January 12, 2004 - PCOL Exclusive: RPCV Malcolm Pfunder reflects back on his Peace Corps Service in Turkey in the 1960's

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Turkey: Peace Corps Turkey : The Peace Corps in Turkey: January 12, 2004 - PCOL Exclusive: RPCV Malcolm Pfunder reflects back on his Peace Corps Service in Turkey in the 1960's

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RPCV Malcolm Pfunder reflects back on his Peace Corps Service in Turkey in the 1960's





More than thirty-five years ago, I lived for sixteen months in a Turkish village in the mountains near the Black Sea coastal city of Trabzon.


Read and comment on this essay written by Turkey RPCV Malcolm R. Pfunder reflecting on his service in Turkey in the 1960's at:

I have worked for some time to put some reflections on Peace Corps and Turkey down on paper. I would be interested in anybody's comments, or additional or contrasting thoughts or reactions of their own.*

* This link was active on the date it was posted. PCOL is not responsible for broken links which may have changed.



I have worked for some time to put some reflections on Peace Corps and Turkey down on paper. I would be interested in anybody's comments, or additional or contrasting thoughts or reactions of their own.

Sandy Pfunder (Turkey 9)

More than thirty-five years ago, I lived for sixteen months in a Turkish village in the mountains near the Black Sea coastal city of Trabzon. I've been back three times in the intervening years -- first with my wife in 1975, again with her and our two teenage sons in 1999, and by myself in 2002. It's a place that has gripped me tightly since I first saw it in late September of 1965. I hope to see it again a time or two.

The name of the place is Çayiriçi Köyü, which means the village in the meadows. It was my Peace Corps site and my home from early October of 1965 until early February of 1967. I was part of a group of about seventy volunteers who trained for a month in Portland, Oregon, and then for ten weeks at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Near the end of September, 1965, we were assigned - alone and in pairs - to villages throughout Turkey. Formally, we were part of a Rural Community Development program, intended theoretically to help villages identify and pursue solutions to perceived needs or goals. The concept was essentially community organization social work in a rural setting, but its definition, at the hands of Peace Corps officials, was more than a little amorphous. We joked that our job description was "Go forth and be relevant."

Five members of our group were assigned to the province of Trabzon, named for its principal city of (then) 66,000 people. Three of our friends went to two villages in the subprovince of Maçka, about an hour south of Trabzon on the main road to Erzurum. My site partner, Allen Neill, and I were assigned to Çayiriçi Köyü, about 25 kilometers inland up in the mountains above Tonya, a subprovincial capital town of about 1500 people, seventy kilometers southwest of Trabzon. One afternoon in early October, 1965, we were delivered by government vehicle to Tonya on its weekly market day, then rode to the village sitting five abreast in the front seat of a two and a half ton logging truck (a 1952 Austin, to be precise), with maybe fifty villagers and their weekly purchases in the back. A volley of pistol shots into the air, by a man who rode to the village on the Austin's right front bumper, sounded what we later learned was the traditional welcome for returning relatives and special guests.

Allen and I lived in that village through the fall harvests, a mild winter, spring plowing and planting, and summer on the high pastures farther up in the mountains. We made friends, we attended weddings and funerals, we visited nearly every one of the ninety houses in the village, we drank endless glasses of tea, played innumerable games of backgammon, talked with most of the 600 villagers about themselves, their families, and their lives. We started a dental health program in the village school, built our own "model" sanitary privy, tried unsuccessfully to grow vegetables, formed a local soccer club, learned something about beekeeping and animal husbandry, and pursued many other less memorable ideas and projects.

Then another fall harvest, followed by a brutal winter, with January snowfall that we crudely estimated at 155 inches over a three-week period. Our two year assignment, which was to have ended in June of 1967, was cut short by the snow. We walked out of the village in early February, 1967, intending to return as soon as the snow receded. After six weeks living in Trabzon, the road into the village was still closed, and we were reassigned for the last months of our two-year stint. I walked back into the village alone in late March, to pack up our belongings and sell or give away what would not be stored for later retrieval when the road reopened. After two days, I walked back out to Tonya; Allen never did return to the village.

