Our landlord, Yasar Bey

Our workshop is located at the intersection of two formerly main streets in the old part of town. One cobblestone road was the main road to Izmir. The other now gets more traffic as it connects the main road leading to local villages to the town. It is a lively intersection, with basic commerce mostly for the grain store and much socializing that revolves around Seytan Suat’s teahouse. With our recent presence, the four corners now represent the state of women officially in the workforce in Turkey: ¼ for women, ¾ for men.

Technically we rent two places for our workshop, side by side. They used to be one piece of property, formerly a tea shop, divided up for each of the owners’ sons. Somewhere along the line, something happened, and the owner and his youngest have not spoken to each other in years. The fight must have been rather intense as the two brothers still do not speak to each other either. I had a doorway opened in the newly dividing wal to we could aess our materials without going outside and then in again. I also had the urinal changed to a ‘modern’ toilet. A urinal is fine for the clientele of a tea shop in this part of the world but not for ladies, garbage ones or otherwise.

Two landlords, father and son, worlds apart. The son and I have always gotten along. He even shook my hand when I signed the original rental agreement and smiles when he greets me. His father, well that relationship was over a year in the making.

When I first rented the space, the old man could barely contain his contempt for me. I used to wonder if it was because I was foreign, then if because I was a woman, perhaps even because we are threatening the status quo. None of the women in his life worked for pay and I assumed he saw the role of women in the home.

Over the year, I was to learn that he would have treated anyone else just the same. He would have yelling bouts full of colorful language to anyone in the neighborhood he was angry at. His wording was rarely original but he made his points clear. It took a while to understand if it was okay to laugh or if one really take his anger seriously. No one in the neighborhood likes him and they all vacillate between arguing and just ignoring him. Now and again there will be a decent conversation between the 3 male owners of the property at our intersection, but mostly people seem more content when Yasar Bey goes on his own way.

‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA’ he roared one day after we locked up. ‘Official  working hours are over????????????? HAHAHAHAHAHA’. I had been waiting for more people, men in particular, to challenge what we were doing, so in a way this was expected. It still hurt though, especially as I saw how proud our ladies were that they indeed were working, whether within official hours or not.

I was insulted personally and had to hold on to keep anger as well as tears back. I reverted to coping skills from childhood and told myself that I would not drop to his level, as I saw it. I reminded myself that we are doing something rather different and that we need to win over the locals, whether we got along personally or not, and that change was difficult to deal with. The owner of our workspace had been here for a lot longer than I had, and it was, after all, his neighborhood that I was bringing change to. I vowed to never let him see me weak, not then, not at any other time.

When the weather was warm enough, Yasar Bey would sit at the base of the steps to his home, three meters from our main entrance, for hours. I always made a point to greet him, always asked how he is doing. It has taken over a year, but he has warmed up to me, to us. We now are on civilized terms, even able to joke with one another. I cross that tenuous line of teasing myself as well as others about my infidel status. Recently I told Yasar Bey that he was jealous as he was not a true infidel as I was. Many people really get upset when I speak like this but he can fire right back. ‘I’ll take you hunting so you can shoot your own pig.’

Not too long ago, there was a funeral for a high school boy who was killed in a terrible car accident.  I did not know the young man personally but I felt the weight of his schoolmates as they walked by us en route to the mosque for the funeral. There was not a dry eye in the workshop.

The funeral procession had come and gone and we had gone back to work. I had stepped outside the workshop later in the afternoon for a phone call and saw the elderly fellow sitting on his stoop. I went over and asked him how he was doing. He said ‘fine,’ but I sensed he was not and said so.

I asked him if he went to the funeral. I figured it was probable that he did as the young fellow who was killed lived two streets behind him.

The old man looked up at me and said,

‘You know, I really hate accidents like this. They are just awful.’

There was a look of deep emotion in his eyes and he held on to his words long enough for me to understand there was more he wanted to say.

‘I can still see the limbs of the 8-year old girl and the family friend who were in the car that I crashed into. I got out of my car and picked the pieces up and put them in a pile and covered them up with my shirt. I hate accidents like this. I had forgotten everything until this happened. You know, the court case went on for 7 years. When it was done, they put me in prison for 11 months. I couldn’t do anything there, hardly could even sleep. We never know when our time is up nor how we will go. But I will never forget that little girl.’

I now understood why he was such a grumpy old man and so antagonistic to so many.

I said that I was so sorry and that this must be a huge burden to bear and that I did not know if I would be strong enough to carry such a weight.

