Cars buzz up and down past me and as I come to the bus stop, the LAST STOP of Kurtuluş, I feel a rush. Lights become lighter. Darks darker.

Şükürler olsun… Allah büyüktür. (Hallelujah… God is Great.) 

From the green veins that have yet to be covered by blacktop and cement; from these veins leak out humidity and buds on newly born branches.. The smell of people rushing from broken street corners toward broader blacker horizons, alive and turgid and chaotic in this razor bazaar Istanbul.. millions of possible broken street corners and tea (çay) cafes.

Along these new spring sidewalks of Kurtulus LAST STOP I see passion beating like a heart attack victim, in this essence that is

Now

In time

And now

Nothing.

Istanbul doesn’t even care for flys, specks of dirt like us.

And here there is a peace in knowing spring.

I interviewed him in Istanbul’s Kurtuluş district:

Hey Textile Garment Workers’ Solidarity Concert

Ayse Tukrukcu’s life is as tragic as it is inspiring. At the age of 9 Ayse was raped by her uncle and by the age of 12 she was cast out of her family. Raised in a German Orphanage, Ayse returned to Turkey in her early 20s, married, miscarried a child, divorced and married a second time. Her second husband sold Ayse to a brothel owner in 1993. For the next three years Ayse worked in officially taxed, sanctioned and regulated brothels throughout Turkey.

She managed to escape the world of prostitution by marrying one of her clients in 1995 and by 2000 she had remade her life. Ayse ran for the Turkish National Parliament in 2004 and co-authored a book on her life (published in 2008). Ayse Tukrukcu is now 45 years old and works as a Sex Workers Rights activist in Istanbul. The following  is a poem written by Ayse and translated from the original Turkish.

-Sean David Hobbs

Woman of “the Life”

I didn’t want to be a woman of “the Life”
I didn’t want to sell myself at the meat market
None of us were born street walkers
It wasn’t us who bought Turkish Government sponsored “Official Prostitute Documents”

Society gave us the euphemism Women of “the Life”
But society never protected us
Never cared if we were hungry or starving or dying from disease
We were the ones who were pushed out on the margins

We were tossed about from embrace to embrace
Forcibly sold for 5 or 10 kuruş (cents)
We lost our friends, some who we worked with
Through torture, we were attacked too

We weren’t able to be “little girls”
Or carefree young women.
We couldn’t have homes or children..
And so the tears fell from our eyes
We didn’t choose to be Women of “the Life”

Take back this official document that made me a prostitute
I entreat to you, please listen!
Give me back my life!
Be not on Death’s side but on the side of the Living

(March 2007)

Upon hearing my English, Wrinkly Gray Waiter glared over at me and pushed my hand away from Ahmet’s.. “Let’s get your bill,” Wrinkly Gray Waiter scowled in Turkish.

The seven huge guys with scars on their faces at the table behind us all worked for the bar and the three door men – who were also very big – also worked for the bar. Thin lithe young waiters dressed with the same white button down dress shirt as Wrinkly Gray Waiter scurried back behind the bar to get the bill for our fictitious drinks and I looked out over all the big men with the scares and the girls who were dancing again up on the stage and the lounging door men who were laughing and joking about something inconsequential – a sports match, a headline, a cartoon. None of them cared but all of them knew what was happening to us. Life was going on without us; raging on without us.

Two slender young waiters brought Ahmet the bill on a tray. Ahmet looked at the bill and then shook his head and passed it to me. It was for $350.

“We can’t pay this!” Ahmet said.

Wrinkly Gray Waiter shrugged. “What do you want us to do? You made a mistake and this is your price.”

“Indeed, indeed,” agreed Bad Eyed Young Pimp.

“Can we see the price list, the menu?” I asked.

“Of course,” said one of the nearby waiters who had brought us the bill. The two slender waiters hurried back to the bar and brought Ahmet and I over two menus; offered them to us in a sumptuous fashion as if we were both nobility in a royal court. What horse-shit.

The Turkish service industry prided itself on presentation but this was way over the top. With this action the waiters were aggrandizing us and making fun of Ahmet and me at the same moment. On the menu $40 was written for a beer and $90 for a bottle of “Champagne.”

