In June, 1965, I had my first plane trip. It was on a new Boeing 727. The short range jet that took off so fast it had to make a steep climb just to slow down. In my case, this was particularly helpful otherwise the plane might have overshot its landing site, Portland, Oregon. It was basically up, level off, and down.
I was going to my one month Peace Corps training in Portland, Oregon. We were housed on the Portland State University campus which is right in the center of Portland and located along a broad avenue with a park between the streets.
We went to Turkish classes most of the time. They were taught by upper class Turkish women with extremely high voices – something a few months later we would never hear in a Turkish village and I was headed for a Turkish village. We were in the Community Development Group, whatever that was.
When I was first there I was sitting in a reading space reading Pascal’s Pensee. A guy walked up to me and said, “Do you really read that stuff?”. His name was Guy Gattis. He was from the south, Memphis I think. He asked me if I had heard of Bob Dylan. I said no. I’m sure he wondered where I had been for most of my young life. Nevertheless, two years later, he was the best man in my wedding to Marge Passassini.
The routine was mainly Turkish lessons, physical exercises like climbing ropes to the ceiling and tight-rope walking long planks, and being tested. I think it was here that I took the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test. I mean, “Is the band around your head tightening?”
We also learned a couple of rules. Don’t talk about politics or religion with locals once we got to Turkey. We learned little about what “community development” was, but I was told not to worry about that because our mere presence in the Turkish village would be beneficial to them.
There were kids from all around the country. Lots of these kids were from the East coast and they crossed against the light which we, of course, would never do. What amazed them was that they got tickets from cops and had to go to street crossing training school. There was a girl from Princeton or one of those eastern Ivy league schools we held in contempt on the west coast, who smoked a cigar. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was headed for DE-SELECTION. Yes, this was the Peace Corps term for failure, getting kicked out, not making the cut, de-selection.
I was semi de-selected. They told me in Portland that I could not go with my community development group to Ankara for two more months of training, but I could go to Istanbul’s Roberts College to be a teacher. I wasn’t the only one who got semi de-selected for Roberts College so at least I had some buddies from Portland.
The plane ride to Turkey was something. We left Portland on a four engine TWA prop plane which landed in Kansas city. The rumor was that we needed to land in order to pick up more beer. NYC and JFK were next and then on to Istanbul’s Yesil koy airport. There’s a picture of us arriving there. I was skinny as a rail and about to get skinnier.
Robert College was situated high on a hill overlooking the Bosporus. It was a private college, replete with beautiful old buildings, clay tennis courts, hot and cold running water, all the conveniences of modern life. What was I doing here? I didn’t join the Peace Corps for this. Meanwhile my community development colleagues were in some god-forsaken former village on the outskirts of Ankara putting up with out-houses, well water and cold showers.
After a couple of weeks, I told the Peace Corps authorities to send me home or send me to Ankara. One day I was called to an office at Roberts College. There was a guy there with an open file on his desk. He told me my life story beginning with the FBI background checks from my neighborhood in Queen Anne. The problem was, he said, the Peace Corps didn’t think I could stick out village life for two years. They thought I was a quitter because I had quit the Seminary. Christ, I said, most kids quit. You go to the seminary to see if you have a vocation. I didn’t. I left. Send me to Yalincak, the name of the village outside of Ankara, or send me home.
I took the train from Istanbul to Ankara. The Peace Corps Director, Dave Berlew, picked me up in his car and took me to his home where I stayed the night. The next morning I had bacon and eggs for breakfast and then I went to Yalincak.
Yalincak was a side of a hill with small adobe-like houses on it. I had a corner of one of them with four others, including one couple Jim and Wing Barefoot. Down the hill was our “çay bahçesi” or tea garden when we had social events. There was, of course, no running water, no electricity, not much of anything, except lots of bottles of Kavalidere wine. We went to Turkish classes at the Middle East Technical University, a modern new concrete series of buildings and we also ate there.
At one point, we had a week-long trial run at living in a Turkish village. Paul Kuzman and I were teamed up and we went to live in a village near Denizli. Deniz means the sea and “li” means with. At one point the Mediterranean was next to this village so it was Denizli. We watched the farmer go round and round on a wooden sled pulling draft animals and we watched them harvest melons and ate plenty of them.