‘You get over it after a while. God gives you strength and you don’t think about it so much. It has to be that way, else how could you live?’

I really do not know.

the past is political as well as personal

Sometimes we need to remember to look at progress, to see where we have come from and where we are now.

People ask why I came to Turkey. I think, maybe, in total vanity, that it could be that I was Helen of Troy in a former life an am looking for that level of excitement. The fact of the matter is that, as many here assume, I was leaving the US, just not for the reasons that they think. From any people’s perspective, I would not be here were I not running away from something. One of the biggest ironies of my life is that I naively came to this country without knowing much about its past. This is ironic as I did not want to be in the US because there was so much about US foreign policy that seemed to contradict what the US was founded upon and that is even if we overlook the small detail that the land was already populated.

Little did I know back then that there are so many angles to the history of the founding of the Turkish Republic and that I would spend many years tiptoeing around to try and get some of the facts, to find out what really happened.

If this was so difficult for me, imagine what it is like for those who grow up here. There is much that cannot be discussed or mentioned. One can go to jail for insulting ‘Turkishness,’ though just what that is has yet to be clearly defined.

I live in a town that was almost completely re-populated during the Greek-Turkish exchange. A few of the ladies I work with are only now beginning to talk about their families trip from the islands of Midilini or Crete to Ayvalik, and how their families made the adjustment to life here. It is difficult to know just what happened of course as the perspective of memory changes over time. It is all the more difficult if so much of what happened cannot be discussed in public.

This is true for many people all around the country.

Today I am writing not about the garbage ladies nor my life here in Ayvalik. Today I am sharing a bit of the political which is also personal. I come from a place where freedom of speech is a priority. Growing up with that notion sometimes makes it difficult to remember that so many people do not grow up with that concept as a given.

On January 19, 2007, Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist, was shot dead in broad daylight, just outside his office. The young man who pulled the trigger is still behind bars; though it is commonly believed that he did not act alone, no one else has been brought to trial. Hrant Dink was proud to be Turkish; he was also proud to be Armenian. He dedicated his life to trying to bring acknowledgement of past events. He did this in a manner that spoke of getting along, of mutual respect rather than of anger and blame. More than one hundred thousand people marched in Istanbul the day after his death. Say what you will but here in Turkey, it was an enormous gesture of strength, honesty and integrity for so many people to be on the streets in a peaceful manner of solidarity for justice and peace.

Until very recently, one could not talk about the Armenian situation here without feeling that you were treading on forbidden territory. Until very recently, you could not acknowledge that there was a ‘Kurdish problem’ in public, you could not speak Kurdish in public. Now there is a state-owned Kurdish language TV channel and there is much discussion on the difference between ‘mother tongue’ and ‘official language’. People may not yet speak openly of the burning of Izmir but there is more and more recognition of the difficulties faced in coming over from Greece.

Sometimes we need to remember to look around and see just what is moving forward.

Some of us start out ahead of the game in life through no doing of our own. Many others start so far back that it is nearly impossible for them to catch up. At the same time, there are many people in many places trying to make the quality of life a bit better for others, to make the scale of equal opportunity a bit more balanced.

Several years ago, a good friend gave me a book entitled ‘My Grandmother,’ by Fethiye Cetin. At first, the book seemed to be just about the author’s grandmother. It was nice, but I wasn’t getting it. Then the tears started to pour down my face. And they kept coming down. I was touched by the story, the honesty, the fact that so much had not been acknowledged for an entire lifetime. It was a personal story, not a political issue.

Another friend also gave me a book, ‘Children of the Sun,’ by Sevim Ak, a warm book about a young woman’s time spent in Southeastern Turkey and her interactions with the children. The region is predominantly Kurdish region, economically poor, in many areas, desolate. There was a civil war for nearly twenty years and the military presence is still strong and rumblings of the PKK, the Kurdish insurgency, are still heard. Geographically the area borders Iran, Iraq and Syria; culturally, the borders are more fluid.

Those of us who grew up with bedtime stories, with story hour, with book lists for summer vacation, understand the love and the power of the written word, be it fact or fiction. Not everyone grows up that way though and not every society is a literary society. Recent research shows that Turks are almost at the bottom of the list despite a high literacy rate: 4 people read 1 book per year here.

So when I came home the other day and saw that Cemile, the woman who weekly increases the quality of my life by cleaning my house, had pulled the book ‘Children of the Sun’ off the shelf to take home, I was a bit surprised. She had previously asked if she could borrow some of my books, as if I would say no. I did not ask why she chose that particular book though I should add that most of my books in Turkish are either political or delve into social issues. Cemile went on to say that the previous week she had borrowed ‘My Grandmother,’ and really liked it. She liked it so much that her children asked her to explain it. My eyes lit up but words failed me. I was stunned, I was impressed, I realized that I was witnessing a major social change.

