by Ginger Taylor Saçlioglu (Turkey 1968–70)
IT MUST HAVE BEEN the winter of the 1967–68 academic year. I can’t remember the month. My husband and I were graduate students at the University of Illinois in Urbana. The Vietnam War was raging on and John’s student deferment was about to run out. He was a conscientious objector in the literal sense of the term, but without a religious faith he could never prove his CO status to a draft board. He did not want to fight so we began considering alternatives — moving to Canada, joining the Peace Corps. We decided on the Peace Corps.
Parental reactions
My parents had never approved of our marriage. John was a year younger than I and still in his last year of undergraduate school when we were married. He looked and dressed like a hippy and, in my parents’ eyes atleast, also acted like one. He had a 350 cc Honda and once, before we were married, he had driven it from his parents’ home in Libertyville down to Bloomington in the middle of a summer night just to see me. Not only that, he had long hair, wore a headband and looked a little like Ringo Starr. Actually, to me anyway, he bore an uncanny resemblance to a photo of Michelangelo’s David in my art history book. He also ate too much according to my mother. He loved mashed potatoes, and no matter how much she fixed, he was always able to finish them. We were not a family to leave polite portions, and I never figured out why this particular trait of his annoyed her so much.
When John and I announced to my parents that we were joining the Peace Corps, my mother’s reply was brief. “You’ll ruin my summer,” she declared menacingly. It was no empty threat either. My mother had had a “nervous breakdown” when I was six. For close to a year she sat around the house crying. That’s all I remember about it. But from that time on, we — my father and I — always had to be very careful how we handled her. After all, a careless single slip of the tongue might just send her reeling into another crisis.
Palm trees and Turkish
I can’t remember if her summer was indeed ruined, but in June John and I took off for Los Angeles for Peace Corps training. I had never been further west than Iowa, where we had visited my grandparents every summer, first on a small farm and later, after the farm burned down, in a dusty backwater of a town in the southwestern part of the state. Those trips were always made by car. This time we were flying.
We arrived at the campus of Occidental College, a posh liberal arts institution perched high in the hills overlooking the city of angels. Occidental seemed like a country club compared with the mid-west campuses we were accustomed to. There were palm trees and an Olympic size swimming pool, and in the dorms, which were small, like individual houses, and no two student rooms shared a common wall. “Hos Geldiniz!” [Welcome!] the banner draped over the building’s entrance declared. We didn’t even know it was Turkish.
Our training consisted of three parts: Turkish language, which we had six hours a day for the first month (“total immersion” they called it), training in the teaching of English as a foreign language, or TEFL, and “cross cultural” in which we learned never to cross our legs when speaking with a Turkish school principal, never to hand anything, especially food, with our left hand, and how to drink raki, the anise-flavored Turkish national drink.
Off to in-country training
By the end of July we — meaning everyone except a handful of unfortunates who had been “de-selected” in the finest government doubletalk — were considered ready to face the country where we would live and work for the next two years. After a brief return home for last good-byes with parents and family, our “training group” assembled at Kennedy Airport for the flight to Ankara, where we would undergo the second half of our three-month training program. There must have been close to a hundred of us, all young Americans, mostly single, liberal arts graduates fresh out of college and a handful of married couples. The U.S. government had chartered a special plane. It was to carry our group as well as another group of trainees going to India. No one else was on the plane except, of course, the pilot and crew.
It was already dark when we boarded. Free booze was served throughout the fifteen-hour flight. In those days planes had to land in Shannon, Ireland, for refueling. By the time we made our stop, most people were already well sloshed. Some seven hours later when we entered Turkish air space we were not only sloshed but exhausted after not having slept all night.
A first look at Turkey
The Anatolian plateau is a greyish-yellow color during most seasons of the year, especially in July when rainfall is sparse. In our training program, we had learned about Turkey’s legendary forty thousand villages. As small clumps of scattered hovels came into view on the gray plain below in the breaking light, future Peace Corps Volunteers peered down from the windows of the plane squealing “There’s a village! There’s another one!”
In those days, when you flew into Ankara you never saw the city from the air. The airport was about 30 kilometers away, and you would never have known you were approaching a sizable — for Turkey anyway — metropolis. (Since then the city has spread all the way to the airport.)
Around six in the morning we landed. Esenboga Airport consisted of a small landing field and a small two-story terminal. As we staggered from our plane to the terminal building, we could see village women in colorful baggy shalvar lining the long window that ran the length of the second-story departure lounge. Wives and sisters, no doubt, seeing their Gastarbeiter [guest workers in German] husbands and brothers off to Germany.