The big excitement was when Paul “wizzed.” Our host was a crusty old farmer who liked Paul. We’d be sitting on the floor of his home eating food out of a common dish with plenty of yufka and the farmer would point to Paul periodically and say, “Paul wizzed.” Finally we got it and with all the male related humor about farting we rolled in laughter and kept laughing about it for the rest of our trip.
Paul was a funny guy, independent and marching to his own drum which led us to leave our assignment a bit early and go traveling. We headed to the Greek city state of Ephesus, known as Efes in Turkey. It was just an open ruin like so many of Turkey’s great historical treasures. Paul and I just walked through it. It had a huge amphitheater and as I sat on the top row I could hear Paul’s low whisper at the bottom. We explored the caves that were supposedly the houses of prostitution.
Next we went to the Virgin Mary’s tomb. Supposedly the Apostle John laid her to rest here. It was a modest place for the Mother of God, but then the Muslims felt that was the Christian mistake. Yes, Jesus was a great prophet and his mother, Mary, was someone to be honored, but making Jesus into God was a mistake.
We went into Izmir, a big city and a NATO headquarters. We sinfully stayed at the Buyuk Efes, (the Big Ephesus), the fanciest hotel in town. My room cost me $10/night and it had a three channel radio transmitter in the room with music from an American channel. Years later, I would bring Bethany to this same hotel and we’d have a drink and some great Turkish meze at this classic place now hidden by a bustling, crowded city, full of Western hotels, cars and pollution.
We got back to Ankara a little late, but in time to learn of our village selections and to have a short break before we went to our assignments. I decided to go to eastern Turkey since my assignment was in the southwest. I left by train to Elazig. There was a girl there who I knew for some reason or other. I think she was a teacher. I’m sure I had some notions of a romantic possibility, but I was far from capable of pulling that off. I did stay with her for a couple of days and still have the key to her house since it was the first time I stayed with a girl, even though nothing happened but sleep.
I left there with her and we took the train east to Tat Van where the train ended late in the night and we got on a small cattle boat and headed across Lake Van. She, being blond and speaking Turkish, got to ride with the captain in his cabin and I got to ride outside with the animals.
We were headed into Kurdish Turkey and by now I could speak a little bit with them on trains and on the boat. Their women were more open, less covered and seemed freer. We got off the boat in Van and about all I remember is scampering up a high hill in back of the city and then going down inside the carved out mountain to see some ancient assembly hall.
I took the bus out of Van to Erzurum, the city near Mount Ararat, where Moses’ boat landed in the flood. Erzurum’s women wore burlap covering them from head to toe and I was glad to leave. I got on a train and it crept across central Turkey on its way to Ankara. Something was wrong with the engine and the heating system. It was plenty warm in my car but if you wanted some fresh air you had to open your window. If you opened your window, however, all the soot from the engine’s smoke stack would cover you in grit. This train trip lasted for three days and I was tired, dirty and very late getting back to Ankara, but I made it.
All of us were by now staying at the Berlin hotel in Ulus section of Ankara and the Peace Corps hired all these small passenger vans to take us to our various assignments all over Turkey.There were three of us headed to the Antalya province, me, Anne Boylon and Jim Wolf. We piled our stuff into and on top of that small Volkswagen-like van and headed down the road.
Antalya was a beautiful, street lined city, with a small harbor full of fishing dories. We stayed in a hotel for a few days and then headed up into the mountains to see our villages. Antalya would become our refuge from village life, a place to come and act like American kids, drink, dance and listen to live music played by Armenian hippies from Istanbul.
First stop after Antlaya was Korkuteli, county seat, where we met Emrullah Zebec, the Vice governor. He was going to be a part of our lives for the next two years, as was Zeki Ozbas, the head of Adult Education and technically our boss. We also met Ibrahim Dokutkan, the agricultural extension agent for the county. Ibrahim was to be our true savior. Jim and Annie’s assignment was Caykenari and my assignment was Comakli, two villages in generally the same direction, but not within walking distance of each other.
The Kaymakan had an English Land Rover with a chauffeur and we transferred my belongings and headed out to Comakli. We passed through Bozava, a bit more than a crossroads. Here, if you turned right you went to Caykenari. But we kept going straight for a couple more miles and then turned left and up this straight, single lane road that I was to walk many times in the next two years.
