Tuesday, March 8th, 2005

Today was national women’s day. Yay girls! If you’re in the states I recommend doing something to commemorate. Women make up an incredibly small percentage of loan receipts for small business ventures. And this is in America, a place were our ladies are supposedly equal to men. I recommend getting involved in community investment initiatives that channel money to women with entrepreneurial ideas but a lack of capital. Check out Co-op America and look for their 1% program to get some more information.

Today I visited a local technical high school here in İskenderun. These schools give kids training in areas such as electrical engineering, electronics, computer systems, woodworking, metalworking, etc. When they graduate high school they have a specialization that allows them a slightly better chance of a job, a much easier chance of an apprenticeship, or a great start for technical college. My goal was to recruit some students for the technical college here, and to inform them about our exchange program we’re working on.

Anyway, I met with the manager of the high school. Wow. He was a nice guy… I’ll just tell you what happened. We’re chit-chatting, normal stuff really. I’m using my broken Turkish (I’ve started to tell people “Tarzance biliyorum,” which means “I speak Tarzan language.”) and he’s using his broken English. Eventually we started using our translator. The translator turns and says, “He wants to know if he can ask you a special question.” Sure. I got my answers about the Iraq war and neoconservative imperialism ready and waited for the query.

“What do you think about mind control?”

Zuh? (That’s my confused noise.) Mind control? “Yes. The American government has developed a small gun that can be fired at a person and used to control their mind. Do you think it’s possible that a large gun could be made that might be firing at entire cities in America?”

I was dumbfounded. And he was completely serious. Apparently he has been reading some rather interesting books. We also discussed American ion-bombs (I think) and the possibility that America has many other kinds of secret technology. I was getting ready to start answering questions about UFOs but we had to go.

Wow. I was not expecting it at all. It’s interesting here. People really latch on to strange conspiracy theories. In Ankara I had a bunch of people tell me that there’s a large asteroid that’s going to slam into the world in a few years, and that my country is the only one that can stop it. But we won’t.

I thought about telling him that George W. Bush is really a Yeti, but decided that it might do more harm than good.