Stand-up toilets
With each Volunteer bringing a large steamer trunk, as well as the normal allowance of luggage, we had a long wait in the terminal while Turkish customs officials checked us through. This gave us ample time to try the toilets. We had, of course, been told about them in “cross cultural,” but the girls, in particular, were ill prepared for the simple hole in the floor over which one had to squat, precariously at first when the requisite muscles were not yet developed. One by one the female members of our group disappeared into the restroom only to return a few minutes later uttering shrieks of disbelief. Never, they claimed, would they be able to get used to it. Little did they know.
By about nine o’clock all the trunks had been searched and we were loaded onto several — what seemed to us like rattletrap — buses for transport into the city. As soon as we pulled out of the airport, we started seeing the villages — the little huts barely distinguishable in color from the surrounding earth. The tiny settlements on the outskirts of the capital were astir with early morning activity, women in raucous-printed shalvar, men in sombre shalvar and the ubiquitous kasket or worker’s cap. And donkeys everywhere. I had responded to the training with my whole heart, and as we bumped along I remember repeating, “I love it, I love it,” to myself in a frantic litany.
Dorm life
The next stop was our “dorm” — in quotes because it bore little resemblance to the residence halls I had lived in as a student in Indiana. It was a bare building, probably four stories tall, with cement walls, cement floors, simple metal railings along the staircases, and small rooms with metal bunk beds, even for the married couples. No bedspreads, no rugs and, though there must have been curtains for sheer modesty, I can’t remember them. The bathrooms were the worst part. A row of sinks and, parallel with it, a row of stalls with those horrible holes in the floor. No toilet paper, no hot water — sometimes no water at all — and hardly any light. Then, of course, there was the ever-present stench which penetrated a good way down the corridor as well. In the bedrooms the mattresses were stuffed with cotton wadding. Later in the morning they brought the bed sheets. Two damp, coarse pieces of oatmeal colored cloth. Fortunately it was a hot day and Ankara’s climate is extremely dry.
Tapeworm in a bottle
The first item on the training agenda was the medical briefing. We were told not to drink the tap water but only bottled water, which, mercifully, was always available. We were also warned to avoid — especially in restaurants — leafy green vegetables like lettuce and parsley, which is used liberally as a garnish on many Turkish dishes. When at home, we were advised to soak fruits and vegetables in water to which a few drops of laundry bleach had been added. (Chlorox, of course, has a strong, not very appetizing odor, and the only way to get rid of it was to rinse the already soaked vegetables again in tap water, thereby defeating the entire purpose. Most of us abandoned this practice after a few weeks.) Finally we were warned about eating undercooked fish — which was actually flown in daily from Istanbul and served fresh in some restaurants. To drive this point home, the doctor produced a large jar containing a long tapeworm preserved in formaldehyde. He assured us that the worm had once inhabited the body of a former Volunteer.
A first test of the medical briefing
That evening we had our first meal in Turkey. A large group of us trooped over to Kizilay, “the Red Crescent” and city center of Ankara, so named for the headquarters of the Turkish Red Cross organization that was located there. The building is gone today, replaced by a fancy shopping mall. The restaurant, which is also gone, was called Rüyam, “My Dream.” It had a large garden with wooden tables under strings of colored Christmas lights. The waiters all wore white shirts and black suits, slightly shabby and ill-fitting suits but suits nonetheless. It was one of Ankara’s most popular restaurants and extremely crowded at that hour on a balmy summer evening.
Our Turkish was of course not good enough for reading the menu in detail. But everybody was familiar with kebab and most of us knew by then that köfte meant meatballs. We ordered Adana kebab, a kind of spicy minced meat molded on a skewer and grilled over hot coals. It was also our introduction to çoban salata, or shepherd’s salad, which consisted of finely chopped cucumbers, tomatoes and onions tossed in olive oil and lemon juice with a liberal admixture of the perilous chopped parsley. I don’t know if it was the hot meatballs or the parsley, but several people had their first bout of Turkish tummy that night.
The training routine
Mornings we practiced teaching English at a local high school. The high point was the midmorning break when we crossed the busy road in front of the school to visit a tiny bakery. In my memory the baker was an old man. In retrospect I estimate he was in his fifties at most, and merely seemed old because I was in my mid-twenties and Turks tend to age prematurely. All his wares were warm and fresh from the oven. My favorite was the soft white rolls with jelly inside and a dusting of powdered sugar on top. Together with the crispy Turkish sour-dough bread which we consumed in prodigious quantities at all meals, it was hard not to put on weight.
The rest of the day was ours as the Turkish language component of the training program largely fell apart once we were “in country.” I don’t think anyone much missed it as we had to speak Turkish whenever we ventured outside our group anyway. Evenings we enjoyed strolling around the narrow back streets, lined with acacia trees, which in autumn teemed with tiny sparrows that were constantly chirruping and depositing their droppings on the pavement.
