The family has lost three of its four children this week to bird flu or suspected bird flu: 14-year-old Mehmet Kocyigit and his sisters 15-year-old Fatma and 11-year-old Hulya. The fourth was hospitalized.

The doctor who treated the Kocyigit children said they most likely contracted the virus while playing with the heads of chickens who had died of bird flu. The children had reportedly tossed the chicken heads like balls inside their house.

As teams dressed in protective suits went home to home rounding up poultry for destruction, mourners trekked up the hill to the Kocyigit house. They took off their shoes before entering to sit with the children's grieving mother. The father stayed at the hospital with their last remaining child until late afternoon, when he came back to bury his third child in a week.

Accustomed to Close Contact with Animals

Hulya was buried later Friday in a simple, small grave in the corner of the cemetery beside her siblings. An imam wearing a mask and rubber gloves presided.

"We're suffering," said an uncle of the children, Hasan Kocyigit.

The Kocyigits were a typical Dogubayazit family -- Kurdish, poor, dependent on and living closely with their livestock.

Bird flu does not easily infect humans, experts say. Eating cooked chicken is not considered risky. Health officials have said only those who had been in close contact with poultry were at risk. In Dogubayazit, that's nearly everyone.

On the main streets of this town of 56,000 near the Iranian border, cars and trucks compete with carts bearing live animals and with flocks of sheep.

The people of Dogubayazit, 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) east of Ankara, are accustomed to living near their animals, and often it is the children who deal most with them. The people have seen their animals sicken before, but until now never thought it could put them in danger.

"They knew the animals were sick, but who knew it would kill them?" Hasan Kocyigit said.

Language Barrier

Education is key to controlling the spread of the virus. That is hampered here by poverty and the inability of many in this largely Kurdish town -- especially women -- to speak Turkish.

Less than three months ago, Turkey tackled a large outbreak of the same deadly virus in a village in the west. No one there got sick, and the country was praised for its effective response.

Here in the east, things have been different.

Trudging over the hilltops toward other houses of brick, concrete and stone, neighbor Ahmet Tastan, father of nine, translated from Kurdish to Turkish for his wife and other women worried they or their children would become sick.

They said they did not speak Turkish well enough to deal with doctors, and complained that the local hospital could not do anything for them, and that a larger one in Van where the Kocyigit children were treated was too far away.

The road from Dogubayazit to Van runs nearly 200 kilometers (120 miles) through a craggy, snow-covered chain of mountains that includes Mount Ararat, where Noah's ark is said to have landed after the Biblical great flood. It is across this -- at times barely visible -- road that ambulances have been carting the sickest patients for treatment.

Emine Sokmen, mother of eight, told Tastan that 20 or 25 of her chickens had died of bird flu, but no one had yet come to disinfect the coop or check on her family's health.

"If there were a hospital here, if they could have diagnosed it, maybe it would have been different," said Hutfetin Kocyigit, another uncle of the children who died.