All the words made me remember one especially embarrassing mis-use of a word. It was early on in the first year. I went to lunch with all the orta okul teachers. It was mostly no food, lots of questions (theirs-not mine) and then the "was my face red" scenario.

One of the teachers asked me about bread, because I had mentioned how very much I enjoyed the fresh bread everyday from the firin.  I think it was the history teacher who wanted to know, "What is so different about American bread?"  Swallow, search my mind. Did I learn that word? Having heard a couple of words in Turkish that sounded borrowed from French I cast my fate to the winds. "American bread is full of 'préservatifs."
That produced a table full of loud laughter that was excruciating because no one could stop laughing long enough to tell me what I had said. When things calmed down, my colleague next to me, (an
avuncular sort of guy), leaned in to me and whispered, "That word means 'condoms' in Turkish". He needn't have whispered. His explanation was clear from the deep red that covered my face & throat...who knows maybe
even my eyes were bulging.

The experience tripled my motivation in learning more Turkish, as fast as I could!

Nearly everyone must have had a similar uncomfortable faux pas. Is anyone else interested in baring their soul?                                                      --Chuck Reiter 
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First Impressions by Carol Kocan (T-8) 
About arriving at Robert College... Although a distinguished institution in its own right, my impression was also not positive back then. My suitcase burst open on the steps as it was being unloaded from the bus or truck, causing me great personal embarrassment, the dorms were our warning not to expect great comfort in the coming months, and the school cafeteria was pretty bad. As a matter of fact, it's a miracle I could ever come to love bamya (okra) or other Turkish food after a first taste at Robert College.

The school was in a great location however, and we did enjoy the view and exploring Rumeli Hisar. At the foot of the hill, at the bus stop, I had my first experience in real conversation when a passer-by asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch, answered appropriately, and the person thanked me and walked on. Only then did I realize I had just had a genuine conversation in Turkish!

That was a good enough sign that there was hope, after all, that I might manage to get through the next two years.

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Community Development by Chris Smith (T-4)

[Sandy Pfunder's recent piece on his and Allen's attempt to form a village development cooperative triggered some sympathetic chuckles and a memory of a failed community development project in Tunceli.]

Scarcely had my site partner, Dave Wesselink, and I settled into our house along the river in the fall of '64', when Country Director, Ross Pritchard, and a retinue of PC staff dropped by for a visit.  Though ours were teaching assignments in the local orta okul and lise, they didn't preclude community development possibilities on the side, Ross informed us.  What about
sprucing up the little house we were living in and planting some flowers in a window box or two?  And wasn't there space next to the house for a small vegetable garden?  Our place would be an example of what could be done with dusty backyards, a precursor of some new Hanging Garden of Babylon along our tributary of the Euphrates River.

Before we could get started with any beautification, our school principal informed us we were moving to an apartment complex which had just been completed.  Our third floor space didn't need any fixing up and there were no suitable spots for gardens or window boxes.  Our community development project would have to take some other form.

As soon as people moved into the new apartments, and it happened fast, they generated garbage.  The drill was to toss the stuff down the slope in back of the buildings.  It seemed unsanitary, unaesthetic and 'un-American'. Here was just the project for two callow, would-be community developers fired by hyper-civic zeal.

In short order we discovered Tunceli had a garbage collector.  What did he do?  He collected the garbage of the city's few well-to-do residents who lived along the river, where we used to live.

When we discussed the matter with the Mayor, he agreed the new apartment buildings should have a large garbage barrel that could be collected when full.  Give him 15 days and he'd have one in place.

Fifteen days passed and no barrel appeared.  We returned to the Mayor's office and reminded him of his promise.  Sorry, he'd gotten distracted with other business.  Give him another 15 days.

The second 15 days passed and still no barrel.  Dave and I returned to the Mayor's office and laid it on with a trowel.  The kids would get typhoid, other cities would think we were backward, etc.,etc., etc.  Thoroughly exasperated, I'm sure, the Mayor said he'd have the barrel in a day or two.

