EGET FOUNDATION TO SUNNY BEAUTIFUL DAYS

Source: Hamle Newspaper

Gülten Şimşek

If you're looking for happiness for an hour, take a nap during the day.

If you're looking for happiness for a day, go fishing.

If you're looking for happiness for a year, get rich.

If you're looking for happiness for a lifetime, help others, say the Chinese.

Özlem Uzman and Safai Özer have chosen to be happy for a lifetime.

They want to help others, to touch their destinies.

They have established the EGET Foundation, which encompasses the concepts of Education, Geriatrics, Ecological Agriculture, and Tourism, and their ideal is to serve society.

I know Ms. Çiğdem Kuş, a member of the Board of Trustees of this foundation. She is a doctoral student and is involved in such wonderful work.

As I spoke with dear Çiğdem, I began to feel sympathy for the foundation. They established the foundation, but they want to touch lives by generating income for the foundation through economic enterprises. They are doing great work. Education is one of their main themes.

They want to protect the ecosystem. They strive to raise awareness of the importance of ecological farming and to undertake pioneering work in this area. Tourism as well…

First, they thought the Foundation needed a home. They transformed a dilapidated building known as the Hacı Latifler House into a living, breathing space that will serve as the foundation's headquarters for a period of 10 years. The foundation operates in this restored house. Its garden resembles a botanical garden; they even produce worm compost.

The Foundation has fundamental goals.

As mentioned, education: they want to provide scholarships and financial assistance to students at all levels who are experiencing financial difficulties during their education.

To serve the cultural, scientific, and social development of society, and to establish pre-school, primary, secondary, university, and similar higher education institutions.

They want to contribute to the development of geriatrics.

Adopting the principle of respect for ecology, which has become an indispensable necessity in today's world, they aim to carry out activities that will ensure the development of tourism in our country, especially in agriculture and animal husbandry, ecological tourism, health tourism, and cultural tourism.

The founders of the foundation state that the fundamental problem stemming from the past is lack of education, and therefore, education will be the main focus of their work.

I keep hearing from my dear Çiğdem, and one day Gülten Hanım informed me that they were having a lavender planting event. For the first time in all of Muğla, a lavender field has been created. The magnificent Provence region in southern France earns its living from lavender. Who knows, maybe one day Muğla will also be able to generate income from lavender? Perhaps the Eget Foundation has rolled the first snowball.

They wish for the Eget Foundation to be remembered not for individuals or its founders, but for the large number of students it supports in their education, its work in protecting ecological balance, its contributions to organic farming and animal husbandry, and its efforts to initiate and develop geriatric tourism in our country.

When establishing the foundation, their first priority was to develop projects that would ensure the foundation's continued support for education for many years to come, and therefore, they decided that the Eget Foundation should be a structure that would create its own revolving fund, and they established its economic enterprises.

The first activity of their economic enterprises is the Eget Foundation Armutçuk Agricultural Enterprise. After months of leveling work on a 22,000 m² plot of land in the Armutçuk neighborhood of Ula, donated to the foundation by its founders, 415 oak saplings, inoculated with truffle spores and purchased from the Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University Truffle Application and Research Center, were planted on the land in an opening event with high participation.

To make the most efficient use of the land during the period leading up to the truffle harvest, lavender, known to support truffle growth, is being planted among oak saplings in a picnic event organized under the slogan "Let the Flower of Lavender Support Education." Thus, the Eget Foundation, as a pioneer in this field, has established the first lavender farm in all our coastal cities, and the money earned from this will be used to provide scholarships to students to support education.

While its main purpose is to provide educational scholarships, another aim of the foundation is to contribute to the science of geriatrics and gerontology. Geriatrics and gerontology means creating an environment for middle-aged and older people to age healthily by meeting not only their medical needs but also their psychological and social needs. While geriatrics focuses on medical issues, gerontology, in a more general sense, examines the aging process; it focuses not only on the problems of the elderly but also on concepts such as appropriate environmental and nutritional conditions for preventing aging or ensuring healthy aging from birth.

The EGET Foundation aims to develop projects that allow middle-aged and older people to stay engaged in life, rather than detached from it, in order to keep their zest for life alive. To realize these projects, they aim to establish an ecological village on over 200 acres of land already purchased, located on the Yaraş hills in the Elkin and Böbecen plateaus, surrounded by black pine forests. Here, they will accommodate tourists in houses built from ecological materials, provide 24-hour healthcare, offer organic vegetables and meat products, and keep their connection to life alive through art and craft workshops.

What can we say? They are doing wonderful things. For beautiful and sunny days. May your hearts be healthy. Thank you. You are doing amazing work in a world where people are so opportunistic.

EGET Foundation Heading Towards Sunny and Beautiful Days…