkey and Syria - and she credits the support of her family for her getting there.
“The biggest problem for Syrian girls in Turkey is education,” Abdulrezzak said. “Families don’t think of it as a priority because of poverty, and they prefer that their daughters get married at an early age, even before they are 17. But if they really want to, there are a lot of opportunities for them to go to school.”
Source: The Middle East Eye