I've thought a lot about why the place holds onto me so tightly. What made that place, and the people, and the experience so special? The answer is like a jigsaw puzzle, with a complex design and lots of pieces.

I'm not sure I've figured it out entirely, but I've fit together some of the pieces.




The Place

The villagers are very proud of the unrelentingly gorgeous views of mountains and forests in all directions. They often asked me whether we have such "yesillik" or greenery in the United States.

The village of Çayiriçi Köyü was then about 90 houses, spread across the West-facing slopes of a line of hills that parallel a river running down out of the mountain pastures, through the towns of Tonya and Vakfikebir to the Black Sea. The altitude at the riverbed is perhaps 2500 feet above sea level. The crest of the line of hills might be 700 or 800 feet higher. We measured them in terms of the time it took to walk (briskly) to the top from the river - 45 minutes to an hour if you didn't rest along the way. The road, built by the Forestry Department to run logging trucks inland up to the forested areas just below tree line, followed the river. The village mosque, several coffee houses and adjoining bakkals (small grocery stores) lined the road. The village houses are scattered - alone or in groups of two or three - across the hills next to their fields.

A large mountain North of the village blocks a direct view of the Black Sea. The town of Tonya lies beyond it, 8 km away (on foot, an hour and a half downhill, two hours returning); the larger town of Vakfikebir is another 18 km. beyond, on the coast. In the opposite direction, the village of Fol (old name) or Kalin Çam stretches along the river for a couple of kilometers before the road steepens, through thick forests to the pass at Erikbeli (altitude 1800 meters), and open, treeless mountain pastures and the villagers' summer homes beyond. To the East of the village, across the river, the mountains are more rugged, heavily forested and, except for a couple of houses, uninhabited. From anywhere in the village, there are spectacular views of mountains and forests in all directions.

There is little land in the village that's level - only the area around the school. Fields used as pasture for the dairy cattle or for cultivation of potatoes, beans, cabbage, and corn range from gently to steeply sloped. Most of the fields are bordered by trees - beech, alder, wild pear and a variety of evergreens are common, with rhododendron and laurel underneath. A number of small hazelnut orchards have been planted. It is now forbidden to cut down any trees, even on one's own land, so the impression is of a village carved out of the forest and perhaps easily returned to it.

The climate is temperate - cool in summer because of the altitude, normally mild in the winter because of the Black Sea. In the spring, everything that grows blooms. In May, the world is yellow, as carpets of buttercups explode. In June, most of the wildflowers, the pear trees and the mountain laurel are white, the rhododendron are pink and light purple. Wild roses grow along the edges of the fields.

The villagers are very proud of the unrelentingly gorgeous views of mountains and forests in all directions. They often asked me whether we have such "yesillik" or greenery in the United States.




The People

One villager said it very directly: your greatest gift to us, he said, is the fact that you haven't forgotten us, and you wanted to come back.

From the day we arrived in the village in 1965, we were subjects of enormous curiosity. We constantly had visitors, often several groups a day. We were invited - indeed, expected - to reciprocate by visiting the villagers in their homes. I was often the center of conversation in any of the three village coffee houses (men-only institutions) that I would visit. There were many questions about home - about our families, our houses, our schools, our cities, what we ate (including whether we ate "pig meat"), how we dressed, how much things cost, why we weren't married, what kind of work we did, how much money we made, whether we had hospitals, and cars, and indoor plumbing, and everything else one could imagine. We became quite accomplished at the responses. We were often asked why we had come and what we were doing living in a Turkish village. That was more difficult to explain - partly because even a straightforward, carefully translated description of the concept of community organization social work in a rural setting wasn't something that they could identify with or readily understand. We did better with explanations about the importance of people from different countries understanding one another. Once in a while we would encounter a villager - often one who had worked in Europe for a number of years - who would describe (or explain) us as bringing a more "modern" perspective to the village. But more than a few times we overheard one villager explaining to another that we had obviously come in order to learn to speak Turkish.