“Oh come on! We had two beers!” Ahmet guffawed. It was getting kinda funny, in a very dangerous sort of way. “We had two beers!”

Wrinkly Gray Waiter almost controlling himself/almost shouting at Ahmet said, “What is it to me what you had and what you didn’t have? We are a legal institution and this is our price. If YOU can’t pay, we have big trouble.”

“Well, we want to pay,” Ahmet said, checking himself slightly. He had reached the older man’s breaking point. Perhaps Wrinkly Gray Waiter was only playing the bad cop routine but then where was the good cop? Real trouble was brewing and Ahmet had to calm down. Ahmet was a very good negotiator and he knew all the ins and outs of Istanbul but he was now fucked and there was no getting around this.

“We don’t have that kind of money,” said Ahmet. “I work in a sales department of a trading firm with my friend.”

“How much do you have?”

“Uh, how much do you have?” Ahmet looked at me.

I felt nervous and twisted. Now I was behind the eight ball? Would I be the one to save Ahmet and myself? “70 million,” I said. 70 million TL was equivalent to about $50 US.

I knew Ahmet had a lot more in his wallet.

Wrinkly Gray Waiter wanted to see the 70 million so I took out my wallet and showed him the money. Wrinkly Gray Waiter took the money and then Wrinkly Gray Waiter’s strong sinewy gray haired arm stretched greedily forward, with compulsion and gobbled my wallet, pulling it from my grasp like an inexorable hawk talon.

As Wrinkly Gray Waiter looked through my wallet, his eyes bulged and he played with his tongue, pushing out the side of his cheek. He looked like a fucking chipmunk, the son-of-a-bitch. A dirty filthy fuck is what he was and I would have loved to belt him across the face but for the scarf faced men surrounding Wrinkly Gray Waiter, Ahmet and I.

Death was around the corner, lurching in the pockets and in the guns and bullets wrapped around the mafia men’s thighs and ankles. I didn’t mind the idea of death and being nothing… it was the pain that I feared. Again I felt calm. I breathed in the air conditioning and the scent of perfume and cigarettes and coolness. It was a gut wrenching kind of calmness spread over my body. This was not the beer I had chugged minutes earlier but instead it was like a drug… a high.

I didn’t care that Wrinkly Gray Waiter was looking through my wallet but when he came to my ATM card and took it out – and looked at it in the dim lamp light, upside down, right side up like a cave man lost in thought – I felt my heart pounding. I couldn’t exactly connect with the fear involved with my pounding heart.

“Will this work on our credit card machine?” Wrinkly Gray Waiter asked Bad Eyed Young Pimp.

“I don’t think so.”

Wrinkly Gray Waiter put my ATM card back in my wallet and minus the 70 Turkish Lira handed everything back to me. I took my wallet and opened it. There were pictures of my mother and father there and Yagmur and a love note Yagmur had given me after our first month together, back earlier that same year.

“Now you,” he said to Ahmet.

“I don’t have anything-”

“Ohhhh, I wanna see what you have.”

Ahmet gave Wrinkly Gray Waiter his wallet, face frozen. Wrinkly Gray Waiter found a credit card and a stashed $100 bill. “Well look at this… don’t have any money huh? Did you forget about this? Puşt (Prick).” Wrinkly Gray Waiter looked at Bad Eyed Young Pimp, “I think we should take this money and charge the remainder of the bill on this nice VISA credit card of our fine young, rich import exporter.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me.”

Ahmet begged now, “Do you have any idea how hard I worked for that $100? Do you have any idea about my family and how they need this mone-”

“I fuck the cunt of your family! What’s it to me?! I fuck the cunt, what is it to me how hard you ‘worked for this money.’ You came here and you made mistakes and now you can’t pay the bill and I am supposed to listen to your sad story which I fuck to the cunt! I am not your relative and I am not your father so I fuck the cunt of the world what is it to me!!?”

“Okay, you have a point, but we really don’t have-”

“So you lied to me when you said before that you didn’t have the money! Fuck, what are we going to do with you asses?! I don’t like liars and you are liars.”