Sure enough, a large barrel showed up outside the apartment complex.  We dutifully dumped our garbage in it and noticed some of the other residents did too.  No doubt they'd been asked to humor the Americans through this little crisis.

Dave and I took off that weekend for some shopping in Elazığ feeling pleased with our community development success.  When we returned, the barrel was gone.  Fellow-residents told us it had filled up and been collected.  They weren't sure why an empty had not been left in its place, but perhaps one would turn up in 15 days.

That night Dave and I had a good laugh over our folly.  It had taken us more than a month to get the message: we were the only people who thought the garbage was a problem.  When we observed the dynamics of the heap more closely, we had another laugh.  Chickens and dogs ate literally all the food scraps.  Metal, glass and plastic containers that could hold water were collected by kids for that purpose.  Even most of the paper was salvaged. With all that recycling going on, there really wasn't much of a heap at all.

I hope our Turkish friends had a good laugh on us.  We were impatient, overbearing, insensitive and ignorant when we should have been just the opposite.  Perhaps a short course in community development would have helped us.  Maybe remembering our manners would have been enough.  That our hosts put up with us so good naturedly is a tribute to their manners and to the quality of their friendship and hospitality.

Chris Smith T-4

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Hugh O'Neill  by Sandy Pfunder (T-9)

Perhaps the most memorable evening I spent in Turkey was with my site partner, Allen, and fellow Turkey IX volunteer, Hugh O'Neill.  Hugh had been my roommate during training in Portland.  He was about eight years older than I and had been a professional social worker before entering the Peace Corps.  He was an extraordinarily funny man with an infectious laugh.  He also had a sharp tongue and did not suffer fools gladly.  His use of the Turkish language was creative and colorful, but disconnected and utterly ungrammatical.  He said he took pride in having been officially certified as incapable of learning a foreign language.

I only dimly understood Hugh's official assignment.  He taught social work in some government organization in Ankara.  Much more fun, he chose to live in a gece kondu neighborhood called Çin Çin.  Allen and I were in Ankara for some official reason in early May of 1966 and we met him at the end of his work day.  We boarded a city bus and rode together for about 45 minutes into the hills outside the city.  From the bus stop we walked through a neighborhood of small, flat roofed mud brick houses separated by unpaved streets.  Hugh's house was like the others; it had a bedroom and a living room, with straw mats on the floors.  He had electricity and running water.

We sat around and had a leisurely conversation while Hugh cooked dinner.  We had just finished eating when there was a loud knock on his door and a high pitched call, "Hoo Yoo!"  Hugh explained that the Turks had some difficulty pronouncing his name.  A bevy of village ladies entered the house and made shooing signs to Hugh, our first indication of his fundamental skill in using and cultivating non-verbal communication.  Hugh turned to us with a twinkle in his eye.  "We have to take a walk," he said.

So we walked out into the neighborhood.  Hugh showed us three apple trees that he had recently planted.  Each was about eight feet tall, about two inches in diameter, with a couple of spindly branches and about twelve leaves.  He said that they had been difficult to plant, since he had to borrow a pick axe to break through the hard packed earth.  He recounted that one of his neighbors had asked him why he was working so hard to plant trees, and he had explained that he liked shade.  During the next half hour of our meandering through the neighborhood, Hugh expressed surprise at finding two more newly planted trees that he said had not been there the previous week.  I remember his saying:  "What more could I ask?"
We talked with a number of his neighbors that we met on the street.  They were articulate and interesting.  They had all come from villages, seeking better education and better job opportunities.  They explained the practice of helping newcomers to find or build shelter.  They viewed themselves as a community, and they took pride in their neighborhood.  Their conversation suggested that they were highly motivated and upwardly mobile.  To the extent that Allen and I had had our own images of the gece kondu prior to that evening, they bore no resemblance to what we found.