Even in a country with a top-down democracy, change can come from the bottom. I do not think that I will live to see the day when, as Martin Luther King said, “[people] will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But I live with hope and the stubborn belief that things can be different.

Thank you to all who believe and are dedicated to bringing the quality of life up a notch or two, to working towards justice, peace, and a life of dignity, to acknowledging the past so that we can all move on to the future with less angst, few burdens of secrecy, more trust in one another.

If you have made it this far, please stop for a minute to think not just about someone or several people that dedicate their lives to making a difference but also just what you can do to make a life a bit better for someone who started off lower than you did.

empowerment does not yet include color combinations

When people learn of what we are doing, a common question they ask is that with new-found economic opportunity, whether or not any of the women who work with us want to leave their husbands. To date, no one has asked if the ladies’ home lives are better because they are happier and therefore, their families are also happier. Visitors also ask if it is difficult for the women to get permission from their husbands to come. While we have a few women who have stood up to or have convinced their husbands to ‘permit’ them to come,  focusing on the fact that they will be able to augment the family income, by and large, if ‘permission’ is an issue, most of those women do not come. Most of our ladies are most comfortable in their own homes, in their own neighborhoods, with their own family members. They are not used to scrutiny and criticism any more than they are used to praise, never mind unfamiliar surroundings.

Many of the women who come to the workshop do so because they are seeking a sense of self, a sense of self-esteem. They spend their whole lives affirming others and no one – or hardly anyone – affirms them. They are all excellent cooks and keep spotless houses. But that is expected of them and so much of their identities are based on just that: their meals and their cleaning skills and that they are wives and mothers. There is little else in their lives that stands out, that sets them apart, that they can look at and say to themselves, ‘I am proud of having done that,’ never mind anyone else saying that to them.  As a friend recently reminded me, this is still a collective society and people tend to follow the norm, to do what has been done for decades.

Recent reports show there is still a long ways to go to bridge the gender gap in Turkey. There are still less than 25% of women in the official work force and participation in government hovers at 5% (UNDP, 2009). While there are plenty of women who stay at home due to tradition, pressure from the husband or family, there are many women who stay at home because that is where they are most comfortable. They have never seen themselves in a role other than mother, homemaker.

It takes a great deal of courage to cross the threshold of our workshop. To do so means allowing yourself to venture into the unknown, to learn a skill you do not know, to be with people who are not part of your familiar circle. In short, you are exposing yourself to vulnerability, crossing the path of many men who dominate three of the four corners where our workshop is located.

The women who come to our workshop are learning to feel a sense of accomplishment within a sense of a community. While we focus on creating opportunities that will hopefully lead to greater gender equality, what needs to be fostered just as much as the reality of income generation, is the sense of worth.

Working within these realities, I am still working to overcome some of the challenges that come with this endeavor that go way beyond the basic communication challenges: the form-function disconnect; wanting to enable-empower our ladies while at the same time producing marketable and sellable items. I am their first boss, yet I do not quite fit the image that they have of ‘patron.’ I want to encourage them to go beyond their own mental borders, to expand their horizons and yet I still find myself establishing many of the perimeters that they work in. As I work on sorting out my own contradictions and try to expand my own mental borders, I am still dealing with the day-to-day issues.

It took me a while to assert myself as the color guardian. Let’s be honest:  I am the Color Bitch. Many of our bags close with zippers, which in my mind, as well as our distributors and customers, should be of the same or at least a coordinated color as the bag itself. Two tones of the same color do not necessarily look good together. It may not be easy being green especially if those two shades of green should never be seen side-by-side. Color combinations may be a matter of taste; I need to concern our products with a matter of what can sell. Some colors that I would never put together actually work on some of the local houses here in Ayvalik, but the same does hold true for our bags that we target to up-scale markets.

Before I took over color control, I tried numerous times to make my point, oblivious that I was expounding on a topic that did not register, was not comprehensible. Not ready to give up, I tried different tactics. One day I found myself holding a bag, zipper side up, and showing it to its maker. I then turned the bag on its side, so she could examine the colors and then look back to the zipper.

I then asked one of the stupidest questions of my life, ‘Can you see that the color of the zipper does not go with the colors of the bag?’