“Okay we are sorry.” Ahmet reached forward and set his hand on Wrinkly Gray Waiter’s hand in the middle of the table. Wrinkly Gray Waiter had all of Ahmet’s life in a tight talon grip. “But big brother, I am sorry but we really can’t let you take the credit card. We are very sorry and we will pay you everything back but I really don’t have the money right now. Please have some mercy on us. Please.”

“Allah, allah, allah…” Wrinkly Gray Waiter said rolling his eyes and pulling Ahmet’s wallet away. “What are we gonna do with you… idiots, idiots, idiots here in this place!!”

Wrinkly Gray Waiter stood up and walked over to the bar, handing the wallet to the bartender Wrinkly Gray Waiter spoke in whispers with the bartender. The bartender came out from behind the bar. He was a young guy and from the moment he sat down at our table one could tell the bartender was the boss of the brothel/nightclub. Real Owner Bartender was calm and seemed a lot nicer than the older wrinkly prune waiter had been. Real Owner Bartender didn’t have any scars on his face and he looked intelligent.

“You really don’t have any more money?” Real Owner Bartender asked Ahmet. “I don’t want to have to search you.”

“No honest brother, we don’t have any more money.”

“The bill is three fifty. You gave us a hundred fifty. Tomorrow come back and give us the rest of the money. Now get the fuck out of here.” The Real Owner Bartender put Ahmet’s wallet on the table in front of Ahmet. And we were free. The axe had passed from above our necks. They had just been playing with us from beginning to end. Two young stupid boys who Real Owner Bartender and Wrinkly Gray Waiter knew would never come back to pay off their fictitious borç (debt). They were just fleecing us for everything we had on our persons.

“Yeah, get the fuck out of here,” said Bad Eyed Young Pimp Ahmet’s Mersin countryman.

Outside the bar there was a complete calm. As Ahmet and I walked across the street to the car a part of me shouted that I should be hopping up and down in joy that I was still alive and that the night of Aksaray monster which shallowed Turkish Man and Foreign Man alike, leaving casualties for the morning paper had decided to release us from between the spaces in its teeth. But I couldn’t jump up and down… All that was empty to me. The cobblestone of the streets and the haze of street lights seemed untouched by what had gone on inside the bar. The material didn’t seem to care.

As we drove away from the night club/brothel each block passing felt to me like a little piece of freeness and life coming back inside.

Ahmet shot back into life angry and ashamed. His 24 year old ego had been badly bruised. He said he wanted to kill all of the men in the bar! He swore in English that he would someday become rich and return and kill all of the bastards who had stolen our money! Ahmet went on mad and crazed and stupid and young and making no sense now and speaking as a Turkish villager (which he wasn’t) saying that he hated people who bumped other people on the streets without saying they were sorry and this, according to him, this, this, thisdamnedPROCESS of THIEVERY was the same AS BUMPING others on the STREETS and NOT SAYING – I PUT IT TO THE CUNT, CUNT – I’m sorry. It was just that same fucking mentality!! How can people just bump other people in the street and not politely apologize and these BASTARDS are just like THAT!!!!

In someways I was more scared of Ahmet and his present rage (and driving) than I had ever been in the night club with faux death in front of our eyes. Ahmet sped us around the coast line of the Bosphorus, out past Ortaköy, past Rumeli Hısarı (Castle in the Lands of Greeks).

When he calmed down we stopped on the coast. We were far up the Bosphorus and here the weather and the water were clean and you could smell the salt from the waves slamming up against the coastline. It was windy and autumn, a perfect time in Istanbul.

The outlines of the hills and small mountains were visible on the horizon.

We got out and walked by the coast. Ahmet said he felt terrible and I believed him. All of his life forced seemed dejected and lessened. The waves were strong out here, smashing and spreading live blood force… a nothing over us all. I watched droplets of the water’s waves exploding next to us on the coastal walls of the Bosphorus and for a moment I could see with each explosion of water the distance between my nose and the droplets of water.

Ahmet couldn’t look me in the face, just kept speed talking in English and staring out at the water and waves and distant outlines of the hills of the Asian side of the city across the Bosphorus Strait from us. He said he felt wholly responsible and embarrassed because of tonight. “I am so sorry. You are the foreigner here and I should never have made such a mistake. I feel like a stupid Anatolian villager just off the first bus. That is how well those bastards fooled me.”

