renting woes

 After much work and a few days--mostly wonderful except when we wandered the cruiseship port of touristic hell of Kuşadası and were told by a roided-out bouncer that there was no room in the visibly empty seaside douche club with the only beach we could find--of escape to the Aegean coast, we left behind Mother of Love. I'm staying in İstanbul (expertly using an internet cafe's Turkish keyboard, as you can see) and Brett is back in New York. So back to work, interviewing journalists and fixer for the next month before maybe going back to Diyarbakır. August there will be a sizzler.

I moved into a bedroom in a basement apartment two days ago and for the first day the only thing getting on my nerves was the roommates, Americans expats who refuse to admit they are out of America except to complain about the natives. They seem to eat Pap John's pizza 4 nights a week and haven't learned more than Right Left Stop (for taxi drivers) of Turkish after well over a year of being here, which they compensate for by speaking loudly and patronizingly to make their English understood, and as I'm discovering by enlisting me to be their unpaid interpreter. About 15 minutes after I entered the apartment one handed me his Turkish-language contract as a university English teacher; he wanted me to confirm that he would be able to sit around and do no work for the next month and then give one month notice in time for his vacation in the Philippines without legal/financial penalty.
So maybe it is so for best that my ceiling started leaking water at 1am last night and I noticed for the first time the black mold infesting that corner of the room, in the last straw was piled on without much delay and I am getting out of here. In the meantime I am still translating, now with a very unpleasant landlady and the Syrian family upstairs--only one member of which speaks more than a few words of Turkish--who have insisted on doing all the pipe and ceiling repairs themselves rather than involving the insurance company. I must wait another week to escape because my other option for a bedroom, with another American but one whom I have known a while and trust and with whom should have stayed to begin with, has now been occupied for the present by his girlfriend's visiting friends.

Afternoon

We finish cleaning the animals’ stalls and then lead the lady goat to a small field with tall grass. The other goats and the sheep wander the sprawling forest out back but she is too athletic, used to climb the low fences separating Tamer and Şadan’s forest from the neighbors and get them into trouble. So they have us tether her to a stake that we drive into a different spot in the grassy field each day, hoping that if we position her with a fresh view and unchomped grass and refresh her water bucket then she won’t bawl in loneliness all day. But she always bawls and the endless sound of it hurts Brett. We looked it up and the internet says goats aren’t supposed to be tethered and left alone all day. We are only here for two weeks, though, and can’t do anything about it like reinforce their fence with electrical wire, which the internet says is okay for goats.

Lady goat competes with the calves for hay

After we tie up the lady goat and the calves, who don’t mind being tethered so much except they would rather be destroying the fruit trees, it is lunch and siesta time, not necessarily in that order. Ayşe cooks vegetable and goat dishes in clay pots in an indoor-outdoor kitchen thick with flies. She sometimes rolls dough on a floured wooden platform into impossibly thin circles that she uses for börek pastries or gözleme crepes filled with cheese and spinach. I have tried to ask Ayşe for instructions when Brett or I can’t roll dough thinly enough or squeeze milk from udders. She encourages Brett’s apprenticeship and is endlessly amused by my willingness to do women’s work like rolling dough or wrapping rice in grape leaves, but she is too expert to know what she is doing and teach it. You haven’t gotten used to it yet, try again, is usually her answer. Ayşe learned by watching: when she was a little girl, she told me with Şadan serving as a Turkish-to-Turkish interpreter, she peeked in on her mother making börek and her mother caught her and chased her off. Her mother said that once Ayşe learned to make börek she would be marriageable and her mother wasn’t ready to part with her.

Şadan and Tamer’s son Can and daughter Oya live in İzmir an hour away and sometimes stay at the farm and feed the ducks. Can designs urban furniture, hand tools and sesame pretzel trucks and Oya is to her mother’s chagrin an international trade specialist: formerly frozen foods and now chemical cleaning products. Efe the goat, our favorite, will be served at Can’s wedding, now it seems delayed until next year.

Oya and Şadan henna Brett's hands

We nap and sometimes while we do Şadan gives a voice lesson to a male pop singer who drives from İzmir in a white BMW with a modeling agency advertisement stenciled on the side in gold letters. She was a singer and then university vocal teacher; eight years ago she retired and they bought the farm, at the time a pine forest full of scorpions. Tamer still works as a pediatrician, commuting an hour to İzmir most days, because the farm is still nowhere near self-sufficient or profitable.

Tamer and I work on the canal

Ram, with his cowed mate

After the worst of the day’s heat, we emerge from the guest room under the main house’s balcony and Şadan in her harem pants and hippy tunic assigns us work grooming her Fukuoka organic gardens or the grape vines or in the forest. Our favorite place to work is the forest, where there is shade and breeze and the goats keep us company. The ram is curious about us too but Şadan warned us not to pet his head because once you get friendly with him he will ram you. Ram’s favorite is Efe the goat. He stays close to Efe’s side all day and tries to mount him whenever given an opportunity. Once we watched as ram charged and rammed Efe, first in the side and then skull to skull with loud thwacks. Luckily Efe also has thick protruding skull bones for such encounters. Efe likes his skull bones and the back of his ears scratched and tilts his head in anticipation when Brett approaches him.

