Between my Sophomore and Junior years of college, I spent two months in Istanbul, Turkey as a short-term missionary to Iranian refugees. The team was an assorted collection of young American adults, mostly Campus Crusaders and Baptists. I was the lone Inter-Varsity student and I’m still not quite sure why. I had requested to work with Muslims and had been learning French and Arabic. When I learned I had been assigned to Turkey to work with Iranians, I thought so much for all that study - Turkish is notoriously difficult and I’m not going to even try. All I can remember to this day is, “Taksi.”
Our work involved building relationships, meeting these Iranian refugees in the lobbies of the small hotels we stayed in for a few nights at a time. Most were in Turkey illegally, with little money, so had little else to do. On occasion, police would show up in the lobbies, demanding to see our documents. When they saw our American passports, they handed them back to us with no fuss. But the Iranians could not get theirs back until a fee had been “negotiated.” This is the way the world works.
These poor Iranians had fled the brutal Khomeini regime as well as the Iran-Iraq war, a brutal conflict characterized by trench warfare, poison gas, and suicide charges. Ironically, my brother was in the Persian Gulf with the US Navy at the same time I was in Turkey. But his job was to protect western oil tankers from Iranian attacks. It’s a complicated world. He was doing his job that summer. I was doing mine.
My two months in Istanbul were invigorating and it felt like we did a lot of good. For several years, I prayed through a list of the fourteen Iranians I had spent the most time with. I still hope and expect to run into some of them in the Life to Come. I will say, “of course you are here!” and we will once more break bread together, the good kind, the kind that is flat and fluffy all at once.
~~~~~
There are many occasions I could write about, but the adventure that sticks out most is the one I had with Afshin, a 14-year-old Iranian Jewish teenager. He was plump and cheerful and spoke good English. His parents let him walk around Istanbul with me, exploring the city together. What sort of world has Iranian parents who let their teenager walk around with an American college student in a foreign country, I don’t know. Our world, I guess.
One day we went to some sort of street carnival next to the water, looking for a ride to enjoy. We picked the bumper cars. Just a few of us were riding, with a crowd of Turks looking on at the side of the rink. It was pretty boring, just a couple of bumps. Bumper car steering wheels are their own kind of confusion and rarely manufacture the sort of whip-lashing impact one pays for.
When it came time to get out of the car, I could not figure out how to undo the seat belt. One of the roadies came over to help but then got up on the hood of the car and started yelling at me in Turkish and pointing a finger in my face. I have no idea what he said but he must not have liked my expression, because he slapped me hard right in the face. Whack! The crowd laughed, and Afshin, sitting next to me, was terrified.
The slap hurt. But more than that, it was humiliating. Being slapped in the face among a hostile crowd in a foreign city is tough going. Is this what being a refugee feels like? Helpless? All I remember is walking away with Afshin as quickly as I could, my face and self-esteem still stinging.
We needed to do something to change our mood, so we walked down to the docks and rented a rowboat for an hour to have a go out in the Sea of Marmara. As we got into the boat, the dock hand began to point out into the water, gesturing wildly and giving some kind of warning. I waved it off. After all, I was a Boy Scout with my Rowing Merit Badge. I had this.
The first thirty minutes or so were great as we pulled away from the city into the gentle breeze of the sea, forgetting all our landward troubles. But when it came time to turn around and head back, I soon realized we were not making any headway. I rowed harder, but we kept inching further and further into the Sea of Marmara, making backwards progress.
The tide had got us. That’s what those wildly gesturing arms were all about. Maybe I should have learned some Turkish after all.
I realized we could never make it back to the docks, but if I aimed the rowboat towards another part of the city, we could perhaps make landfall further down the shore. My arms were sore and I was getting blisters on my hands, but I had to pull, and pull hard if we were going to make it.
And then. The rope broke.
The oarlocks were not the kind I was used to from Lake Merriweather at Camp Goshen. Those were metal, and rotated back and forth with the oars. This rowboat had wooden oarlocks with ropes that kept the oars attached. If a rope broke, there was nothing for it. One oar is only good for going around in small circles, a circus trick. Useless against the tide.
So that was it for us. Afshin and I had far worse problems than getting slapped and yelled at in a bumper car. We were going to float out into the Bosporus and never be seen again. That or get picked up by a Russian cargo ship and sold into white slavery. At the very least, there would be some questions about why an American Army ROTC student was out in the Sea of Marmara with a 14-year-old Iranian Jew. I foresaw all sorts of interviews in small, windowless rooms while faceless officials in Foggy Bottom tried to keep Turkey from bolting NATO. One does not always think clearly afloat at sea with one oar.
Realizing our hopeless condition, I began to yell into the sky, lifting up my arms in anguish and frustration. Afshin asked me, “What are you doing?”
“Praying,” I said.