I wonder if I had any clue of what I was doing or where I was. I don’t think so. The villagers greeted me politely and the Kaymakan must have said something to them about what I was doing here, but I would not have understood any of it. I remember when the Kaymakan got back into his Land Rover, turned it around and headed back down that straight, single lane. I can still see him. I watched until he turned right on the road to Bozova and then I had to turn around and face the Turks and all my luggage in the middle of the village square. Jesus, I was lonely already. I couldn’t speak Turkish. No one here sounded like those high pitched Turkish ladies who gave us our Turkish lessons. I might have had a vague idea what I doing there and I kept saying “toplum kalkinmasi” or community development hoping it might mean something.
I was immediately ushered to my home by Mehmet, a young boy of about 12 and another young man who ran a barber shop on the first floor of my home. My home was on the village square along with three village coffee houses, a village store and a posthane (postoffice). The well where I was to get my water was just in front of the post office.
My home was just like other Turkish homes in the village. The first floor was for animals and wagons. In my home, that floor was empty. You pulled a string on the front door to open it and then walked directly upstairs. I had two big rooms facing the square, split by the stairwell and a back porch walkway that led to a little house on the end which was my toilet. Both rooms were empty, but Mehmet and the other young men soon installed a bed, a wood stove for heat and a standing closet for my clothes. And, there I was. Now what?
I’d been briefed on the village. It was in fact a small city, a belediye, run by a progressive mayor named Apti Bey. He was a short, busy man and ran the village council which met on the second floor of the city hall directly across from me. He supposedly hated goats and called them devil animals that eat everything. They were a threat to Apti Bey’s main village development project, a new terrace of almond trees on a hill just to the left of my home overlooking the road out of town.
I think it was Walter Salmen who told me all this. Walter worked for CARE and was a surrogate Peace Corps representative to me and probably many other kids who were trying to figure out what they were doing in these villages. Walter told me that Apti Bey was a good politician. The proposed almond grove was near a burial site and sacred ground for the local Imans, village religious leaders. Apti had persuaded them that this grove would be a way to honor the dead and they had agreed.
One of my first activities was to climb up that hill and see what the villagers were up to. The hill was steep and the villagers did not use animals to terrace the hill. Instead they pulled each other, one man acting like an animal and the other guiding the hoe. Of course, no one would let me work or lift a thing. Once I brought out my camera, I became the official photographer. I still have all those pictures including ones with a hat given to me by my friends which looks like an African safari hat. But, who knew where Turkey was anyhow.
Shut out from working on the terrace I headed for the elementary school located just outside the village proper on the road out of town. There were five teachers who lived on site. Two married couples and Fidan Chaliskan.
Fidan was a single and beautiful young woman. She was a teacher or an “oretman” and that was enough to protect her as long as she stayed in the school yard which is where she stayed most of the time. Fidan’s name translated roughly into a “working seedling” and, yes, I would have liked to work that seedling, but the thought of it was so “ayip” or “naughty” that even the idea never got developed.
I got a couple of projects going with the school, if you could call them projects. The first one was a CARE volleyball set which I got from Walter. Volleyball wasn’t really a Turk’s game. They played soccer and could do amazing things with their feet, but not their hands. Next, they were building a small school bakery out behind the school and I think I helped get supplies to make bread, but I’m not sure. I know I was there when the officials came to town to open it up.
I do remember when they opened up the almond terrace. It was a big event and I remember that Annie Boylon, my Peace Corps buddy from Caykenari was there, along with all the county officials and Ibrahim Bey, the county extension agent. The villagers had used an old Roman aqueduct that ran across the crest of the hill to fill a newly built cistern on top of the hill. It was amazing to think about something that old working that well. But there it was. I have a picture of us standing on that cistern and a picture of a flower bud on an almond tree that Ibrahim pointed out.
I had another project. Abti Bey had built a “Reading room,” an “Okuma Odasi” right next to the city hall. It was a small building, but empty. I said I could get a starter library from CARE and the village craftsmen built a beautiful standing bookcase. The books arrived, placed in the bookcase and the beautiful glass doors closed. Closed? Yes, what if the Governor or some official comes and the books are dirty? I didn’t have the Turkish to argue or even suggest that the purpose of the library was to read the books. Anyhow, the books in the reading room remained locked up.