He was taking all the blame. I told him not to. I told him I was just as willing to go to the bar.

Ahmet and I walked back to the car and got back in and began to head back to the Asian side of the city. On the way we bought wine and beer with Ahmet’s credit card. As we drove we poured it all down our throats to forget. To forget lovely our shame and our light pockets.

By the time we reached the Asian side of the city at the district of Üsküdar I was drunk and Ahmet was buzzed. We drove down to the Bosphorus coast from the hills of Üsküdar and stopped opposite Kız Külesi (Maiden’s Tower), a famous tower in the middle of the Bosphorus.

We parked along the coast and turned the radio on load. Ahmet listened to Müslüm Gürses, a Turkish singer of Arabesque music. He fell asleep. I walked drunk and alone away from the car.

The moonlight could be seen directly from this point of the Bosphorus. The Maiden’s Tower shone in light and was surrounded on all sides by the sea and an outline of moon light lit the sea phosphorescent.

I walked until I came to a small inlet on the coast of Üsküdar. Positioned on a platform was a computer guidance radio tower. It sent clicks and beeps to the passing sea tanker traffic going up and down the Bosphorus strait. Nothing could be see in the darkness or in the daylight.. the radar messages, sound-waves, were blind and real.

This computerized tower felt was a 2001 movie prop. It was a king. My kind. I fell down low. I laid next to the tower. I hugged the tower. I thought about how lucky we had been. I couldn’t feel the luck. I was in drunken-hood. I could hear the clicks and beeps very clearly in the empty night.

by Sean David Hobbs and H.firouzeh

We pulled up next to a corner shop and Ahmet got out to buy some beer. The streets in Aksaray, like all Istanbul streets, are crooked and confused but Aksaray is special because in Aksaray everything buzzes with neon light from the bars and other clubs. The hotels looked new and modern. Next to us a giant truck was trying to back up. The truck couldn’t get out, was trapped by three roads, each going in a different direction. Men were out on the sidewalks trying to guide the truck from its quagmire. It was like trying to move a shaken rhinoceros from its swamp. The truck gagged; honked and squealed its engine.

I watched the Rhinoceros Truck and wondered if it might drive backward and hit the Lexus soccer team car I was in. Ahmet returned with his beer, stepping over a large pile of trash and avoiding the tail end of the truck.

We drove on. We saw women and men on the streets together and the women were with the men, walking arm in arm. The women were prostitutes; all the women out at night in Aksaray were prostitutes.

We passed a main road over at a large domed white mosque, hundreds of years old like a palace in the night. It was pure white and the architecture was slender and graceful. Each tiny curvature created a vast movement like a frozen white wave. Down a wide alleyway from the White palace/mosque we passed a group of pimps. Our car inched by the pimps, one by one.

I asked Ahmet why we didn’t just call his Russian pimp contacts. He said he had already tried that and they weren’t answering their phones. “Just leave everything to me. Don’t worry. I will take care of it all. Don’t say you are American. They’ll think you are rich and fuck us on price. Only speak Turkish if they ask you a direct question. From now on only speak English with me. We work together in an Import/Export firm and I want to show my good foreign friend Istanbul’s night life.”

The pimps called out to our car in Turkish. They used a lot of slang which was hard to understand but the meaning was more of less obvious. “Hey brother, do you need some ambience? Can we help change your ‘milieu’?”

Ahmet talked to a few of them. The conversations were close and manly; shoulders were patted, arms squeezed, eye contact constant. A Turkish man patted his chests out of respect for another man. The important thing among Turkish men is to relate within the closed fraternal culture of masculinity. Simply put, Turkish culture is Islamic at root. In Islamic culture there is a strict division between men and women.

Consequently, one sees that Turkish men have a special culture among themselves (and Turkish women have a special culture among themselves). In Turkey being a man and using the right words and expressions is everything. If one can do this, a man enters the brotherhood of Turkish men and once there he lives safe or at least relatively safe.

We came to a pimp on the street who looked younger than the rest. He was short and muscular. “Merhaba abi” he said to us (“Hello big brother.”)