The villagers' curiosity was literally never tinged with suspicion or hostility, that either Allen or I could detect. The people in the village may not have understood why we had come, but we were welcome to live with them and to be a part of their lives for however long we wanted to stay. Their hospitality and their interest in us was spontaneous and genuine. And so we plowed their fields with them, and we carried wood with them from the forest, and we accompanied them to their weekly market in Tonya, and we ate the food they cooked in their kitchens, and we walked with them to their summer pastures, and we shucked their corn at harvest time, and we drank thousands of glasses of tea with them. And we talked with them, about their lives and their families and their needs and their pleasures and their hopes.

The intensity of the villagers' curiosity mellowed over time. We got to know them, and they, us. And they saw that (unlike many Turkish town and city dwellers) we didn't view villagers as unsophisticated bumpkins, nor the village as a place to get away from as soon as you could. The villagers understood that we liked living there and we liked the people who lived there. They took our presence as the compliment that it was, and once in a while we even heard ourselves described to an outsider as "our Americans".

When Margaret and I returned with our two sons in 1999, and again when I returned alone in 2002, more than once, in a variety of different ways, people found ways to express their pleasure and gratitude, often quite movingly.

One villager said it very directly: your greatest gift to us, he said, is the fact that you haven't forgotten us, and you wanted to come back.




The Experience

The resulting feeling of freedom was exhilarating, and because of the way our program was structured, that freedom persisted. While we joked about making ourselves relevant, the fact is that nobody - not Peace Corps, not the Turkish government, not the villagers, and certainly not we - had any specific expectation or even definition of what we would or could or should try to accomplish.

My living in a Turkish village was particularly special because during those two years, I came closer to living outdoors than I ever have or likely ever will again. My two-room house was great for sleeping, for cooking and eating, and for reading. Anything else that I did required me to leave my house. Allen and I often visited other villagers' homes. I went to at least one coffee house nearly every day. We visited other nearby villages. We worked in the fields, put in a store of firewood, bought a winter's supply of potatoes, built our own sanitary (outdoor) privy, planted a vegetable garden (which was a miserable failure), tried to get the village men to build a soccer field, explored the high mountain pastures in summer, visited the village primary school, went to the market in Tonya almost every week, and traveled to Trabzon at least once a month. We were outdoors a large part of every day. The perspective of having gone to law school and then worked in office buildings during the thirty-plus intervening years makes me, albeit in retrospect, appreciate and yearn for the feeling of being closer to nature and weather and sunshine and mountain air and exercise.

An element of the experience that will never be replicated is that it was sandwiched between two different kinds of responsibility in my life. Until the week before I started Peace Corps training, I had been entirely focused on getting through college. Before leaving, I had received informal assurances from law school that there would be a place for me in the entering class, if I wanted it, two years hence. It was as if all the moorings had been removed at the same time. I had absolutely no obligations to anybody for the next two years, except to do this job. The two years were, in a sense, hermetically separated from what came both before and after.

The resulting feeling of freedom was exhilarating, and because of the way our program was structured, that freedom persisted. While we joked about making ourselves relevant, the fact is that nobody - not Peace Corps, not the Turkish government, not the villagers, and certainly not we - had any specific expectation or even definition of what we would or could or should try to accomplish. We were entirely free to define our own relevance and to set our own goals, our own agenda, our own lifestyle, and no one was in a position to second-guess our choices or our decisions. The freedom of being answerable only to yourself, and being the only person who can hold yourself accountable, is heady stuff. The resulting experience was incomparable because we made it our lives for most of two years, and we loved it. More than 35 years later, I feel quite nostalgic for that same feeling of freedom.

