Kumri Kaplan, born on April 15th, 1951, comes from Turkish Kurdistan. They are from the town of Midyat in Mardin. She and her husband and children came to Belgium in 1995. They first settled in Meerbeek and then moved into their current home in Kessel-Lo (Leuven). Theirs is a traditional family, upholding values brought from Kurdistan. Kumri is a housewive and mother of 14 children - 8 sons and 6 daughters. Only 6 children still live at home, the others have flown the nest and made families of their own, in Belgium, Germany and Turkey. Kumri is the proud grandmother of 36 grandchildren already.
They moved from Turkey to Belgium because, according to the family, Kurds have no rights in Turkey, they have no political rights, it is forbidden for them to speak their own language in public and even Kurdish names are changed to Turkish names.
The family has done well in Belgium, four of the kids have their own businesses and the family owns 3 pizza take-out restaurants.
Kumri is the mater familias, always ready to help out and take care of her many children and grandchildren. She raises them, she takes care of them, she cooks for them, does laundry and all other household chores. Kumri has never been on vacation, she has no time for such luxuries in her busy life.


Some information on the historical background, taken from Wikipedia: "The incorporation into Turkey of the Kurdish-inhabited regions of eastern Anatolia was opposed by many Kurds, and has resulted in a long-running separatist conflict in which thousands of lives have been lost. The region saw several major Kurdish rebellions during the 1920s and 1930s. These were forcefully put down by the Turkish authorities and the region was declared a closed military area from which foreigners were banned between 1925 and 1965. The use of Kurdish language was outlawed, the words Kurds and Kurdistan were erased from dictionaries and history books, and the Kurds were only referred to as Mountain Turks.[10]

In 1983, a number of provinces were placed under martial law in response to the activities of the militant separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).[4] A guerrilla war took place through the rest of the 1980s and into the 1990s. By 1993 the total number of security forces involved in the struggle in southeastern Turkey was about 200,000, and the conflict had become the largest civil war in the Middle East.[11] in which much of the countryside was evacuated, thousands of Kurdish-populated villages were destroyed and numerous extra judicial summary executions were carried out by both sides.[6] More than 37,000 people were killed in the violence and hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave their homes.[12] The situation in the region has since eased following the capture of the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1999 and the introduction of a greater degree of official tolerance for Kurdish cultural activities, encouraged by the European Union.[9] However, some political violence is still ongoing and the Turkish-Iraqi border region remains tense."