It was then that I thought of something. I was wearing a cotton, long sleeve button down. I quickly took it off and tied it to the oarlock, fashioning a rope of sorts. It was not perfect but it was strong enough, and with renewed energy and zeal, I rowed our jerry-rigged boat back to shore - far down the coast from the rental docks. But still: land. Safe. Not imprisoned in a brig of a rusty old freighter, like some frame out of a Tintin adventure.
Soon a rowboat with two Turkish dock hands approached from the rental outfit. I could see they were angry - and understandably so. They had warned me about the tide and I had ignored them. But I couldn’t take getting yelled at another time that day.
So here was the coup-de-grâce, the greatest answer to my prayer shouted into the sky. I held up the broken rope and blamed the boat. They looked at the rope, shrugged, and told us to go on our way. No yelling involved. A double cure.
Afshin and I laughed all the way back to our hotel and that was that. I have no idea what happened to Afshin or his family since my time in Istanbul. He must be what - in his late forties now? Did he make it to Austria or to Sweden? Or to the US? I will never know. I don’t remember his last name. But I did pray for him for years. So who knows? Maybe one day, we will row again.
~~~~~
There is one other postscript to this story perhaps worth mentioning. My Turkish was crap but I did learn to read and write a little Farsi, a beautiful language with a similar alphabet as Arabic. There was an Iranian named Rahim* many people on our team had befriended. Rahim was a Sufi Muslim, a stream of Islam which stresses the love of God and mystical experience. He once showed us his faith by going into a trance and putting a nail through his cheek. Not something I would do, but it was a sight to see.
Once I got back from our adventure, with Rahim in mind, I looked up Matthew 5:
“If any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also… I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Rahim spoke little English, so I wrote those verses down in Farsi on a card along with a simple explanation of the event at the bumper cars. Rahim read the card, and gasping, pointed to his cheek and slapped it, looking at me. I nodded, and said, Jesus tells us about a different way. A better way.
Rahim had already been reading his Farsi New Testament and many of us were praying for him, including one of the team leaders, Khalil*, a former Iraqi Special Forces soldier. Khalil had come to Christ in Turkey and then spent his days trying to reach his former enemies with the same grace he had been shown.
And so here was Rahim, an Iranian refugee befriended and cared for by a former enemy, and then shown that this was the way of Jesus. This was the way of the Gospel. This was grace. And in a short time, Rahim came to believe in Christ as his Savior. I heard recently from a former teammate that Rahim continues to follow Jesus these many years later.
We live in a complicated world. We slap and humiliate one another. We go to war. We place ourselves and others in danger by our arrogance. But in all this mess, the Gospel of Christ’s coming kingdom is still at work. And in all this mess is a God who cares, a God who hears, a God who answers.
A Day will come when we will beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruninghooks. A Day when the Prince of Peace will return to make the lion lay down with the lamb. A Day when a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and tongue will worship in peace together. A Day in which every day will hold a new adventure, adventures of awe with no pride, adventures of wonder with no fear.
* not their real names
Amazing story, Chris. Thanks for sharing that.
Really loved this travelogue through time, space and geopolitics. It isn't war and conquest we remember best. It's the intimate relationships that place us face to face with another soul. Especially on foreign soil.
Many moons ago, I spent a couple of years in Turkey during my teens. Among other things, we house-sat for a couple traveling to Russia who'd inherited the former base-housing residence of Francis Gary Powers of U-2 fame. [Not the Irish rock band — though a nascent version of the band was forming in Dublin about that time — but the Lockheed "Dragon Lady" U-2 surveillance jet.] Powers survived the destruction of his U-2 spy plane, two years of Soviet imprisonment, and an international prisoner exchange — only to be killed in a television traffic helicopter in Los Angeles shortly after we left Turkey.
Like you, I have vivid memories of Turkey: splitting open a juicy red watermelon, beside a vast blue municipal pool at Atatürk Park, with a Turkish native and an American friend (all of us had summer jobs at Incirlik AFB); riding daily over an aqueduct-style bridge nearly two millennia old in Adana; listening to the final Elvis hit while crossing that Seyhan River bridge [https://youtu.be/WBYRIFyiZfE?si=_ZwmMry248kpTCYk]; wolfing down lamb and parsley tantunis at the Turkish base cafe on our lunch break; learning from my friend, Donald, that the $1.75 per hour minimum wage he and I earned on our summer jobs was more than Charlie, a Turkish national with more than 20 years of experience, made at the same TUSLOG supply detachment; working with the dapper Mr. Fikret and the laid-back, blue-collar backgammon master, Mr. Ziya, at TUSLOG; shelving back-breaking buckets of paint and sweeping away inches of dust accumulated on the little-used upper level of the metal supply warehouse, in intense heat; and learning one Monday, with Donald, that our good enlisted friend, the golden curly-haired Airman Grubb would not be reporting for duty after a drug-induced weekend fall from the roof of his multistory barracks. That was the summer I learned the world works in wonderful, awful and mysterious ways.