The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach)

Well! It’s been almost a month since I got to Turkey. Projects have come one after another and it’s been good to be back in the city of Kahramanmarash. Doing work like this can expose you to a lot of highs and a handful of lows. It’s hard to articulate but here in a place where life is more precariously balanced between “enough” and not enough, emotions are both at the forefront, and buried behind a lot of deeply lined faces.
Interactions with the people here can turn quickly into moments where two grown men choke up with emotion. A grocery store employee stopped me a few days ago, on the sidewalk as I walked by. He wanted to thank me and my companion for being there for them, and he broke down as he said it. He had spoken a bit in Turkish and then tried to say it in English probably remembered from far back in school days. I choked up when I translated for my other volunteer companion. How forty or fifty odd foreigners living on a hill, doing scattered projects in a city of half a million people, can have a small influence, is still a bit of a miracle. For the hundreds of people we intersect with, it means a lot.
At the same time there are days we struggle with purpose. In the desire to do good, the organization tries to line up as many meaningful projects as it can manage. In the fluid dynamics of the Turkish response to the earthquake, some things are a miss. We finished a structure a few days before the tent camp it was meant for, went away. The long term humanist in me tries to think that someone will benefit from the structure, but it doesn’t feel the same as one of the “home run” projects where we deliver a critical thing in a timely fashion to a community of need.
Tonight as I write this, is one of the lows. It’s not crazy low, but a tiring day combined with the swing-and-miss project is enough to make it one. And funny enough, I have usually found writing hard to do…I used to do it a lot and I think it was me processing natural lows, while now, I have fewer lows, and thus less fuel in the tank for writing. I was drawn to blog precisely because I was knocked off a plateau-high I’d had for the first weeks. The good news is that it’s a perfect writing mood.
Thoughts come in non sequiturs sometimes when you’re on relief projects. It’s like life is isolated factoids and anecdotes that your animal self uses to construct an impressionist sense of reality that makes you attuned to the risks you need to avoid. The next non sequitur, I realize that it should be a good thing that the tent city went away. The tent city we built that structure for. That’s the real mid term hope of the government and larger response here- to get people from tents to container homes (mini trailers deliverable, two at a time, off a flatbed truck.) It’s funny to think that we feel frustrated that the residents didn’t hang around in their tents long enough to enjoy the thing we did- while for them, life just got the most immediate, important mid term upgrade they could hope for- a container with air conditioning, one shower per family, within their own trailer. For them that mattered more than our structure, and damn well it should.
What motivates me to stay in the response, though, are the constant moments of interaction with the people here. As our Turkish taxi was giving us a ride home from the worksite today, he saw an old friend while parked at a red light, and he rolled the window down to chat. He proudly told his friend he was transporting some of the “foreign volunteers” from the project, working to put a shade structure up in a container neighborhood. This taxi guy likes to help us unload, even more than the usual taxi man may be eager to. He’s proud to be a part of it in his way, and proud to talk about us.
Another moment…friends and I were walking around the covered bazaar in Marash last weekend, and my shoes had started to fall apart from the heat (glue failures), and we happened upon a shoe repair guy. I showed him the issue, he waved his arms and told me to sit down and take them off. He and I chatted for 15 minutes as he cleaned them, reglued the main parts, added adhesives to future failure points, used a lighter to seal the ends of threads fraying on the shoes torn up by the Marash mountain clay, impregnated with jagged white limestone chunks and pressurized flints. I got my wallet to pay and he refused twice, insisting on it as a gift, due to the work we’d been doing. I got emotional leaving. It was not a big deal money-wise, but it meant a lot.
There’ve been times we struggle to pay for something or simply get turned down, while here. The tire shop that topped off our tires one rushed morning and refused payment.
Today I fetched myself a kebab from a shop 10 minutes from our worksite, and two young boys around 14 asked me where I was from, what was I doing there. I told them I’d walked from our nearby project, that we were from around the world, I was from the USA. One asked what America was like…I told him we had some beautiful parts, some tough parts. He laughed and said that was Turkey too. Exactly, kid, exactly.
The response is not always perfect but my hope is that in the course of it, our balance of good outweighs the negative and neutral. In disaster response we talk about safeguarding- the idea that we think about the relationships we form with people and how they play out when we leave. I do worry how much of our positive benefits will remain when we’re not here. The whole point is to make a hurting community feel not alone- and to ideally deliver them some physical, tangible, material benefits. How much remains when our boots are not on the ground, we can’t always account for though. The grocer who was so impacted by our presence- he’s an adult and will manage his own emotions as we leave. Sometimes I feel at odds with some of the organizational views about that. Just like in our non-response life, we cannot account for all people’s reactions to our actions. You have a responsibility to some degree on your impact, but you cannot hand-wring every decision based on your own predictions of how someone else will handle it. Should we stay because a certain percent of the community will feel abandoned again when we leave? Should we have never come, or will the effect we had on the other percent, outweigh that to the positive? I err on the side of thinking that we must continue to step in and do things- and make mistakes in the process- rather than staying paralyzed in inaction or in thinking it’s our responsibility to handle both sides of all these relationships.
I spent a certain time of my life with social anxiety, one of the hallmarks of which for some people is to constantly pre-plan “difficult conversations”- which is many conversations, of course, when you have anxiety. I would try to think of the first opening thing I’d say, and the first response. And then mine, and then the other’s. And there were entire conversations I’d avoid because I could not predict the other person’s actions. Part of healing away from that anxiety was to realize it was not my job to predict or manage the other side of the conversation. I can speak my truth- ideally in a compassionate way, in an honest way, but I cannot and should not need to predict the rest and change my truths for them.
For that same reason, I believe the ideal way to manage relationships in a response is to be honest and straightforward. Respect another human enough to say the truth. The kids at the worksite yesterday asked me how long the project would take. I told them three weeks, ideally. I trust that they can handle it. False promises are what do the most damage, and next- I think- is to remain emotionally cold just to reduce the number of managed goodbyes that you have to execute.
I go to sleep soon to put in another day tomorrow with the shade shelter. The data is hard to pin down but a massive number of people (rumors fly, but maybe 500k-700k, in the region) live in neighborhoods like the one we’re working in- mixes of tents and containers, with the goal to convert to containers before winter. Where we work, kids play in the dusty gravel plaza between living spaces, water refill stations, and community services like workshops. Women in hijabs and burqas walk back and forth refilling water jugs. Kids in obvious second-hand clothing and beat-up flipflops run around, playing, hanging around, bored, somewhat oblivious how many kids do not have childhoods at all like theirs-arguing about how their sandwich was cut or other neuroses of excess. Old men drink tea, lounging on couches out on the ground, outside of their blazing hot un-airconditioned tents. Young men come to offer help as we pickaxe the ground. The camp is mostly Syrian, and had already been dealt a shit deal with the civil war which they fled from. It started 11 years ago, and most Syrians I talk to (in our mutual learner’s Turkish, usually) have been in Turkey 5 to 10 years.

