PROFESSIONAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS IN TURKEY

PROFESSIONAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS IN TURKEY AND TURKISH BREAKFAST

These children, the gevrekci boys, unfortunately come from poor neighborhoods, majority of whom, are helping their parents with their income. Most go to school, I learned over the years by talking with them. They get surprised when I attempt to talk to them asking them what neighborhood they live in, if they go to school, what grade they are in, how they are doing in school, etc. Apparently, most people tend to not see that their vendor is a child; they choose their gevreks, pay and dismiss the mini-adult they've just failed to notice. I sometimes wonder what kind of market-sharing system exists among them since they range in age and demeanor over a very wide range and I have heard that sometimes altercations break out among them. There must be one, may be a study for Dilara, the daughter of my best friend, who is doing a PhD in Sociology.

I would like to do something different this morning, though. I would like to go down to the shopping district of the neighborhood and get our gevrek from a bakery along with other breakfast goods since one of my brothers Mehmet and his wife Kezban will join my mother, her assistant and I for brunch this morning. I want to have an elegant and all inclusive Turkish breakfast, which is a favorite indulgence for pretty much all Turkish people. I walk down the stairs instead of taking the elevator, I have to increase my energy expenditure after the several pounds I gained during the holidays in Iowa City. As soon as I reach the sidewalk beneath the upper level yard of the apartment complex, I notice him: a young man with a large cart full of items that he is pushing. He is one of the "professional recycling" entrepreneurs! He stops by one of the dumpsters in front of one of the apartment buildings. The physician in me is concerned that he will do his exploration in the dumpster with no gloves and who knows what he will be exposed to. I can see, his left hand has no glove on. He reaches into the dumpster with his right hand, though, and valla! He does wear a latex dish-washing glove on his right hand. Turkish minimilastic submission to rules and regulations...

Professional environmentalist recyclers


He takes a plastic item out of the dumpster and transfers it into his cart. Alas, on the way to the cart the item passes from his right hand to the left with no glove. Apparently, whoever taught him to wear a glove while exploring through the dumpster didn't fully explain to him the reason for that. He moves on with the fake satisfaction that he is doing his job by taking the proper precautions to protect himself. I wonder if any public health professional considered doing a study on these recyclers to find out the prevalence of various infectious diseases in this population. A topic to discuss with my friends at Izmir Department of Public Health.

I also wonder how many miles this man has done already and how many more he will do all day. But wait, I guess I don't need to worry about his joints and muscles for walking so many miles every day. Things,  in Turkey, seems to have changed in this arena, too. Ten feet ahead of me something I had never seen before is unfolding. Our environmental entrepreneur approaches the sidewalk for a different purpose this time: he pulls the canvas "container" of his cart off its metal frame and starts dumping its contents into a truck bed! Wow, it looks like garbage sorters travel not on foot but with a truck nowadays, I am stunned. Businesses must be indeed growing in Turkey if it came all the way down to mechanization of this trade as well...

Recycling of goods off dumpsters has become motorized in Turkey!


Mark, my friend, a law professor and a sociologist, is correct after all, globalization is indeed making developing countries wealthier. I can see that every time I travel to Turkey, but at what cost must be the next question, which Mark is not asking. It is also clear before my eyes that most of the new wealth at least in Turkey is accumulating in the hands of privileged, already wealthy.  And, it is accumulating more and more in the hands of the religiously fundamentalist corporations or those that are pretending-to-be-so, the "nuevo rich". The ever Americanization of Turkey follows the trend of constant increase in the gap between the poor and the rich at an ever-increasing rate. This, globalization advocates have not found a solution to. Garbage sorting entrepreneurs being able to own or rent a truck to collect more garbage and even more so, the top rich being able to live in gated communities guarded by security men "enjoying" their jets and yachts don't help reduce the squatting communities in the barracks of every metropol, nor does it help the poorest struggling in those communities or in isolated countryside be able to get health insurance or better food, clothing, housing, and education for their children. I wonder if the greedy rich ever worry about how to close this gap, in America they certainly do not, and I don't see any sign of such a concern in Turkey, either.

After all of this proselytizing, I am back home, Shahodat, my mother's caretaker has steeped a wonderfully aromatic Turkish tea, already. We start furnishing our breakfast table with purely Turkish breakfast items; gevrek right out of the neighborhood brick oven, three different kinds of cheese, one of which, an aged kaseri cheese came from the cheese capital of Turkey, Kars, along with two kinds of olives both green and black, sliced fresh cucumbers, green and red peppers chopped into rings encircling a bunch of parsley treated with sea salt and lemon juice, finally a bowl of sliced tomatoes treated with olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, mint, and sea salt. Mmmmm, I can see how we will enjoy all this. Mehmet and Kezban arrive soon and they have brought a home-made sucuk made by one of Kezban's childhood neighbors from her home town Adana. Sucuk is a Turkish sausage prepared with ground beef treated with lots of spices, salt, and garlic and stuffed into lamb intestines to serve as casing before it is dried. Because it is treated with so many different kinds of spices and salt, it is edible even raw. But the best way to eat sucuk is to grill it in 1/8 inch thick slices into a sandwich or cook it with eggs in olive oil or butter. In my kitchen it is always olive oil since we pretty much do not use butter at all in Cretan cuisine.

A picture off the internet close to our breakfast table

I am glad I bought fresh organic brown eggs. I give the responsibility to cook the eggs and sucuk to my brother. This item has to be prepared at the last minute, just before starting breakfast since it is most delicious when it is warm/hot. We check the table, one more time, we are satisfied with what we see. Mehmet is on the job to cook the eggs and sucuk, even my mom is waiting with a childish excitement of "sucuk for breakfast". She is not allowed to eat it due to its salt content, but on such rare occasions, we ignore the doctor's recommendation, thinking at age 70 she may enjoy some of the not-so-good juices of life. She is thrilled, she eats her sucuk with such savoring, I can tell all she is focusing on right now is her taste buds and what is happening on her tongue. In other words, she is meditating.