Retired teacher Rahim Demirbas has planted thirty-five thousand trees around his village (Photo © N. Birch)[/caption]I first met Rahim Demirbas in 2010. A friend had told me about this old man who had been planting trees around his village for over a decade, thirty-five thousand of them in total, all paid out of his own pocket. I was curious.
The village turned out to be in one of the driest parts of Turkey, on a once-forested mountainside overlooking the southern edge of the Konya plain, a vast bowl dependent on increasingly scarce rain for water. The land around is a grey expanse of thistles and salt. Everywhere there are holes like huge well-shafts, some of them sixty meters deep, formed because underground rocks that used to carry groundwater are now drying and crumbling as groundwater levels drop.
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The view from Rahim's practically deserted village (Photo © N. Birch)[/caption]And yet somehow this man, in his seventies now, a retired teacher, the first from his village to receive an education, had managed to plant spruces and cedars and wild cherry and pear and had persuaded them to grow. He had put up a wire fence to keep goats out, laid six kilometers of pipe to funnel snow melt to the plantation and built two reservoirs to hold it. The tallest of the trees were more than six meters high.
Watching him in his plantation, I was reminded of Jean Giono's story about the shepherd who turns an arid stretch of the French Alps into an oak forest by planting acorns everywhere he goes. "When I reflect that one man, armed only with his own physical and moral resources, was able to conjure from the desert this land of Canaan, I find that in spite of everything humanity is admirable," Giono wrote. "But when I consider the tenacity of spirit and the unswerving generosity that were needed to achieve this result, I feel immense respect for that old and unlearned peasant who was able to complete a work worthy of God."
Giono has his Elzeard Bouffier die peacefully in his bed. A month ago, when I visited, Rahim Demirbas was still working on. In March, he had invited friends and former students to plant a further three thousand saplings. He had been the subject of a couple of documentaries. His tallest trees were now over eight meters high. But he looked strained and unhappy.
He had money worries. He had always intended to sell the properties he had bought over the years to finance his planting. But he hadn't foreseen the increasing competition that had turned the private school he had run and taught at for twenty years into a liability. He had had to sell his car. He talked vaguely of the flat he lived in being repossessed.
That evening, he walked me to the bus station and waited an hour and a half for the Konya coach to arrive. It did him good to sit outside, he said. At home, he felt trapped.