I was beginning to wonder about all this. Almond terracing projects where I couldn’t work. Volleyball sets for soccer players and starter libraries where the books were locked up.
I started to retreat. I spent lots of evenings in that posthane next door to my house turning pages in my Oxford/English dictionary looking up words as the Turks excitedly waiting for some form of recognition to cross my face. They didn’t speak like those upper class Turkish women we learned from. These were old men, often without teeth, who spoke a mixture of old Turkish laced with idioms no Istanbul woman would have ever heard. Nevertheless, I plodded along and slowly after six months I began to be able to speak.
As I learned the language I also began to see the absurdity of my own position. A complete ignoramus, an Irish Catholic city boy coming into this village talking about “community development”, a nonsense word with no status or position in Turkish society. If you said you were a teacher, okay, they knew that, or an agricultural agent, okay, but a “community developer.” Hey, son, do you want some tea?
I retreated even farther into my second floor room. The Peace Corps must have known I would end up there. They gave us our own book locker filled with literature and it was a life saver for me or maybe it was my entry way into depression, probably both. I started staying up all night reading books until I’d fall asleep. I’d wake up when the glass in my kerosene lamp would break from the smoke of an exhausted fuel supply.
I had two large three ring binders in my room, one in English and one in Turkish. They were products of US AID and I think they were produced by Cornell University, a place I’d end up in years later.
I saw something in that binder that really got my attention. It was a wash machine. Now, I had seen women squatting outside around a fire with a large kettle on it, fishing clothes out with a stick, placing them on a flat stone and beating that with a wooden mallet. Barbaric, no?
I also knew that for whatever reason the new communal wash-house that had been built on the hill above the village by the government was not being used by the women.
The thing about the wash machine or camashir-makinasi was that it was built out of wood, with no nails and looked very modern compared to the stoop labor I had observed. First, the tub was resting on four legs and the person could wash the clothes standing up. The person would push a long handle up and down. This action would cause two plungers to move up and down inside the tub thereby washing the clothes. It seemed simple and efficient.
Now I knew that “community development” was about a successful model that would prove the experiment would work for everyone. All I needed was that model. I asked around for carpenters, showed the design in the book and all said no, except one. Of course, this carpenter would not build it in public like I wanted him to, but he would build it in private so that in case this fool American was on to something, he would be rich.
He built the machine and it looked great. Now, I needed to test it out. Of course, I could not show it to the women. I was not allowed to be with women. I decided to show it to the men even though they definitely did not do laundry. Nevertheless, I was undaunted, a true Peace Corps missionary.
I convinced my friend, Hushit, the owner of a coffee house and a village elder to let me use his coffee house for my demonstration project. He had been kind to me during Ramadan and secretly fed me in the back of his coffee house when my resolve to fast has weakened during the day.
I brought the camashir-makinasi to Hushit’s coffee house and threw my dirty clothes into the two foot deep, three foot long tub. Of course, there was no running water, either hot or cold, to fill the tub, but this did not stop me. I walked back to my house across the square, got my two water pails, took them to the well, filled them up, brought them up to my room, and turned on the village’s only kerosene stove. After the water heated up, I brought both pails over to Hushit’s and poured them onto top of my clothes. It barely covered them, but it did get them all wet.
Still, I was not deterred. I went back to my home and repeated the same thing: get the pails, go to the well, heat up the water and walk over to Hushit’s. After I poured more water onto to my clothes, Hushit had a couple of questions. What was I going to do about the fact that water was leaking onto his coffee house floor and why exactly was I getting all my clothes wet?
I still was not deterred, diving deeper into my own stupidity. If it was not for the fact that the bottom of my pails both burnt out, I would probably still be pushing that rock up the hill like my old friend Sisyphus.
I finally did give up and brought the disgraced washing machine back to my home and dove into my bed and nightly reading vigils with ever more desperation.
Two years later, an old village friend would bring me over to his house where he was now using the wash machine for his granddaughters’ crib. He wanted me to take a picture so I could show success to my family back home. He had his wife take the handle, his daughter distribute the clothes and he posed with a water bucket about it pour it into the tub.
Thirty years later, I came back to my village for the first time. Now there was electricity, phones, cars, brick homes and orchards. However, every time I entered a home, the women who I could now talk face to face motioned to me to come and look at their camishir-makinasi – usually an electric Whirlpool! They remembered my effort even though I had never seen them.