Efe

Our crowning achievement in the forest has been a canal that carries waste water from the animal stalls out back to a muck pit and then downhill into the trees through pipes that we unblocked. Manure will sit and compost in the muck pit and then be collected to fertilize the Fukuoka gardens. Fresh manure should not be used as fertilizer—one of the many basic facts we have learned.

Goats and ram lounge beside our canal

Morning

Every morning we have tea and breakfast before Ayşe arrives. Ayşe is a formidable woman in peasant dress and her 50s in constant back and arthritic pain who grew up as a nomad herding animals. Eight years ago when Tamer and Şadan bought the farm, they poached Ayşe from the service of their neighbors, who had her cleaning and housekeeping with her pained hands and not taking care of animals, what she knows best.

We follow Ayşe down the cobble path past the rows of fruit trees on the hillside, some more ravaged than others by the adolescent cows on mornings when it is too hot for anyone to pay attention to whether their leashes are properly staked into the ground. We reach the animal pens and usually the ram is already ramming the gate of his pen demanding out. He’s a real bastard, always butting his mate and his children when they try to eat from the shared trough and picking fights with Efe the goat. The only male animals I like are the eunuchs.

Efe is a eunuch. Tamer and Şadan had Ayşe’s husband castrate Efe so that he would fatten up in time for their son’s wedding. The wedding was postponed because the son’s fiance wanted to finish her doctorate first but then just yesterday Şadan got a phone call that the fiance did well with her dissertation defense so Efe is back on death row.

As Ayşe feeds and milks the animals we pick up shovels and brooms and buckets and gloves and we collect their shit and piss for the compost. Mother of Love, the cow mother, shits enormous piles and we have to be careful never to dawdle behind her as there is no warning, no change in posture or lifting of the tail, before she lets loose a faucet of pee. I get the most satisfaction from scraping up those mountainous shits and hurling a bucket of them into the compost pile for the chickens to sort through; the pebbles of the goats and sheep are more mundane and raise more dust as we sweep them up. Mother of Love is indifferent to us, as are all the animals except the ducklings (who beg for food and nibble my feet in the afternoon), the hostile geese and the goats.

Sometimes I start early on the goat and calf pen as Ayşe has called my girlfriend Brett over to do trigger point massage and range of motion exercises on her shoulders. They all love Brett and she has already learned all the animal and food names, though no verbs yet except the imperative forms of Come, Go, Open (Start), Stop.

After cleaning the pens we fill their water buckets and Ayşe lets them loose: the male goats and ram to the back woods to forage, the chickens and four generations of ducks and hissing gawking geese to wander as they will, Mother of Love’s daughter and the latter’s fiance to the forbidden fruit trees and grazing lawns up the hill. Mother of Love stays in her pen always. The horse and her foal also stay in their pen. The foal was born at 2am two nights ago after a year-long pregnancy. Brett and I slept right through the birthing drama but watched the next morning as Tamer and a horseman neighbor tried long and patiently to get the foal to suckle and finally succeeded. Tamer with his big grey hair and thick glasses gave a goofy grin and thumbs up and whispered to me that the foal had chosen to live, after all.

Dang no writing -- farm pictures

Today was supposed to be my blog-writing day off but then we were at the beach for hours and not finally back home and fed at 9:30 I'm about ready for sleep. Another early morning tomorrow. So I will just leave you with some farm pictures:

Fukuoka garden:

Our hostess and boss, Şadan:

Şadan and Ayşe (to be described further):

Big Island

My girlfriend joined me in Istanbul and for a week we were both sightseeing and doing research meetings and so no time for blogging. Now we're on an organic farm near Izmir volunteering and up early  working then scrubbing off manure smell and so little time for blogging. I will write a proper post about the farm shortly but for now here are pictures from Buyukada, the largest of several islands in the Sea of Marmaris reachable by municipal ferry from Istanbul. 

The island should be on a fixer-upper real estate reality TV show. There are no private automobiles allowed and so on our way up to the Greek monastery at the summit (see the view in pic #2) we passed crazily designed mansion after crazily designed mansion, every one with an often-bizarre personal touch. I actually didn't even think to take photos until we were hurrying back to the pier to escape an imminent thunderstorm so these are none of the most interesting ones we saw, but these pictures give an idea of the realty paradise that is Buyukada.

Also here is my lady doing abs in a woodland fitness center halfway up to the monastery:

Aya Yorgi Monastery. Here's a documentary about it:
http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/9488/BELLS--THREADS-AND-MIRACLES

They made the most of some steep slopes--lots of terraces and some gravity-defying benches: