For Esref Uyan, the only hope of earning money to take care of his family lies not in his hometown in Turkey's mainly Kurdish south-east but in agricultural land miles away in the west of the country.
The unemployed 34-year-old from the regional capital Diyarbakir is just one of hundreds of people who, with no hope of steady jobs at home, travel outside the region each year for a few months of hard manual labour in fields across the rest of the country as seasonal workers.
"We work from four in the morning until sunset for seven days a week with few breaks," said Uyan as he waited for the train that will bear him and his family on a 24-hour journey to lettuce and spinach fields near the capital Ankara.
Uyan and his wife have been working the fields in summer for the past eight years but their labour does not earn them the money to get them and their three children through the rest of the year.
A hard day's work brings in only about seven million Turkish liras a day per adult (about 4.6 dollars) and three or four million for children after the middle man takes his cut for arranging the trip. What is left is used to buy provisions as the family camps out in a tent near the fields.
"We live with our stomachs half full, half empty," said Ayse Yildirak, 37, as she sat at the train station with her baggage - a tent, foodstuff and mattresses in a bid to make their time away less miserable.
This year, she will be picking onions with her husband and 17-year-old eldest daughter, while her 11-year-old daughter, Gulisan, cooks for the family and takes care of her two younger siblings during the day.
"Life in the tent is difficult. There is no water. There are mosquitoes everywhere. The children fall sick with fever," Yildirak added.
Their stories bear testimony to the economic stagnation that has plagued the underdeveloped south-eastern regions for years amid a 15-year bloody Kurdish insurgency for self-rule in the region.
The deadly conflict stalled investments and left hundreds of villagers with no means of support as they were forcibly evacuated from their homes in a bid by the army to cut off possible supply lines to militants hiding in rugged mountains.
The displaced ran into the cities, setting up shanty towns and swelling the army of jobless already there.
According to the state statistics institute, the unemployment rate in 2003 was 21.6 percent in the south-eastern provinces, much higher than the average of 10.5 percent for the entire country.
In Diyarbakir alone, 70 percent of the some one million people in the city are unemployed, according to mayor Osman Baydemir.
"If you ask me, the biggest human rights violation in this city is poverty," he said, adding that it was also the root cause of another problem: street children.
Baydemir estimates that there are some 28,000 street kids, 2,000 of whom are victims of substance abuse. "The most realistic and shortest way of resolving the issue of street children is to find employment for the parents, but we do not have the means, there are no factories in our region," Baydemir said.
Successive Turkish governments have announced a series of incentives to industrialists willing to invest in the region, but they have so far not been enough to persuade companies to move into a conflict zone.
Local officials, however, feel that the tide will soon turn especially now that once-heavy clashes have scaled down considerably since 1999 when Kurdish rebels declared a unilateral cease-fire.
"Money and capital are easily scared away. If they do not feel safe in a place, they will flow away. But things are now changing, but we cannot expect things to improve overnight," Diyarbakir governor Nusret Miroglu said.
Back at the train station, the mood is less optimistic.
"Let us talk about more serious things. How do I sneak into France? Can I get asylum if I manage to get through the border?," asks a sun-beaten seasonal worker minutes before the train's departure.
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