As the words were coming out of my mouth, I realized that she had no clue as to what I was talking about. She was wearing a yellow, green and purple striped long-sleeve tee-shirt with a brown, red and blue floral skirt. While not all our ladies dress the same way, the ever-so-obvious was looking me in the face. I had been waiting for results that would never come. There was no way that she was going to see that the color of the zipper and the colors of the bag were not in sync. No, in her mind, function was paramount; form could come later, if at all.

I finally understood what ‘form-function disconnect’ was all about and added ‘color selection’ to my own job description.

is what i heard what you meant?

One of the main principles of çöp (m)adam is dignity. Respect for self, others respecting the work the garbage ladies do. Initially, I had much loftier notions, such as teaching better manners, better nutrition, giving information on basic health issues like covering your mouth when you cough.

While we have not given up on all those other concepts, in actuality, all our energies are directed to basic logistics: staying afloat and improving our communication. Well, Melih and I are working on trying to keep us afloat and I am working on what is my communication problem.

Communication in this part of the word in general is much less direct than in many western countries, and certainly less than in the USA. Turkish seems to go in a spiral. I call it an IUD form of communication. Eventually the point is gotten to but there are a whole lot of steps to be gone through before then.

Like so many others, I grew up with the story of Alice in Wonderland. It is only in running this endeavor that I really understand some of what Lewis Carroll was getting at.  A word can mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

‘Which mug do you use?’

            The purple one

There is no purple one but I chose one that is not white, pick it up and ask, ‘this one?’

            Yes, that’s the one.

(the mug happened to be orange)

I recently realized that perhaps some of my life here could be a chapter from the book ‘The Man Who Tasted Shapes,’ by Richard Cytowic.,,

The conversational frame is more important than the content. Each and every day one of our ladies says ‘I can’t imagine eating food without salt’ to which another replies, ‘I can’t eat anything salted’ to which another adds ‘I don’t care for sweets. I wonder why?’ It’s not what is said it’s that there is a common theme, eating, and each person contributes something about the theme.

Listening skills have not been given importance and we won’t even go into the concept of analytic skills. It’s not that I was expecting these skills to exist, after all, our target audience is women who have had few opportunities in life and most of our ladies only made it through fifth grade. But I find myself living the reality rather than the ideology that there is so very much more to development, to providing opportunities than just that, giving people opportunities. I feel a bit naïve, never mind frustrated, realizing that there are so many issues that I never considered when I entered the world of enablement through creative trash.

Before I moved down to Ayalik full time, conversations with my own neighbors were along the lines of their statements and my obvious responses

‘Are your parents coming this year?’

‘It sure is hot today.’

‘Off to the beach?’

‘That sure is a lot of garbage you’re throwing out.’

Neither they nor I ventured farther. And yet they were never anything but kind to me, making me feel welcome, making me feel part of the neighborhood.

So, what was I expecting, when I decided to provide a venue for women to come together, a space that was their own, where they could feel safe and feel not just that they belong but that the space belonged to them?

The first ladies who came to our workshop were in fact my neighbors. I knew only a few of them by name, and was not sure I could place the people with the residence, as I mostly saw them sitting together on someone’s stoop.  They were all polite and friendly to me as I was to them.

I had hoped the women coming to our workshop would see the space as theirs, a place for them to come, feel comfortable, safe and secure. Men had many places they could go to. In villages, towns such as this and specific neighborhoods in larger cities, men go to the tea house daily to play cards and backgammon with their friends. Many women have no such space unless it is their own home or that of a relative or neighbor.

Much of the initial conversation in the workshop was about the techniques, the challenges, the fun involved, as well as common themes and digs at each other that come from having known each other for some time.

For some reason, I tried to share an anecdote but got stuck on the word ‘rainbow.’ I could not, for the life of me, remember how to say ‘rainbow’ in Turkish. And that was key to what I was trying to explain. So I tried to explain rainbow, ‘when it is raining, or after it rains, what do you call the arc of different colors that appears?’

I was not ready for their having no clue as to what I was talking about.

‘An umbrella?’ offered one.

‘Hail?’

‘A flood?’

‘Getting rained on?’

‘Thunder?’

‘Lightening?’

By that time I remembered the word for rainbow but the momentum was lost and not only in translation.

I was not yet aware that many if not most of our conversations were to flow along word association rather than topic or content and that this was only the start of what would turn into my own most challenging aspect of all this. I cannot fault our ladies as they are not used to anything else. I don’t fault myself either as I am used to other ways of communicating and different audiences.

People come to the workshop and ask if my ladies have grown since they started coming. Few people ask me how much I am learning and I feel that I have only just begun.