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depressing. When İkmen’s son Bekir had died, at least he had been able
     to mourn the boy in the relative comfort of his Sultanahmet apartment. Often he had salved his emotional wounds by looking
     out across Divan Yolu at the great mosques and monuments that surrounded his home: Aya Sofya, the Blue Mosque, Topkapı Palace.
     He hadn’t had to deal with all the things this woman had been up against.
    The snowfall began to intensify, and Martha Bell and Lieutenant Diaz took them inside one of the blocks to what they were
     told was the ‘community centre’. It was a large grey room filled with chairsand tables that had seen better days, but it was warm, and there was coffee provided by a group of young men and women, mostly
     black, many of whom were very heavily tattooed. As they sat down at a table with two of the British officers, Süleyman spoke
     to İkmen in Turkish. ‘This is like Ümraniye used to be at its worst,’ he said, referring to what had once been one of İstanbul’s
     most troubled districts.
    İkmen, who wasn’t fond of anyone speaking in a language no one else could understand unless he just couldn’t help it, didn’t
     comment. Süleyman, he felt, had taken against Detroit as soon as they had landed. He’d never been a lover of the cold; it
     had to have been the snow that had prejudiced him.
    ‘By the middle of 2005, I was almost ready to give up,’ continued Martha Bell, now hunched over a large mug of coffee. ‘And,
     I’ll be honest, I would have done so if it hadn’t been for one old lady. She dead now, but Imelda Blois, she come out one
     day as I was putting back some flower bulbs and she said to me, “Martha, if you stop putting in them silly bits of nothing
     and grow something a person can eat, I’ll help you.”’
    And so Martha, the old woman and then a few other people began a vegetable garden. They called it the Luther Bell Food Patch,
     and anyone who agreed to work on it or help keep it safe was entitled to a share of its produce. The first year they grew
     potatoes, carrots, onions and collard greens, and for some families this meant that their food bills went down. Working in
     the garden became fun, especially in the summer, and the following year more people and more land produced even more food.
     People who had never talked to each other before became friends, and when Martha suggested they all get rid of the burned-out
     cars and the old broken furniture, a lot of them were willing to help her do that. The dealers and the gangsters stayed, but
     began to get pushed into more and more distant parts of the space. Unspoken was the knowledge that the dealers and the gang
     bosses just helped themselves whenever they felt like it to the now manyvegetables that grew in the garden. But they didn’t oppose it any more. There were too many people who liked it and worked
     at it, and anyway, no one actively opposed the gangs. People just got on, ignoring them and slowly growing things. Some of
     the gangsters, if a little reluctantly at first, even helped out themselves. Funding came in too. From local council officials,
     from the city, and eventually from the police.
    ‘Then, one day about two years ago, the dealers not involved in the garden just weren’t on the ground out there no more,’
     Martha said. She looked down for a moment as if to collect herself. After all her struggles, to finally triumph like that
     had to be almost unbelievable. But then Martha looked up again and she smiled. ‘Lieutenant Diaz saw what we done; he been
     involved from the start, helping us, fund-raising. PD do us proud now. So we help them too, it’s mutual. And that’s why you’re
     all here today.’
    ‘Things like the Luther Bell Food Patch are what will bring parts of this city back to life,’ Diaz said. ‘I am a Detroiter
     born and bred, and it offends every bone in my body to see what unemployment, gangs and drugs have done to this city. But
     this is one way forward, and