A critical defining element of the two years was the fact that nearly everything about it was an exotic adventure. Nothing was familiar about living in a rural mountain village in a Moslem country where you had to communicate in a foreign language (I had never learned another language well enough to use it), traveling on foot or in the back of a flat bed truck, eating local foods, or explaining ten times a day who you are. Almost everything that you thought of as a constant in your life becomes variable; something surprising was happening all the time. Our senses were flooded with sights and tastes and sounds and odors that were pleasant but often unfamiliar. Yet the challenge of figuring out how to survive, and to travel, and to communicate was great fun and constantly rewarding, and it left us with hundreds of stories to tell in later years. Ultimately, it all became quite comfortable. Part of the reason is that if you are interested, Turkey is a comfortable place, and the Turks are comfortable people. They show their pleasure when people find pleasure in them. Part of it is that you learn to do things that you don't know how to do, and you learn to figure out things you don't understand. That makes the adventure less intimidating and more memorable.

Turkey is also a fascinating place because of its history. I had literally never been to a place that had a history of more than about four centuries. Yet we lived and traveled in places that had been Hittite, and Greek, and Roman, and Byzantine, and Seljuk, and Ottoman, and Russian, and Turkish, and Armenian, and Kurdish. Both on business and during the six weeks of vacation that we had during the two years, we saw Ankara, and Istanbul, and Bursa, and Konya, and Izmir, and Erzurum, and Kars, and Rize, and Samsun, and numerous smaller cities and towns.




The Reflection

One of the common characteristics of aging is to sweeten the memories of youth - or at least of its high points. The further away I get from my Peace corps experience, the more I want to refresh that experience, through pictures, travel, music, writing, studying and speaking Turkish, reading about Turkey.

One afternoon in May of 2002 I was sitting in one of the village coffee houses, talking with a number of young men who may not have been born when I lived in Çayiriçi Köyü. I explained once again as best I could what we had tried to accomplish while we had lived there 35 years earlier. They listened politely, and when I was done, one of them asked a simple question: "Sonuç ne?" - What was the end result? It's a great question!

The real answer is: I'm not sure. If we left anything behind, it was one man's willingness to build a closed outdoor privy like the one we built for ourselves. It was another's fascination with the fact that we read books - lots of books (Peace Corps supplied us with a wonderful library of perhaps 100 paperback books). It was the fact that we had traveled part way around the world to live in a village where some of the women had literally never seen the

Black Sea less than 15 miles away, or had never ridden in a moving vehicle. It was the fact that we chose to live in a village, and enjoyed it, at a time when Turkish townspeople and city dwellers often derided rural life and villagers and took pains to distance themselves from their own rural background. It was the fact that we were interested in them as people and accepted and returned their hospitality and friendship.

We did not then fully appreciate the enormous changes to which Turkey - and particularly rural Turkey - were being subjected. At the time we lived there, about 125 men from the village were living and working in Europe - most of them in Germany. They earned perhaps ten dollars a day, lived in dormitories or apartments - often with other Turks - and worked in factories or in other manual labor jobs. (Only one or two found a way to take their families to Europe with them.) They saved or sent home most of what they earned. Most of them got a full month's vacation each year, and they usually returned to the village for that time. They worked in Europe for two, five, ten years; some never returned. Those that did return were wealthy by local standards. The village mayor, with whom my wife and I stayed for several days in 1975, had returned with his savings and bought a minibus, which provided at that time the only (mostly) regular transportation service between the village and Tonya.

The fact that about 20% of the village population - and more than half the men between their early twenties and mid-forties - were living in Europe when we were there ultimately brought a different kind of wealth back to the village.

These young Turkish men saw the big cities of Europe. They saw well developed systems of education, of health care, of transportation. They returned to Turkey wanting these things for themselves and their families. The major influx of returning guest workers had not begun when we were there in the mid-sixties, but those who returned for their month-long vacations often sought us out and talked about what life was like in America, and how it compared with life in Europe. Two Americans living in their village were a different piece of a larger puzzle that was exposing the villagers to the elements of an attractive, cosmopolitan, educated, urban lifestyle with which they were entirely unfamiliar. We may have made a contribution to the people of that village just by making people like us seem less strange and foreign to them, and making the notion of change in their own lives seem less daunting.