When we returned to Hugh's house, our dinner dishes had been washed, and a basket of clean laundry had been exchanged for whatever the ladies had found that looked as though it needed washing.  The neighbors clearly were very fond of this guy and took good care of him. 
We sat down to chat, and there was another knock at the door.  This time two school-age kids came into the living room.  It was time for the weekly sign-in and sign-out of library books.  Hugh explained that he had bought a collection of Turkish books for the neighborhood kids but insisted that they devise and administer their own system to keep track of the books.  He said they all agreed that it was necessary to number the 75 or so books, so each one was given an individual number, ranging from one to about 30,000. 
Hugh told us that one time one of the books had been stolen, and the kids asked Hugh what he was going to do about it?  Hugh told them that he wasn't going to do anything.  It was their library.  It was their problem.  A few days later, a sheepish young man knocked at Hugh's door and gave him the 30 kurus that he said he had made reselling the stolen book.

When the "library" was ready for business, a couple of dozen kids who had waited outside were admitted to the living room.  Incoming and outgoing books were duly logged, and then everybody left.
We had time for a bit more conversation before Hugh walked with us back to the bus stop, where Allen and I caught the bus back into town.  We were quite sure that we had seen a master at work that evening.

P.S.   I saw Hugh a number of times after Peace Corps.  He always had something fun and funny to say.  .  Hugh died in 1998.  Photos of Hugh O'Neill

Sandy Pfunder (Turkey IX)


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Corn Bread by Sandy Pfunder (Turkey 9)

In the mid-sixties, a staple of the diet of Black Sea coast villagers was corn bread.  But nothing like and corn bread that I had ever eaten.  The villagers raised large quantities of what we would think of as feed corn, husking the cobs after harvest in the fall, then drying the cobs in an oven, removing the kernels for storage over the winter.  As needed, the dried kernels were taken to the village mill and ground into a rough corn flour.  Corn bread was made from a wet dough consisting only of corn flour, water and salt - totally unleavened.  The 'loaves' were roughly triangular, about the size of a frisbee and nearly two inches thick.  They were baked on top of a large round, slightly convex metal disk that sat on a trivet in an open fire in a small pit inside the house. 

The resulting loaves were heavy, vaguely reminiscent of a small discus.  The corn bread itself was as heavy as it looked and felt.  It was eaten in a variety of ways - broken in chunks into warm, sweet milk or into a bowl of yogurt or into a bowl of cabbage soup.  When eaten plain, it had to be chased with liquid of some sort.  It was very filling, which was obviously the idea.  To a Western palate, it was vaguely tolerable when it was fresh, and it definitely did not improve with age.

My landlord, Ali Bekir, and his wife, Ayse, were wonderful people.  They were probably in their sixties and lived next door with one of the landlord's sons, his wife, and two young children.  The landlord's wife was your typical grandmother and took particularly good care of us.  I rented a two-room house from them for a monthly payment of 25 Turkish lira (then worth a little less than three dollars), and the house came with a fresh liter of milk or yogurt nearly every day, often delivered by the landlord's wife.  Occasionally, she would bring us some fresh baked corn bread.  We would eat some of it, but there was always plenty left over.  We tried giving it to the landlord's dog, but that scheme was foiled when the dog began taking chunks of corn bread back home to store for future consumption.

One morning when grandmother brought some fresh corn bread, my site partner, Allen, and I looked at each other and decided that we just couldn't face it.  So we didn't eat it that day.  By the next day, there was no question of eating it.  But what to do with it?  Turkish village houses simply didn't generate any garbage or trash.  Anything edible was fed to the dairy cows, so there wasn't a place to take it and dump it, even surreptitiously.  We clearly had a problem.  Then we had a brilliant flash - the wood stove on which we did our cooking!  We revved up the fire, tossed in the corn bread in chunks, and sighed with relief.

About ten minutes later, a knock at the front door.  It was the landlord's wife.  "I smell burning corn bread," she said. 

"How is that possible?" we asked innocently.  "What you brought us yesterday was so good that it's all gone."  We couldn't lie to grandmother.

"That's very strange," she said, turning to walk back to her house, shaking her head.  "I could swear I smelled burning corn bread." 

Thereafter, when we had excess corn bread, we buried it.

Sandy Pfunder  (Turkey IX)

Note: Memories of Turkey is a regular feature for stories by RPCVs who have served in Turkey.  Check back regularly for new stories.