It’s funny the things you hang on to after you have traveled. I just cleaned out my jewelry box and in the process pinned a tiny evil eye bead on my shirt. It has been floating around my wardrobe for months now since I got back from Turkey. My program roommate gave me the thing- she got it from someone else wanting to welcome her to the country, and she thought it was cheesy. It is. Beside the bead hangs a bunch of fake plastic grapes. It really is spectacularly cheesy pin. And yet I still have it.

I have been thinking about Turkey a lot today since reading about the 6.0 earthquake that occurred this morning in part of the area through which I traveled last October. I can just remember staring out my bus window as I passed dozens of similar villages similar to those now pictures in the aftermath, thinking only at the time how opposing our lives were. Unlike me, these people lived in remote places, on family farms that had been there for millennia. I remember farm wives in peasant dress leading cows into barns beneath their dwellings. Skinny chickens darting back and forth along the road, trying to avoid the lumbering vehicle- one of very few that probably ever come along some of those roads. The locals tend to travel by hanging on to the side of a tractor, or in the back of a truck- I often saw some such farmer giving people a lift to and from destinations. These people lost everything as their traditional mud brick dwellings bit the dust this morning, some even lost their lives.

As my supervisor in Istanbul informed me over lunch at the top of one of the buildings in concern, there are rarely standards in countries that aren’t first world, even in countries like Turkey that are earthquake-prone. Even if standards do exist, they are rarely enforced, and therefore never followed. As population centers boom and mid-rises pop up by the thousands, the problem escalates- not even evil eyes can ward them off then. Case in point: Haiti. It’s scary to think of how many more Haiti-like disasters will occur in this coming century. Today’s earthquake was “lucky”- it hit in a remote area where many of the dwellings are still traditionally built, and therefore by tradition built to withstand the elements of their environments, including earthquakes. The new population centers will not be so lucky in the future. Standards, though expensive to sometimes implement, really are worth our time. Today, I am thankful for the bureaucracy of enforcement, and keeping those in places without such luxury in my heart.

Sanli Urfa, a city in Southeastern Turkey

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