I didn’t like the young pimp’s eyes but Ahmet continued talking to him. Bad Eyed Young Pimp’s accent was thick from the south of Turkey. His accent was like that of Ahmet’s family.

“Where are you from my man?” Ahmet asked.

“From the south, my brother. Mersin.”

The province of Mersin was Ahmet ’s memleket. A memleket means one’s homeland and has a special reverence within Turkish culture. The memleket is where your blood, your ancestry, your history are from. In a land like Anatolia, with one of the oldest histories on earth, one’s memleket is a mythic place filling a Turk’s heart with reverence. To meet a hemşehri or fellow countrymen from one’s provincial home is something holy too. It is believed a hemşehri can never do anything bad to you. One can ask money from a hemşehri; can ask for lodging from a hemşehri. Istanbul was fast and supposedly devoid of the old country’s honor. And so, Istanbulites look back to their homelands with longing.

I knew when Bad Eyed Young Pimp said he was from Mersin, he would probably get our business. Bad Eyed Young Pimp started to look at me more and more while he was speaking with Ahmet. He couldn’t place me. Bad Eyed Young Pimp was a little confused, “Where are you from, brother?”

“Poland.” My grandmother was born and raised in Poland until she was 10 upon which Grandma’s family emigrated to the coal mines of the Ohio Valley. It was a lot less hassle – and sometimes safer – in Turkey to say I was Polish.

“He is our foreign guest, my friend.”

“Well, anyone who is a friend of my hemşehri is a friend of mine,” Bad Eyed Young Pimp said and extended his hand across Ahmet to me.

I took it smiling and said, “Thanks my brother.”

“You know Turkish?” he asked me, holding my hand milliseconds too long.

“Yes, certainly I do.” Again I didn’t trust him. The pimp let go of my hand.

Bad Eyed Young Pimp smiled wide, very polite. “Well how can I help you?” he asked Ahmet.

“We are looking for some ladies. We are looking for a fun ambience for tonight. Maybe, my brother, you can help us.” I noticed Ahmet’s Turkish shifting to the south Turkey/Mersin accent. Normally he always spoke Turkish with the official Istanbulite accent but now Ahmet seemed more relaxed and his home-province came out in his Turkish.

“Of course I can help you. Come on!” Bad Eyed Young Pimp opened the back door and hopped in the backseat.

I felt uncomfortable with Bad Eyed Young Pimp in our backseat.  But Ahmet didn’t seem to mind and I deferred to Ahmet; he was the one who was Turkish after all.

“Follow my directions and I will show you how to get to our bar.”

“Okay,” Ahmet said.

I listened to their conversation nervously. Ahmet calmly began complaining about Istanbul, “It is all about money, brother. Not about anything else.”

“You’re right. You’re right. There is nothing else.” Bad Eyed Young Pimp said distantly as if for a moment the mask was dropping and he didn’t give a shit about what Ahmet was saying, was just agreeing for agreement’s sake.

We came to a bar on a quiet back street with flowers and plants along the front. No one was outside. Inside, a group of three very burly men were sitting at a table by the front door. No women were with them. They watched us as we entered. They didn’t speak.

At the back of the bar was a stage with lights. Romanian and Moldavian girls danced around to music on the stage. The girls dressed in bikinis. They danced without passion, distant and foggy eyed. There were picturesque hourglass shaped girls and flabby walrus-like women moving around in a circle on the stage.

Close up to the stage was a large table filled with seven burly men who were drinking carbonated mineral water.

There was no one else in the bar.

Things didn’t feel right to me. Bad Eyed Young Pimp sat us close to the stage. The table of seven big men occasionally glanced over at us.

The stage took on a profane, perfect light. These prostitutes had transformed themselves. They were more than normal women. They sold their thighs, breasts and haughty jaws… This selling was special somehow. Even the ugly ones were special and became more lust filling and attractive. I wanted to live with a nice woman who was nurturing, who I could share my heart with, who I didn’t have to feel empty with after I came in her. Yet, the call of the sex dancing, the wave of emptiness before, during, and business-like after was forbidden and perfect. It satiated the soul and dizzied the brain. One felt horrible and wonderful at the same moment.