It was also a fascinating intellectual exercise to learn enough about a country and its culture to be able to understand and identify with its aspirations and its challenges. Many of our Peace Corps colleagues believed that Turkey in the mid-1960's was on the verge of a breakthrough to becoming a thoroughly modern state. We saw opportunities for economic growth, for cultural sophistication, and for political self confidence. We saw Turkey as a rapidly developing country that seemed to have the tools to deliver prosperity to its people. We have had the ability, over the intervening decades, to watch those developments and to compare them with our expectations. I have never been able to do that knowledgeably with any other country than my own.

We also had the unique ability to identify with the aspirations of the people living in a rural area. We saw the beginnings of the influence that the European guest workers would bring home with them. We saw the beginnings of the huge growth of Turkish cities and towns. Those changes have been dramatic - even wrenching - in the intervening years. Our village now has electricity and a telephone in every home. Most have "televizyon" and refrigerators and gas stoves and indoor plumbing. Some have washing machines. The village road has been paved, and dirt roads within the village now connect the various neighborhoods to one another and to the main road. A few villagers own automobiles or small trucks or minivans. A new school building houses grades one through eight, at which attendance is mandatory (the old village elementary school had had only five grades), and five minibuses pick up and deliver students from distant neighborhoods and from a nearby village, whose school had closed for lack of pupils. A large new mosque has been built next to the main road. At the same time, the village population has dropped below 400. Young people in large numbers have moved to Trabzon and Izmir and Istanbul and other towns and cities, leaving their parents to tend the dairy cattle and plough and plant and harvest the corn and potatoes and cabbage. Some houses are new and comfortable; but others have been abandoned and stand empty and crumbling.

My intellectual interest in these developments remains, for those of us who keep in any kind of touch with the people or the places that we knew. The issues are by no means unique to Turkey; they resemble many of the pressures on the "family farm" in this country. The possibility that an aging population may someday be physically unable to sustain itself economically in that village is worth worrying about.

Ultimately, the hold that Turkey, and particularly Çayiriçi Köyü, have on me is that in significant part they define me. My Peace Corps experience is something that I have done that is unique. It distinguishes me from most of my friends and professional colleagues, both as something I have done and as something I remain interested in. There is a combination of pride and ego in being able to say (to myself or to others): this is something that I have done (and continue to do) that's really different.

There's one more element that cannot be overlooked. One of the common characteristics of aging is to sweeten the memories of youth - or at least of its high points. The further away I get from my Peace corps experience, the more I want to refresh that experience, through pictures, travel, music, writing, studying and speaking Turkish, reading about Turkey. Partly, I am making up for lost time, as during the intervening years I have not always pursued these interests so enthusiastically. Partly, I am calculating the remaining time in which to enjoy and to share the experience and to stay in touch and to show off and to proselytize. Part of that effort is to think about and to articulate what about the experience holds me so tightly after so long. I'll have to re-read this to see whether I've found an answer.




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By Joanne Marie Roll (joey) (cache-da08.proxy.aol.com - 205.188.208.12) on Sunday, March 07, 2004 - 1:38 pm: Edit Post

Your appreciation and respect for the people of Turkey just shines through this beautiful memoir.
The historical perspective is something absolutely unique to the peace corps experience. I hope that recording these experiences is another responsiblity that more RPCVs will undertake. Thank you for writing this one.

By Jerry Ficklin (12.148.231.2) on Saturday, September 04, 2004 - 11:03 am: Edit Post

Very interested in your story of village life near Trabzon. I was pre-Peace Corp resident of Trabzon during winter of 1955-56, as 19 year old Russian linguist in Air Force Security Service. You may have met other airmen stationed on Bostepe during your tenure. I was one of very small group who lived in houses and apartments in Trabzon, then a village of about 50,000, before the base was built. I learned Turkish in the village, and I have returned as visitor three times, (once with my family) most recently in April, 2001, to stay with Turkish friends. I too have wondered why the place, people and the experience has held me so tightly?


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