President Erdoğan: Our roots are best mirrored by the way we engage with the elderly
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a speech at the 1st Council on Aging, held at the Beştepe People’s Convention and Culture Center in Ankara.
Expressing his belief that the role the elderly play in the transfer of cultural values and civilization from one generation to another is bigger than the role of schools, teachers and books, President Erdoğan said: “Therefore, caring for the elderly means caring for the future.”
President Erdoğan continued as follows: “We have put into use a large variety of services of crucial importance for the elderly from 2003 onward. The number of the elderly accommodated at nursing homes has increased from less than 5 thousand to almost 14 thousand. Having proven to be a welfare state that reaches out to the lonely, we leave no elderly citizen of ours on streets or between four walls in despair. We care for all of them.”
“A world where the elderly live alone and children grow up alone cannot be our world,” President Erdoğan further stressed, and added: “We exist together with our roots. And our roots are best mirrored by the way we engage with the elderly, with our senior citizens. We want a Turkey where different generations live under the same roof and where relationships go on without any interruption, not a Turkey where the number of nursing homes is on the rise.”