In civil conflict, when you can’t pick a reasonable side, reasonable people head out. Far from being threatened by young Syrians in their 20s and 30s, they are perfectly kind people and I’ve never felt the conversation halted by us sharing our nations of origin. They insist on trying to help, they smile and laugh as they join in. We are frank about where we’re from- American, English, French, and beyond. Nobody gives a shit, because they’re living on a gravel parking lot on the edge of the city, often struggling to be accepted by Turks, and there we are, the random allotment of people who also don’t care who we’re helping. We don’t quiz about the nationality or politics of the camp we help in.
Today, I worked alongside an Estonian who is a former Soviet soldier, and a young man from Somalia. When you get away from the scaremongering and “othering” that American media (especially the right wing) can do, you can be liberated to form these mini nations of conscience, somewhat like the Heaney poem alludes to. It’s usually only when a Turk or Syrian asks, that our team looks around and takes account of “who is what.” My usual response is to say we’re “chok karishik”, we’re all mixed up.
We aren’t so naive as to not know how national policies impact our own wellbeings, and that of others, but in the day to day, remarkable work can be done with diverse sets of people.
In other news, just as I write this, there was a 5.3 earthquake, light for this area. I actually didn’t feel it but the person next to me did. I also experienced another 5.4 while on a coffee break at a worksite- that one, I could actually feel quite clearly.
We are always working in areas away from tall buildings- by definition our main goal is to address the needs of the one-story tent and container neighborhoods. But that first one was one of the more visceral reminders of the tenuous nature of life on our planet- how it’s precious but also subject to amoral forces.
So, two more weeks remain for my time in the Turkey program, and then I hope to see some friends before my visa runs out, so I’m leaving a week early. The program requires a mandatory three day break tied to a two day weekend if you volunteer for a long stint, but I’m getting it waived if I leave a week early, so I’ll miss out on those five days instead of three days- and have a more straightforward block of time to see friends. How it’ll work in practice will be seen, as some friends are scattered far. I expect to see two or three at least.

As for camp life, it is much as before but instead of rain and mud, it’s brutal heat. I can’t lie, I really had second thoughts about the heat on my way here. I wondered if I’d be way out of my element but I feel like I’m one of the better adapting folks here. I’m not sure why, but probably my years of farming are part of the adaption. I also try to adopt a lot of local food and custom when I travel, and I’ve learned that various compounds in olives and tomatoes are a form of natural sunscreen – so I’ve burnt far far less than I’d thought I might. All in all I feel good about how putting on the metaphorical Marash coat has felt- it still fits.

It is mostly a dry heat, so the 100-105 fahrenheit readings are actually about as bearable as a 90+ in humidity, or at least I think so. We have mosquitos to manage at night, and watching for columns of marching ants has become a thing as well. Minus a one night getaway and a two night getaway, I’ve hung in Marash on the weekends. That has given me the rich interactions with people that fuel my stay. The getaways were fun but invariably every weekend I stay, the universe rewards me with once in a lifetime meetings with people in town or on the streets.

Speaking of getaways, I had gone to Shanliurfa a few weekends ago and visited Gobekli Tepe. As one of the earliest communal structures known to be built (that survived in a findable state, anyway), it was cool to witness while working with so many people around the world on other gathering places. The urge to make neutral meeting points that meet a human need, has existed in our minds for all this time.