Back in the village, though, only Ali the night watchman could shake me out of my despair. He would see my light on and come for a visit. Ali was a mosaic craftsman from Antalya, but could not breathe down there, so he and his wife and family moved up to the Comakli. He had no status, no land. He needed some respect. He became one of my best friends.
He wanted to be “Ali Bey, the Tavukcu” – Mr. Ali, the Chicken man.” So we began reading all we could about chickens out of the AID manual and I began talking to Ibrahim the Agricultural Agent who had projects in his five year plan. One of those projects was promoting egg production. Ibrahim had gone to Israel to learn the latest techniques and had a great slide show that everyone came to, not because of the chicken raising and egg production techniques, but because every once in a while Ibrahim would slip a racy slide into his show.
Nevertheless, Ibrahim was a serious promoter of economic development projects and a tireless worker for the farmers of Korkuteli county. He said if Ali and I built a state of the art chicken coop which he would help subsidize, he would get us 100 chicks.
Ali and I started mixing mud and straw in the field to make kerpitch, or the mud brick Turks used to build their homes. He also hired carpenters to start the room framing, but fired them as soon as he learned the technique. We built a chicken coup that was the envy of the village. It was so nice, in fact, that Ali’s wife wanted to move in!
It was a free standing building and for sanitary purposes not attached to the main house. A new departure. It also had six windows in front for sun light and it had a cement floor that was sloped for easier cleaning. We had modern feeders and a tall, wired enclosure out front of the chicken coop so the birds could not roam around and get infected.
With the arrival of the chicks and the beginning of egg production, Ali became Ali Bey the Tavukcu who was the only one with eggs during winter. He would horde them up and sell them at a premium price. Soon, everyone wanted to get into egg production.
There was a problem, though. They all wanted the same subsidized deal. Money for the chicken coop and 100 free chicks. This wasn’t in Ibrahim’s budget so the villagers went back to their old “unsanitary” ways, built two walls inside their first floor homes, knocked out a couple of windows in their exterior walls and Voila! – a chicken coop.
We had another success, but it wasn’t mine. Annie and Jim in Caykenari worked with Ibrahim to bring some purebred turkey chicks to their village. They grew so big the villagers called them lambs. They let them range into the wheat fields after harvest and soon they were trucking turkey meat to big cities.
It never really dawned on me what we were doing with “community development” until years later. I thought we were just helping people have a better life. We were in fact implementing and promoting a particular kind of life – a market based life – a commodified life – a life where you used your resources to sell in a market and became dependent on that market price rather than your own land for your livelihood.
I started working more closely with the agency directors that hung out at the Sehir Klub (City Club) in Korkuteli. They all sat around drinking tea, playing backgammon and telling stories. In my two years at backgammon, I never beat any of them, except the rather large and slow captain of the gendarmes. In fact, for the first year, they told me I needed to watch the game and not play. Most of them were masters at zarf tutarlar… or holding the dice so they could roll combinations almost at will.
I hustled a $5000 grant from CARE and got myself a Czechoslovakian motorcycle in the deal. It was a 250 cc bike and even though Peace Corps volunteers were not supposed to be motorized I somehow got one on the up and up. The grant was for community development training classes for two leaders from all the villages.
We set up the classes at the school in Korkuteli and I moved into the home of a newly arrived Peace Corps Volunteer, Gene Zajac from Chicago. Gene was a teacher and became a great buddy of mine for the final year of my stay in Turkey. Gene became a US consulate officer years later.
The community development training schools were a great hit and became a source of lots of projects for me and Ibrahim. The schools became show cases for agency directors. The directors would come and demonstrate all the latest devices that villagers could use for a better life, new stoves, new orchards to plant, new roads to build, new tractors to buy, new cheeses to make, etc.
As a reward for completing the ten day school, we would put all 50 men on a tour bus and take several days to visit the best agricultural experimental farms in the region. After most farm visits, the bus would often stop in a city and the men would literally rush off the bus and disappear. It wasn’t a meal stop and I finally asked Zeki Bey where all the men went. He asked me if I really wanted to know and I said yes. We grabbed a taxi and went to a compound on the outskirts of town where my village leaders were all lined up outside the whorehouse doors. You can live in a foreign culture and speak their language, but you will never know exactly what is going on.
