Looking back at Turkey

I'm writing this on September 11, a day when all of North America seems focussed on "our enemies" in the Middle East and the threat they pose to us. And I'm thinking back to our time in Turkey and wondering how what we experienced there makes sense in those terms.

We went to Turkey knowing some Turkish people and so with solid evidence that at least some Turkish Muslims are trustworthy, loving people. We went expecting to meet more like them, and we did. What would it have been like if we hadn't started with that belief? Who knows. I think we would have learned the truth quickly, but I suppose you get what you're expecting and perhaps we would have interpreted what we saw quite differently.

I've been spending some time wondering what we miss most about Turkey. Number one is our rooftop clothesline on a hot summer day - by the time the efficient and thorough European-style washer finished the second load, the first would be bone dry and bleached. In our Canmore condo the bylaws don't permit us to hang laundry out on the balcony. It looks messy, don't you know? To me, the lack of laundry on balconies looks like we're a nation of energy-hogs, or maybe prudes who are embarrassed to show our underwear in public.

We also miss the fresh fruit and vegetables, of course. Even though the supermarkets around here provide green beans and lettuce and artichokes and tomatoes year-round, there's no taste to them. The sense of luxury that comes from having Peruvian asparagus in September is diminished somewhat by the inability to tell exactly what kind of vegetabular matter you're eating. And now I'm conscious of how much it costs to bring that stuff to our little mountain town. No, I don't want to go back to the days of carrots, turnips and potatoes in the winter, but I really would like to eat vegetables that still remember what it was like to be attached to the vine.

The big thing I noticed about Turkey is how important it is to be connected to a community. Relationships are everything there. That's why a Turk feels naked without a cell phone or two. When our "Turkish daughter" Begum was travelling with us, she talked to her mother at least twice a day and checked in with each of her friends every day or so. One reason we had a good time in Turkey is that we were part of a family thanks to our Rotary-exchange parenting of their daughter a few years ago. Add to that our connections through the Anglican church in Izmir, and we were guaranteed to be safe and cared for.

Canadians are vagrants; footloose, rootless immigrants, we've learned to be self-sufficient and lonely. Turks don't do that, and I suspect that's true of other Middle-Easterners, too. Relationships are everything there.

That's a good thing for people like us who arrive with ready-made relationships. But it can have its down side, too. Other tourists we met were quite justifiably cautious when dealing with Turkish shopkeepers and merchants. Outsiders are fair game. I thank God that we ended up living in a close-knit neighbourhood where people were ready to take us in and accept us. We found we could trust our local vegetable-sellers, pharmacist, and others we dealt with in the three or four blocks around home. Outside that area we could pay twice as much and be treated with something that felt close to hostility or suspicion. Around home we were, as I overheard a neighbour telling a visitor, "Our foreigners." That felt okay.

It also felt okay to see the church working the way it should. Although the Anglican church in Izmir makes no attempt to win converts among the Turkish people (that's against the law in Turkey, and not the Anglican way anyway), it is open to visitors of all backgrounds and more visible than the other churches - surrounded by just a low wall with a gate that doesn't lock. As a result the congregation and the liturgy are half Turkish. And in that congregation you see people mixing who would stay far apart in the world outside: foreigners and Turks, gay men and straight, the unemployed and middle-class. People who have no relationship in the traditional Turkish way are drawn together in Christ. It feels like the sort of place a church should be. There's a reason for its existence, unlike many Canadian churches I can think of.

So what's this got to do with September 11? I think that disaster, and others that have happened since in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, England, and many other places around the world, have at least some roots in this basic difference between western and Middle-Eastern societies. Westerners value self-reliance; for Middle-Easterners relationship is everything. Outsiders are not to be trusted and are fair game. And we sense that mistrust, whether we know it or not, and return it along with fear.

Many years ago a Middle-Easterner we say we love and trust told us to love one another. In other words, relationships are everything. Maybe he was onto something there. I wonder if he had the answer to what's going on in the world today?