One such evening, to supplement our staple Turkish breakfast of bread, tiny shriveled black olives and feta cheese, we decided to practice both our Turkish and our bargaining skills by purchasing some peaches from one of the many vegetable stalls that stayed open until well after dark. The poor greengrocer must have been astounded when a small contingent of young Americans descended on his shop to haggle over the price of a couple of gorgeous looking peaches. We were sure he was trying to cheat us and only reluctantly paid the price finally agreed upon. As it turned out, the peaches were delicious.
An unforgetable adventure
One of our first assignments as fresh Volunteers was to be sent outside of Ankara to fend for ourselves in small groups of two or three. There were several destinations to choose from and we all drew straws. John and I got Çankiri, a provincial town of around 8,000 some 90 kilometers from Ankara. Since we were already a couple, we went on our own. To get there, we first had to make our way down to Ulus to catch a minibus. We crowded onto the dilapidated vehicle with a number of other passengers heading for Çankiri and villages along the way.
As young Americans on a route rarely traveled by foreigners of any nationality, we attracted a good deal of attention. The driver and his assistant were particularly protective of us. When we made a rest stop at a roadside teahouse, they insisted on buying each of us a bottle of ayran, a cold drink made by mixing yoghurt with water. Not wishing to appear ungrateful, I drank mine quickly, only to discover, when I got to the bottom, a long, coarse, black hair clinging to the inside of the clear glass bottle. It looked like a goat hair and has remained unforgettable.
Falling in love
For several months following our arrival in Turkey, whenever I saw a plane soaring in the dry blue skies over Ankara, I longed to be on it, winging far away from this alien, backward country where I felt like such an outsider. Then at some point everything changed. I fell head over heels in love with the country — exactly as I had tried to convince myself I had on that first morning riding into town.
I loved the grey brown hills that embraced the city, the way they blazed green for a brief month in spring and I tried to memorize their soft, gentle contours. I loved the narrow back streets and crooked pavements where you could lose your way and I tried to walk them all.
I loved Kizilay, the city center, with its dim cafés, its pudding shops and Iskender kebab restaurants where a boy in Ottoman costume stood on the sidewalk tempting passersby with raspy calls of “Buyrun, buyrun!” — Please come in, please come in! Iskender kebab was a lovely concoction of crisp roasted döner — enormous slabs of greasy lamb meat, crammed down on a tall, vertical spit and roasted next to a blazing fire, then sliced paper thin and stacked up thick on top of crunchy rounds of Turkish-style pitta and topped with yogurt, melted butter and hot tomato sauce, the latter two poured on separately at the table from enormous sizzling iron skillets. I was always afraid the waiter would lose his grip and I would be scalded by the searing hot oil.
I loved the outdoor teahouses, especially the one in Seyran Baglari — a few rickety wooden tables and chairs set out under some scraggly trees on the hard, dry Ankara soil.
I loved the people, quick to smile — the men sometimes too quick — the snot-nosed gypsy beggar who worked the turf in front of the French Culture Centre and the urchins in the Citadel who followed you calling “Turist! Turist!” and had no shame about asking for money. I loved the working class men in their kaskets, many of them fresh from the provinces, with their direct ways and earnestness, and the women who had no inhibitions about asking why I had no children.
I loved the city’s smells, the huge garlicky slabs of rust-colored pastirma or Turkish-style pastrami that hung outside the small grocery shops in the ancient district of Ulus. I loved the old citadel in Ulus — now, or so I’m told anyway, a fashionable boutique and dining district — where poor families nestled in hand-built shanties propped up against the walls of the ancient fortress. I loved the adjacent quarter of Saman Pazari with its tiny, dilapidated shops selling everything from hand-carved wooden spoons and blue and white enameled pots to gauze-like Turkish towels with the most intricate embroidery in delicate pastels, and the strident printed fabrics known as Antep bezi from the southeast.
I loved the city’s dolmushes [share cabs] with their muavins — young boys who leaned precariously out the passenger door endlessly shouting the destination to prospective fares.
But most of all I loved the city lights. Viewed from the high southern district of Çankaya late at night, they twinkled wistfully on the shantytown districts north of Ulus and out across the great, dusty Anatolian plateau.
# 366
At the end of the first year, in August of 1969, the U.S. government abolished the draft in favor of the lottery. John’s number was 366 — so high he would never have been called up, even if the war had gone on for another thirty years. By the end of the second year our marriage had fallen apart. But that is another story entirely.
Ginger Taylor Saçlioglu taught English at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Since 1976 she has lived with her husband in Istanbul and worked as a free lance translator and English teacher.