recommended listening: these things by ken oak
And always rejoice! It’s OK to have fun and relax! Even God rested! Get out and enjoy his creation! We were online and found out there are parks and museums all over your city. Haven’t you been to any of them yet? You’ve been there six weeks and you haven’t really gotten into ministry yet, so this is your time to relax, enjoy, and gather all of those colorful cultural details that get people reading your newsletters. You should plan at least one good family outing each week. Take four to six hours every Saturday, when you have free time, and use it to get out and have fun with your family in the community. Take a weekend sometime, and go on vacation!
Twelve hours by train going, fifteen returning. Temperatures over one hundred and twelve for sixteen hours a day. Harems of hundreds of beautiful women and boys, emirs who treat a wanderer as royalty and poison him in his sleep, the Pit of Despair, sultans, torture, belly-dancing, rug markets, camels, curved swords: this is the place where the stories started. We’re on vacation.
“Hello. Hello. Hello.” Any foreigner attracts children wanting to practice English and/or begging. The sound of “Hellos” is like a beacon.
“What is your name?” I ask a girl, maybe eight years old, who seems to be the leader. She giggles.
“She is Turquoise.” The voice is of a young woman ducking to look out of the doorway of a courtyard. It’s odd that she would speak to me. I’ve read about the local beauties, but this is the first one you’ve seen unveiled. Olive skin, dozens of braids hanging to her waist, huge eyes, huge smile, gold teeth, one thick eyebrow that almost connects her ears, one breast completely revealed.
“You want to know her? Or me?”
I walk faster.
Less than one hundred years ago, many women spent their lives in courtyards like the one behind her. Walls are eight to twelve feet high, but doors are short, to compel bowing. Crumbling sections of wall reveal blonde brick three layers thick, with rows alternating in vertical and horizontal brick patterns. The road is so narrow that the children following me have to walk in pairs. The city is the then-clause for the sentence, “If, 2,500 years ago, God and some city planners made a pact to use only blue and beige,…”
And there’s Lauren up ahead.
We walk through the artisan bazaar, and a grandmotherly woman with a gold silk robe and matching teeth comes out from behind the dark-red patterned rugs to tell us the kids are cute. It’s over 120 degrees, and we’ve been out for hours, but maybe she finds heat exhaustion attractive on Caucasians. Then she gives both kids a souvenir pin of the city and tells us to come back. She hasn’t tried to sell anything. Odd.
Later that day, we walk back past her shop and she greets us again. “The weather is getting hot today,” she says. “Do you need a stroller? My grandson is two years old, and my daughter has a stroller that she hardly ever uses. Why don’t you borrow it for a few days and return it before you leave?” She refuses money, of course. You’re guests in my city, and it’s famous for hospitality! Of course you can borrow it. Of course, of course! Why, you are almost like my children! Of course!
We go back to the Bed and Breakfast. Later that day, several of the team walk an extra block to buy bottled water and souvenirs from the stroller lady.
The next day the stroller breaks. It’s a poorly-made contraption that wouldn’t have made it to a Wal-Mart discount rack, but it was imported, it’s broken, and it was in our charge.
But first we have an appointment.
“I live near here. You can follow us easily. But stay back about twenty meters. Just be tourists.”
We meander after him, past the unemployed guys on this corner, and this corner, and this corner, past the mosque, and past the grocery store, and more guys. And he’s gone. There’s a blind alley, two feet wide, with twenty-foot walls.
There’s his eight-year-old son peeking from a door at the end of the alley.
Within a few minutes, we’ve regrouped and are exchanging blessings, taking off shoes, ducking through doorways, and finding seats in the small living room. There’s an old couch and two chairs. One wall has windows into the fifteen-by-fifteen foot courtyard; two have black, red, blue, white, and yellow Turkic rugs, like the floor; one has built-in cabinets covered with nature scenes and Bible verses. This is the city’s main church. They gather almost every day (massive unemployment among the minority religious group). The exact times change to avoid attracting too much attention. The authorities know about it, but they relax more if it doesn’t look too scheduled.
The next three hours involve a lot of talking, but the multiple languages involved result in not much being said. At the end, we each pray in our own language.
