Blog Action Day: Poverty, a Turkish story

Poverty is such a pregnant term. Probably the first image that comes to mind is physical. We can so easily visualize people alive, but virtually skeletons. Sadly, thousands today are burdened with malnutrition and the anguish of not knowing where their next meal will come from. In the mind’s eye it is easy to envisage beggars, shantytowns, inner city slums, and refugee camps. Associated with those come images of crime, violence, and danger. In fact, who anywhere can say they live in safety?

But there are other less apparent dimensions of poverty, too. Emotional, for example. How many people live in the abyss of emotional starvation? How many cover up their echoing hollowness with excessive drug use, selfish sex, constant stimulus, violence, or greedy relationships? How many live in the grip of existential loneliness and despair?

Mental poverty, too, is a viscous vampire. It sucks the intellect of its higher potential as it devours all sense of hope and imagination. Sadly, the lack of intellectual opportunity and the resultant boredom are so often cheaply relieved with literature and entertainment that are trashy and degrading to the mind and heart alike.

Probably the greatest, deepest, and most damaging poverty, however, is that which concerns the soul. Spiritual starvation deprives us of our birthright. It severs us from our connections to a Cosmic purpose, and uproots us from meaning that is wider and deeper than the smallness of our ego. And of course, it isolates us from others and from our deepest self.

Since the spiritual (not religious) dimension is paramount, I would like to address this month’s topic of “poverty” from that perspective. But with a twist. Any condition implies its opposite, otherwise it could not be known. In that light, poverty implies the potential for wealth.

What is spiritual wealth? Primarily an attitude. A glass half full, more than half empty, if you will. When there is spiritual wealth, even emptiness can be experienced as a blessing and privilege, an ongoing condition of life. Maybe, too, suffering can be a route beyond oneself into compassion.

Mary Lee Settle in her book Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place (A Touchstone Book: New York: Simon and Schuster: 1992) wrote a very moving account of detainees in a prison camp. The appalling conditions of the place were in stark contrast to the attitude of some of the prisoners. In the midst of such a horrific and potentially devastating, demeaning situation, certain people allowed true beauty and spiritual strength to come to the fore. For those, there was a sense of cohesiveness and of purpose. The primal purpose, of course, was towards survival. But not only for oneself alone. And that was where inner wealth was born and permitted to blossom.

Here is the story, exactly as it was told.

I had a friend in Virginia who, nearly forty years ago, was in a prison camp in Korea. His life was saved by a Turk. He told me that hundreds of GIs died there. “We didn’t know how to look after ourselves, and the Turks took pity on us. They thought we were babies in the woods. My friend was Hakim. When I was sick he brought me food, and he looked after me as he would have another Turkish person. They knew how to survive.” He was silent for a long time, back there, and I was not a part of that.

Finally, he said, “I won’t tell you the bad part. I will tell you the good part. When we were caught, most of us had American GI scrip in our pockets. It became the rate of exchange in the camp and, in a year, the Turks had all the scrip. When our sweaters and socks wore out, they picked the wool apart and reknitted it. Hakim made me a pair of socks.

“Every day they knelt and prayed to the southwest where Mecca was, and when the Chinese soldiers hit them in the butt with bayonets to make them get up, they stood and said, ‘Kill me. I will go straight to Heaven.’ After a while the Chinese let them alone. I think they were a little afraid of them, even though they were armed and the Turks were not, not with guns, anyway. Not one single one of them went to a communist orientation lecture. They said they couldn’t understand the language, but after a while, most of them had found a friend to help, who in return of friendship, would teach them English. We had informers among us, and we knew who they were. I still know. The Turks did not have a single informer.

“They didn’t have any more to eat than we did, but they shared it. When I was so sick I thought I was going to die, Hakim brought me soup, and sat with me, and pulled me through it. I think he gave me courage; so many GIs just died because they gave up, but the Turkish soldiers in the camp didn’t lose a single man. They looked after each other. They organized, and when one of them was sick, the others shared what little food they had with him until he was well again.

“I taught Hakim English, and he taught me Turkish. He studied it so well that he became a driver for an American officer in Turkey after the war. But I only remember one Turkish phrase. I have remembered it for nearly forty years. It is Iyi arkadasim, my good friend.”