When they were done dancing, some of the girls came down from the stage and sat next to us. They spoke in broken Turkish and looked dejected. It was just a game, it was just business. Their skin was soft and their perfume was turgid in my nostrils. Their limbs were supple and young. I was a kid in a candy store.

We spoke with them a bit. The table became filled. It was becoming too much, the table itself started to totter from the weight of the women. All of them asked for drinks. Ahmet and I said no. Bad Eyed Young Pimp was sitting with us. He asked for drinks.

We were served beers. Ahmet and I didn’t touch the beers.

Suddenly we heard a (pop!). And another (pop!). And another (pop!). They were opening mineral water which had been corked to look like Champagne. They were serving the girls even though we kept saying no, no,no we aren’t paying for any of that, we didn’torderit! But now it was getting too late, very late for Ahmet and I.

Ahmet changed to English and said to me, “Drink your beer. All of it and let’s take the girls sitting next to us and hope we can get out of here.”

We slammed our beers, and I sat back with a brain buzz.

Ahmet said to the pimp and to another man who had joined our table that we wanted the girls sitting next to us and we were ready to leave right now. The girl sitting next to me was a brunette and I actually I started to protest in Turkish that I wanted a blond one but in mid-sentence I shut up as the realization of where we were and what was happening crept over my beer addled mind.

“You can’t have those girls,” said the son-of-a-bitch Bad Eyed Young Pimp… said the honor-less pimp….

There is a story my father told me when I was a kid. I don’t remember when he told me but it was probably on one of our father/son hunting trips we used to take. We’d drive up highway 51 to northern Wisconsin (the only way to get up there) and the snowflakes would be falling, the whole of the forests and hills blanketed white and empty of leaves except the many pine trees, stark endless evergreen in the white. Inside our truck it was warm and his black beard and rosy Welsh eyes watched the road while his lips told me this story….

There once was a kind, young, beautiful woman. She was walking home and it was winter and she saw a snake buried in the snow. The snake was very weak and dying. ‘Help me,’ it whimpered.

She picked up the half frozen snake and took pity on it. She took it home, fed it and allowed it to get strong. After a few weeks the snake was back to its old self again, coiling and zooming around her house. One day, after work the woman came home and couldn’t find the snake. It wasn’t in the living room and it wasn’t in the kitchen. It wasn’t in the bathroom and it wasn’t in the basement. She shrugged, made herself dinner and went to bed.

As she was getting into bed the snake lunged out at her from its hiding place under her pillow and sunk its fangs into her face and torso. As she lay there dying, the venom coursing through her veins, she looked at the snake and asked it, How could you do such a thing to me? I saved your life! I brought you back to my home. I cared and loved and nurtured you!

You dumb bitch… said the snake, I’M A SNAKE.

… everything changed after the Bad Eyed Young Pimp said that. The girls scattered away and a wrinkly gray haired man who was dressed like a waiter sat down next to us. Bad Eyed Young Pimp no longer said anything just nodded in agreement with whatever Wrinkly Gray Waiter would say next.

“You guys have a bill to pay and you ARE going to pay it,” said Wrinkly Gray Waiter.

“We didn’t drink anything but two beers,” said Ahmet.

“Who is this idiot?” Wrinkly Gray Waiter indicted me.

“He’s my friend.”

“Where is he from?”

“Poland.” I said.

Wrinkly Gray Waiter looked at me wan and then his face twisted, enraged. “You speak Turkish?” He almost shouted.

“A little.”

“Well my rich foreigner, You… Have… Got…. A lot… To…. pay! Amına koyayım.” Amına koyayım is one of the worst (and most popular) curse words in Turkish. It means literally, “I shall put my dick to the cunt of the world” and it shows when the speaker is frustrated and angry. One thing men say when they want to fight is, “I shall fuck your woman’s/mothers/sister’s c—” and by saying this they usually don’t want to fuck another’s man’s woman/sister or mother but it is a way to call a man out and say he has no honor.

Ahmet shook his head, “We only drank two beers. We were looking for some women. Your man said to us we could get some women here. We will still buy two women from you. That is not a problem. You want to talk about-?”

