As I promised awhile ago, I am going to try to detail the backgrounds of some of the more interesting peopl I have met in this program. Today it will be B2 (not to be confused with B, the previously mentioned Greek guy), a 30 year old native of Zimbabwe of British origin. His mother and father were from Ireland and northeastern England respectively. In his words, 'probably saw the same commercial on TV' in the 1960s and both headed to Zambia, still part of the British empire, looking for adventure of various sorts and better financial prospects and material comforts than they were liable to receive at home. Mom was a nurse by profession; Dad a mining engineer (read: skilled miner). They met and quickly married. A honeymoon spent in the comparatively metropolitan Zimbabwe convinced them to move to Harare, where mom left the workforce and Dad switched from copper mining to asbestos. (Noting my visibly horrified response to this, B2 informed that there are two types of asbestos, and one of them 'is quite safe.' Is this true? Anyone?) They had two children, B2 the youngest, who despite the parents' devout Catholicism were educated at fancy Anglican schools. 'Our exams were marked in Cambridge,' B2 noted with pride.
These were boarding schools, and apparently not much fun. It was here that the brothers discovered weekend retreats run by a Charismatic Pentecostal congregation.. Compared to their normal environment, these were apparently a blast, and both brothers were succesfully evangelized to in short order.
After high school, B2 read psychology in South Africa at the University of Cape Town. Like most educated Africans, he graduated with little or no job prospects. While waiting tables at a waterfront Italian restaurant and praying for divine guidance, he decided to move to Singapore and work as an English teacher.
According to him, most of his students were women from Korea, Thailand or Indonesia with some sort of guestworker or refugee visas. Most, according to him, were primarıly interested in locating a husband from either a comparatively wealthy Asian country, or somewhere in rıch white people land. B2 fell into the latter category, and was apparently innundated with offers of varying degrees of seediness. All of them, being apparently sincere in the belief system he ascribes to, he declined. Instead he married a Filipina woman he met through his church. They moved for awhile to the Phillipines (where, like in Latin America, the Pentecostals are taking over lock, stock and barrel from the Catholics), where he learned Tagolog and she learned to drive and, judging from his pictures, they played a lot of water sports.
But I guess their life there wasn't sustainable for a variety of reasons, because they followed some Sıngaporean contacts to Istanbul, where they are now settling in, looking for work, and enrolled in the same program as I. I suspect they will end up teaching English, but who knows.
The parents, if you were wondering, left Zimbabwe a few years ago (big surprise) and are now living in Ireland, somewhere rural that I can't remember.
Now, here's what I find interesting about this guy. Pentecostals are obligated to prosthelytize, right? But to do so in Turkey is illegal. I asked him about this as gently as I could, and his answer seemed to indicate that he was middling at best on the witnessing issue, and considered it rude to be otherwise. What is going on here? Are quasi-European evangelicals much more laid back than their American counterparts? Are some evangelicals a lot less evangelical than others? Most importantly, ıf so, am I a dick for not figuring that out on my own?