Two days later, we meet again. This time, the head elder is there, too. After two and a half hours, we have the outline of a potential partnership strategy and another meeting scheduled, with Jeremiah 33:3 and Philippians 1:27-28 as the meeting agenda and current action plan. “I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you a hope and a future…”, “…that I may hear of you with one spirit and one mind, striving side by side for the sake of the gospel.” When communication is limited to Bible verses, business consists mostly of blessings.
We never return on the same route you use going, which guarantees getting lost. But that’s safer than being found.
It is cooling off, finally, and time to put the kids to bed. They’re on their backs in front of the air conditioner, singing.
Ella: “I’m walking on sunshine.”
Caleb: “Whoa, whoa.”
Ella: “Walking on sunshine.”
Caleb: “Whoa, whoa.”
Ella: “Walking on sunshine.”
“Hey guys, time for bed. You have a stinky diaper?”
Caleb looks puzzled. He carefully lifts his legs, sticks his whole hand under his legs into his diaper, removes his hand, carefully looks at it, smells it, and says, surprised, “No.”
2,500 years of sub-code septic systems can give a city a certain smell, so this time it’s not his fault.
Almost half a million people live here. It was bigger a thousand years ago. It had more restaurants then, too. A hundred tourists have queued or swarmed, depending on their homeland, around the courtyard entrance to the dinner theater. There’s a seven-piece band playing drums, tambourines, flutes, and violins that are held like cellos. Dancing girls in traditional costumes put on a fashion show using traditional colors and patterns to make modern styles. Tomato-cucumber-onion salads, carrot-vinegar salads, pickle and cabbage salads, noodle and onion salads, cherries, peanuts, raisins, breads, beef and rice soup, meat-filled pastries, meat and onion-filled pastries, and green tea. This all takes place inside what was once one of the world’s most famous religious schools.
The next day, our last in the city, we return to the golden woman. She’s not there, but her son is. We explain about the stroller and ask where we can find a welder to repair it.
“Oh, don’t mention it. Don’t worry. No problem. No problem. It’s not a problem. Really.”
But, we explain again, “It’s our culture to pay for something if you break it. Please let us buy it from you.”
“But no, no, no. It’s a gift. You are guests in our city. It is not a problem.”
So we ask for prices on the embroidered wall-hangings and pillow-cases that we’ve been planning to buy. For the next twenty minutes, we examine embroidered table-cloths and wall hangings with unique, hand-stitched patterns, patting the dust off, and carefully spreading them over the cobblestone street.
Then the moment of reckoning has arrived: “How much?”
He squats flat-footed and look thoughtful. He names a price that is twice what the items are worth.
“OK.”
His mouth opens and he stares. If buying embroidery could be compared to playing chess, we have just sacrificed our queen, and he can’t see our strategy.
For the next ten minutes, he thanks us.
A few hours later, we walk by again. This time, the golden woman is back. She rushes out from behind the silk scarves to greet us. “Oh, have a wonderful trip, oh please return soon, oh, may God be good to you.” She kisses Lauren on both cheeks several times.
Then she grabs a plastic bag and fills it with souvenir T-shirts, several small souvenir pins, ceramic toys, and some more embroidered pillow cases with patterns similar to the ones already chosen.
And more kisses. “Please come to our house when you visit again. Really, please come to visit. You can find me here. Please come back.”
Careful accounting would show that we’ve paid at most ten percent more than we would have estimated had we bargained for the wall hanging, pillow cases, T-shirts, and various souvenir toys separately. True, we hadn’t planned to buy all of them, but we couldn’t argue that we’d been ripped off. And the extra ten percent is almost exactly what we would have expected to pay to have the broken stroller repaired. In the local economy, you can make a lot of friends and spend your money well; it’s just that you’re never really sure what you’re paying for. It’s an economy of gifts.
That night, it’s well over one hundred degrees in the train. The kids keep falling out of their bunks. We finally get to sleep to be awakened by pre-dawn prayers in the hallway. The train breaks down, so the last fifteen miles take three hours. Kids are bruised. Parents are sick. It was a great trip, We’re all depressed.
None of our friends express surprise at the low spirits. “Why’d you go there? Didn’t you hear the city’s cursed? No foreigner has ever lasted there more than a couple years.”