“Goddamnit, you think I am a pimp?” said Wrinkly Gray Waiter. “This is a legal bar and you are making a lot of mistakes. You’d better be quiet until we can figure out what to do with you.” The Wrinkly Gray Waiter gazed off in the distance and then looked back at Ahmet and me. “I have to think what in the world I am going to do with asses like you… Alright, you are just going to pay the bills for your beers and the Champagne you ordered for the girls..”

Ahmet exploded. “That wasn’t Champagne!! It was mineral water! And we never ordered it!”

Wrinkly Gray Waiter said nothing in response for a few long seconds; just stared at Ahmet, stretching his arms over the table. Between us and the open wings of Wrinkly Gray Waiter there was emptiness. Here was something real. Wrinkly Gray Waiter had complete power over us. I was no longer addicted as a child in a candy store. The girls were gone and now reality reigned. I felt calm which surprised me.

(To be continued)

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As a group we went to a local homeless shelter that held Turks and political Refugees from other countries. The young men from Sierra Leone explained they had come as stowaways on international tankers. They were in Turkey illegally and they always feared arrest. They were afraid to even go to the government to start the refugee application process.

A man from Egypt and a man from Iran and others spoke with the men from Sierra Leone. Everyone of us were living and waiting and working in Istanbul and all of us were on the outside.

Writing by Sean David Hobbs, January 29 2012

From under bridges and out of dark corners we have come to say no to a problem in society. Some of us have been assaulted without mercy by the police; and we live on the outskirts, rejected by all.

Even if this is so we don’t look at life with dichotomy, with a “you” and with an “us”

For “us” you are the ones who live in homes. For “you” we are the ones who live on the streets. So come together and let’s share as humans. You are us and we are you.

Let’s have you ask us for forgiveness for forgetting about us and alienating us and hiding your faces from the truths in society. And then let us ask you for forgiveness for creating dangerous streets and for disturbing you. Let us be good, polite and upright young boys.

However as much as your children are childlike we too are the same, the same children. But we grew up too fast. Too quick…

When you touch the cheeks of those children you love just remember that our faces were never caressed by those who loved us… they only beat us.

We are not rightists or leftists… We are the ones deep down, caught and rejected!

While you are carrying your loved ones we waited outside in the cold, under the bridges of Istanbul for your love.

But in the place of your love the city’s police came and questioned us. With the authority of hidden cameras, and we became targeted, known to the whole city as “the suspects.” We stayed away from trouble and told you we didn’t commit any crimes! But still you scapegoated us of being the one in the wrong when a crime was committed.

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While waiting for your love the Media came in your place and we:

Became the “Wild Animals” of the media.

By seeing our drug addiction to rubbing alcohol you decided to put on our shoulders all of your fears and discomforts.

Our shoulders were weighted down now.

You threw us to the hands of the State.

Which was true right!

after all we are not your children anyway. So if anyone is going to look after us poorly, of course let it be the State!…

So the “Father Government” came to us and took us in. But “Mother Government” never came and loved us.

There was no kindness, no mercy from our government.

Rules, bunk beds and projects that we “deserved”… that is what we got

You gave us all these materials but you couldn’t fix our souls.

Then you stepped back and said, “These children will never be real men!”

Hey people.

You create homes and places for us to stay. But we couldn’t breath there.

Do you know why we prefer living under bridges than in the closed homes the State made for us?

Our exteriors are strong, it is our insides which have been broken to pieces!

Forget out about our exteriors, Touch our hearts instead!

Ye humanity who hath lost your heart, whose soul has been knifed!

We have left our places under the bridges and come out into the light of downtown Istanbul to make our voices heard!

We have lived here in this city for years addicted to substances and alienated:

We don’t want to be beaten by the Istanbul Police anymore. While being taken to jail we demand that the Police act as mentors and leaders in our community so that if we are taken to jail they don’t beat us and treat us as criminal animals but instead as humans, as younger siblings who need a hand

Don’t leave us in the darkness of this city

We are very afraid of the dark!

We inhale rubbing alcohol to take away the fear and the pain of being alone in a black world. And then you call us rubbing alcohol “Huffers.” And then we return again to the darkness. And then and then and then you see us in the news, in the newspapers and your read and then and then and then we are finished.

Please don’t blacken your eyes with insensitivity and violence. Please don’t forget about us.