When the training schools were done, I’d ride my motorcycle out to the villages, find the graduates and make a list of projects that they wanted to do. Then, Ibrahim would come and help them. It was great fun. Unlike the Turks I could ride my motorcycle regardless of the road conditions. Most of the Turks didn’t have the long legs that I did. This meant that when they came to a muddy road full of ruts they would have to slow down and weave slowly through the mud puddles so as not to risk a spill. I would just put my legs down and glide right through the mud at top speed. They also would not ride in the dark, but I would because I was young, dumb and full of Peace Corps missionary vigor.
The only thing that really scared me and still does today were the dogs. The Turkish village dogs wore Anatolian dog collars, an interlaced collar of spikes around their necks so that they could rip the wolves apart or whatever animal they were fighting. To have those dogs come charging out after your motorcycle scared the shit out of me. I learned though that they would only come out a certain territorial distance from their houses and then stop. Whenever I came to a village, I would slow down, go down the middle of the lane and be prepared to gun that bike past any dog that might appear.
One of the hard things about this work on the county level was that I had to leave Comakli and move to Korkuteli. This was to be a permanent leave, not just a trip for market day on Wednesday or a trip to Ankara for some Peace Corps function. Leaving even for a short time was hard enough. When you came to the village, the Peace Corps said if you ever left even for a short time you had to tell people exactly why you were leaving because the villagers would feel bad about it.
I had decided that after the Peace Corps I wanted to work for the US State Department in a consulate office so I signed up for the foreign service test. You had to pass this first with a certain score before you could get to the interview stage. I dutifully looked up the word for test in my dictionary. It was “tercube.”
I spent several weeks telling people that I was going to go up to Ankara for my tercube. Everyone was quite pleased and wished me luck. I was gone to Ankara for about two weeks. When I returned everyone was asking me how my tercube was. I said that it was long, hard and difficult, but that I came through alright.
About a week after I returned, Walter Salmen the CARE representative pulled in for one of his visits. We were speaking in Turkish. Walter was beyond fluent and he asked me what I had been up to. I said that I had gone to Ankara for my tercube. “Wait a minute,” said Walter, “You did what?” I said, “Walter, I went up to Ankara and took the foreign service test.” “Yeah,” said Walter, “but tercube is not the word for test.” I said, “yes, it is, Walter, I looked it up in the dictionary,” which I had pulled out to show him. Walter said, “Look, Dan, the word for test is ‘imtihan’” and sure enough there it is in the dictionary next to tercube. I said, “well, shit, Walter, if imtihan means test, what does tercube mean.” Walter said, “well, Dan, it’s something like a test, but it usually refers to your first sexual experience!” At least when I had to leave the village permanently they all knew that during my first sexual experience, I had come through alright.
During my second year in Turkey, I started receiving letters from graduate schools. The Peace Corps was a hot topic back in the U.S. and graduate schools wanted us returned volunteers to season up the conversation. I had some notion about graduate school in economics, since that, along with philosophy, had been my double major at Seattle University. I sent my application into a lot of schools and, while I got into some, there was no money attached.
Then, I got a letter from New York University’s Graduate School in Public Administration. They had a program in International and Comparative Public Administration and, more importantly, they had a National Defense Education Act (NDEA), Title IV Fellowship for me in a straight doctoral program, don’t stop at Masters, go directly to your Ph.D. I said yes, but I had to get married first.
PHOTO CAPTION: Modernity
1967. “Backwards” Turkish Village, but what do you see? She is standing up and not stooping over a cauldron of hot water. He is not at the teahouse wasting time playing backgammon with the other men. He is engaged in traditional women’s work. He is helping her with a domestic chore. They are doing this chore together blurring gender roles. They are also using technology to save labor, a washing machine designed by the U.S. Agency of International Development, the premier agency of modernity in a traditional world. You also notice there is no wash or clothing involved and that there is water on the ground below the leaking machine. The technology is not working. This is not a washing machine and labor is not being saved. This is in fact a crib for the couple’s grandchild. The photo? The essence of modernity — a spin on reality to maintain the fiction of progress. A gift to the young American Peace Corps Volunteer who, after two years in the village, was just beginning to experience a critical thought. –Dan Leahy, 2010
