A Little Stop in Turkey

Would you believe me if I told you I once witnessed a stoning in a remote village in eastern Turkey? I doubt many of you would think that in this day and age stonings, that harsh age-old punishment meted out in Old Testament days, might still occur. I doubt if anyone could better document this particular instance than me…seeing as how I somehow regrettably managed to instigate it. I was the one being stoned.

I had just traveled across the width of Turkey and had reached the last border town before the Iranian border. Originally this area had been populated by Armenians before the turn of the 20th century...but their systematic extermination by the Turkish government during and after WW1, with as many as 1.5 million killed, marked the first genocide in modern history. This area has known death...death on an unimaginable scale.

Nowadays, most in this area are Kurdish. The name of this particular border town is Doğubeyazıt. Mount Ararat’s snow-capped peak, legendary resting place of Noah’s ark, at almost 17,000 ft. elevation hovers surreally in the distance only 10 miles away. I had just disembarked from a cross-country bus ride and had noticed interesting looking ruins off up in the foothills. The day was still young so I decided to hike up there to have a better look. I didn't find the ruins to be any more impressive up close but I did have a noteworthy run-in with a weathered old man and his beautiful Afghan dog. This was one of the most stunning looking Afghan dogs I had ever seen. I wanted to take a photo of this beautiful dog but the old man stood proudly at attention as I leveled my camera in his direction. When I mimed to him that I wanted the dog, not him, he got very angry and took out his anger on the dog...beating the dog with the stick in his hand. I turned away and quickly made my way back down the mountainside, seeing this small village far below that I thought might be interesting to visit.

As I approached the village many children gathered in excitement to see this strange visitor in their midst. They smiled and gathered around me. There must have been about twenty of them and not one over twelve. I took out my camera and took some photos. That is when the trouble started. The children reached out their open hands to me. I assumed that they had seen tourists with polaroid cameras before and wanted to see the finished shots...I shook my head, pointing at my camera and spreading open my palms....miming that I couldn't do anything...that the film needed to be developed. Their expressions grew hard and fierce and their tiny hands began to clench..... Before I knew it they were reaching down to the ground and picking up rocks and hurling them in my direction! I beat a hasty retreat. Fortunately their hands as well as the stones that were flying in my direction were small. I escaped unsettled but unscathed.

I was all prepared to end this story right here with some fancy-sounding platitudes and the stoning being the main story. But as my brother once said to me, “I don’t remember things happening the way you do.” He’s right. It doesn’t mean we both didn’t witness the same thing. We just don’t all take away the same lessons from what we experience. And sometimes it can take us years and years to more clearly understand things that have happened long ago. It took me forty years to look back on this and see it more clearly.

Let me take you forward six more months in this story. I had carried on through five more countries going as far as India and then returning back the same way to Europe. People talk about the cultural shock of going to India. The real shock that I experienced was going back to Europe.

There is only one time in my life I can remember drinking to try to deal with a problem and that was after I left India. I was back in Munich, Germany visiting with the same family I had met on my way out and I am sure they disapproved of the beer after beer I drank while in an emotional funk there. I looked around at the expensive cars and the fancy houses set behind high walls and all the trappings of a wealthy people. It just didn’t mesh with what I had seen in my travels East. The disparity between rich and poor in the world is so great that for most Westerners it is almost impossible to comprehend…and most won’t even bother to try. Have you ever really thought about it seriously yourself? What someone here might spend for a Starbucks coffee would feed a whole family in Asia for the day. The $50 we spend to fill up a car with gas might provide them with food for a month. In pastoral areas their greatest wealth might be the sheep or the goats that they herd or the lands they till. They live hand to mouth like this for generations and generations. Sometimes times get bad and it doesn’t take much…and they sicken and starve. The poverty line right now for a family of four in the USA is $22,550. In 2010, the World Bank reported that 32.7% of the 1.2 billion people in India fell below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day while 68.7% lived on less than $2 per day. Let me do the math for you. That comes out to 871,000,000 people living on less than $2 per day in India. What would you do with your $2 if it was you?? Can you even begin to wrap your mind around those numbers?? $2 per day for a family of four comes out to less than $3,000 for the full year. So almost three-fourths of the people of India live at one-seventh the poverty line of our country. Do you really get that?? They have less than one-seventh the income of someone in this country who is already officially considered poor! Maybe you think that somehow they are different than we are? They are not. In every way they are just like us. Maybe you think things are so much cheaper over there. You are wrong. Commodity prices are pretty much the same world-wide. We all pay virtually the same basic food prices. The recession we had in this country with the drop in the price of commodities and the stock market’s fall was a bad thing you think? Well…everything is relative. That inconvenience to our retirement savings and loss in our home values probably prevented the death of millions in other countries.

So….you say, what really do you expect me to do about it? How does that really affect me??

I would say that we need to recognize that each and every one of us in this country is one of the most privileged of elites on the planet. We are wasteful. We are energy gluttons. We throw away millions on stupid things. We are not a rich country because we are so much better than anyone else but because we have done a lot of favors for ourselves at the rest of the world’s expense. We push other people’s faces into the dirt because we can. We strut around. We consider ourselves superior.

The facts are: we are arrogant, we are shallow, we are selfish, we are thoughtless, we are ignorant, we are petty, we are pompous, we are so self-righteous. Take a good hard look at yourself. Do you really like what you see?

So…are you ready for a surprise ending to my story? Do you know what my final lesson learned there in that little village of Doğubeyazıt is? You wouldn’t guess it in a million years. I probably would never have gotten it myself if I hadn’t spent six more months living amongst many more people just like them. It is……..that I am thankful to have been stoned…thankful for the lesson those children taught me there. I was probably one of the richest people that those children would ever see in their lifetimes. If I came to see their poor squalid lives I should have been willing to do more than just take it as some photo-op.

If I should ever be in that part of the world again I will stop by once more in Doğubeyazıt. All those children I saw then will now be around their fifties. Perhaps one of them might yet today recognize me as that stranger from so long ago that they drove out of their village with stones. If they would allow it I would try to rectify things some…perhaps donate some money to their village school… a couple generations late in doing them some kindness. I believe I owe them some good in return for what they gave to me.