Before a blinding sun bakes Beysehir lake, Ismail Senol poles his thin, bright-blue fishing boat through high weeds and out into the clear, deep water.
He is glad to be a fisherman, a job that didn’t exist until recently because the lake’s fish had been wiped out by people who used dynamite to catch them.
Now, such techniques are banned. Commercial fish, which bring a good price in Europe, are stocked regularly, and several hundred fishermen earn a decent living.
How life has changed in this dusty, hushed community on the parched Anatolian plain in south central Turkey.
Nearly three decades ago–when I arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach English–running water, electricity and a better way of life were wild dreams. Nobody dared break with tradition, and tradition swaddled the sleepy town in poverty.
These days, people here embrace progress, and it embraces them.
The world last week was focused on events a few hundred miles from here, as feuding Kurdish factions and Saddam Hussein’s latest intrigues mocked the flaws in Western policy toward Iraq.
While regional flash points understandably grab our attention, they unfortunately overshadow the real success that Western influence has nurtured in some parts of the region.
To many, Turkey probably is still the dingy setting for the movie “Midnight Express,” another battleground for Kurdish rebels, Greece’s eternal foe, the backdrop for yet more Middle Eastern fanaticism, a dusty throwback to another time.
But years ago, the West told Turkey how to rise up, and it did.
In many ways, the progress that has reshaped lives in Beysehir is a portrait of good things that have happened in this century to many so-called backward places. Many still are backward, but many also have a new destiny.
Beysehir’s progress mirrors the way Turkey catapulted itself ahead by investing more in education, diversifying its economy, opening its doors to investors and boosting foreign trade.
Increased wealth brought new schools, universities, hospitals, roads, and factories. A new middle class buys goods made in Turkey.
Three decades ago, Beysehir had two cars. Today there are hundreds.
Where horse-drawn carriages and donkeys crowded dirt roads, today there are tractors and motorcycles on pavement.
My Peace Corps students came from families of eight or 10, and often had several dead brothers and sisters. Thanks to better medical care and birth control, today families are smaller, and fewer lives are lost needlessly.
Where life was cruel and changeless in nearby villages, those that modernized their farm equipment, sought government help and found water for their fields, now thrive.
On the edge of town, construction is under way on four factories, the first explosion of steady, good-paying jobs in a place where most people have been farmers, government workers, small businessmen or, lately, fishermen.
One reason for these changes has been Adil Bayindir, the mayor, who was a thin, energetic high school student 29 years ago.
He is a paunchy middle-aged man who walks with a swagger as he points out the changes. Here, he says, is the new hospital, new roads, new apartments and even a new amusement park, complete with bumper cars and Ferris wheel.
“I am going to get all of this and more done, and then I am going to Ankara and become a member of the parliament,” he declares. Most think he will.
He has succeeded by being innovative, offering land at low prices with tax breaks to business, encouraging housing cooperatives, building roads and making sure local taxes were collected.
He returned home after studying to be an engineer. So did Ibrahim Kayaalp, another engineer. Once the only educated people who came home were doctors or teachers. Not any more.
A classmate of the mayor, Kayaalp left Beysehir for college and worked in Libya and throughout Turkey. But his heart always ached for Beysehir. Over those years, Beysehir grew from a village of 5,000 to a town of 30,000. When he returned several years ago, he fixed up an old house and planted his roots. Now he is an engineer for the town.
His 19-year-old daughter, Alef, is nearly finished with nursing school in Konya, a good-size city. But she does not dream of leaving Beysehir.
Yet, just as in the U.S., economic progress has its drawbacks.
It is less likely today for neighbors to see after each other. People have their own worries. Life is expensive. Inflation is worrisome. People watch television rather than visit family or friends.
For the first time ever, Beysehir had to set up a program to help the poor–mostly newly arrived villagers–because some could not buy fuel or medicine.
There is also a restlessness among those without skills or education. “There’s nothing to do. No place to go,” complains 23-year-old Ibrahim Kurd, a fisherman who wears jeans and a fancy T-shirt and has long hair curling over his shoulder.
He and Fevzi Ciftci, 23, are wandering among the young men and families at Luna Park, the amusement park that sits on the lake’s shore.
And, as it was years ago, some people are stuck in the same suffocating despair.
In nearby Fasilar, a mountain village largely deserted by people in search of a living elsewhere, Mustafa Bagci, 14, is a victim of a failure to find water for the dry, sun-bleached fields.
“I want to go to school, but there is no money, so I am going to go to Izmir and will become a waiter,” says the thin, bright-eyed youngster who finished elementary school two years ago and has done nothing since.
“I did well in school. I would like to be doctor,” says the youngster, whose family could not afford the bus fare for the daily 10-mile ride to Beysehir’s schools.
But what strikes me the most are the changes. They are so startling I cannot believe this is the same place that slept in winter cut off by snow, and where the postman came jogging down a muddy lane announcing a telephone call.
At Beysehir’s bus station, a graying, slightly balding man stops me. “Hocam,” he says, the Turkish word for “my teacher.” “Don’t you remember me? ” he asks. I search his face but can’t recall it. I feel like I am in a time tunnel. His 19-year-old son looks more like one of my students.
He is Abdullah Kolayci, and he has come home from Ankara, where he is an Air Force officer. His son is a college business administration student who wants to work in Beysehir’s new factory.
“You haven’t changed at all hocam. I saw you walking on the old bridge, and I knew it was you,” he says in Turkish, and then says a few words in English.
As I listen, I feel suddenly inspired that so many of the hopes I heard so many years ago were not abandoned.
