Sometime around 1965, I set off in a VW from Adana, Turkey to drive to Izmir and on to Istanbul.
I had been in Adana to start an alfalfa dehydrating business. I had become the Heil Corporation’s distributor for dehydrators in the Middle East They were better known for Garbage trucks which was probably a better business.
I had found a wonderful partner, Korkut Beriker, who had a brick-making factory in Adana. We were just getting started putting it together. Adana was a small town surrounded by fields of alfalfa and cotton. With the American Incerlik airfield nearby.
Half the transportation in Adana was horse-drawn. We left town on a road that ran along the Mediterranean coast. Some of It paved some dirt. It seemed a long way from the Cote D’Azure. But the Mediterranean was as always beautiful
With me was Reynolds Burgund who helped start our agricultural business in Iran. Reynolds had a Yale law degree and spoke 4-5 languages, but had difficulty understanding people in any language. We had a small accident along the way and were running late.
About a hundred miles from Adana we turned away from the Mediterranean and drove into the mountains. It was about 9 PM when we got to a small mountain village. There was the usual central square and they had installed a gas pump. We needed gas and I found the operator of the hand pump in a tea house at the edge of the square.
We drove the VW over to the pump. Reynolds told me I should get out a make sure that the pump was turned back to zero. “THEY WILL ROB YOU BLIND IN THESE MOUNTAIN VILLAGES.”. I got out, the tank was filled. Reynolds paid the bill and we drove out of the village. We came to a fork in the road and took the wrong one. We had a map that showed a road ahead that turned out to be a figment of the cartographer’s imagination. The road got worse and worse. After half an hour we turned back to the Village.
There was a mob of hundreds of people in the square. The US Embassy advisory is “Don’t stop” – but somehow drive on. The mob was bigger than the VW. We stopped. Suddenly a man appeared in front of the VW waving a Manilla envelope over his head.
Reynolds went pale. It was his envelope, He had left it on the pump when he paid for the gas. It had about $1000 in US currency and $400 of Turkish Currency. The mob wasn’t a mob it was a crowd. The purpose of the crowd was to return the envelope whose contents were a few year’s income for a Turkish villager.
Reynolds got out of the car to retrieve the envelope and then reached inside to find some money to pay a reward. The man did not want a reward and the crowd looked insulted. I suggested that Reynolds get in the car and shut up, and we went down the correct fork in the road.
People in villages don’t rob you Blind. It is more likely to happen with people in Skyscrapers. The Internet may have changed this, but people in Villages live within a community and honesty works with your neighbors and friends. Something about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.
In mountain villages in Central Afghanistan, people were armed and the men looked tough and the women shy. But as usual, the people were kind and gave you a place to sleep and the sense of peace that made it possible to sleep
In all the villages I have traveled over the years nothing unpleasant ever happened. Nothing stolen, nothing threatened, just people getting on with life and helping you do the same..