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In breath-taking Dere village, in the Sharbazher region, we had the pleasure of meeting farmer Abdulwahid, his wife Gulchin, and their children Shara and Yusif, who collectively care for their fields. On a bright sunny day at the end of August 2024, Abdulwahid, Gulchin’s lifelong partner and companion, declared to me with a big grin on his face that without Gulchin, whom he called a shera zhin, a lioness of a woman, he and his family would not have been able to continue. Abdulwahid explained: “Gulchin is a wife, mother, farmer, cook, an engineer — she knows everything about farming, and I learn from her. She pushes me to continue every morning. She has kept us all going.”
Abdulwahid, a prisoner of war during the Iraq-Iran War, informed us about the vital role women played in their village and his family. He referred to his wife, Gulchin, as a lioness due to her strength and bravery. He told us that in his six years of imprisonment during the 1980–1989 war, she cared for their children, fields, animals, and the rest of their family. On the night of our interview in August, while Gulchin and I chopped a whole container of freshly picked tomatoes from their garden, she spoke of the importance of producing their food instead of depending on the government. “I always tell my children about those years. I tell them to work hard and eat from their fields. During the war, we had nothing to eat when we were in Slemani. We were away from our fields. We waited for the government rations to feed us. I pray we will never see those days again.”
Dere has become one of our main bases for the Oral History Study, where we return for field interviews, film screenings, and panel discussions, as we did during the food sovereignty festival in April of 2024 with a team of food sovereignty activists. We have also recently begun exchanging critical knowledge and heirloom seeds with farmers in Dere and shall continue to learn from each other. Dere is one of Kurdistan’s natural heavens where clean water from the mountains runs down through all the fields in the village, and old oak and walnut trees have been standing tall for hundreds of years. In Dere, we learned that self-sufficiency meant that women and men had to combine their collective strengths, from dusk to dawn, while working shoulder-to-shoulder to produce their food. Farmers Abdulwahid and his wife and others in Dere are hopeful about continuing their clean agriculture heritage to be self-sufficient, as their ancestors were in the past.