Benim Öğrenci!

This has been my first week with students, and so far I am very happy to be teaching them. They have names like Onur, Murat, Gökhan, Buse, Yuşra and Mehmet, and though about 90% are from Ankara and points west, there are some from all different parts of Turkey. They are also preparing to enter many different disciplines, though economics and engineering are by far the most popular. Most are very proud to be at Bilkent and widely regard it as the best university in Turkey. Basketball is the most popular American sport here, followed by baseball and football, though of course none of those compare to Turkish soccer. I have been delighted at their levels of enthusiasm and participation so far. Some have much better English than others, but the overall effort is encourgaing, and I believe the speaking skills program will truly improve BUSEL as an English prep program over the next year.

The students come to us once a week for two hours, and we see ten groups of 4-6 students. Right now I have introduced myself about 8 times and still have a couple more to go. Good times. I am so good at "2 truths and a lie" it's not fair anymore, like me versus a Friends Camper in rock, paper, scissors (for all the times I used that this summer, Allegra Atkinson was the only person to beat me). Luckily, the comprehension of the students is much better than their expressive abilities most of the time, so explaining worksheets and other activities is doable. Each class also usually has one or two students with very good comprehension who can explain things to their classmates when needed. I promise I won't actually use that strategy all semester.

Peace and leblebli (the sesame-covered chickpeas that are my favorite food here so far),
Bucky

The four T's- Things Take Time in Turkey

According to the Fulbright advisor of one of my colleagues, that's an important mantra to keep in mind here. So far, I would have to agree. For example, one obvious and constant question for me since I arrived has been: "How do I register for my masters-level classes?" At various points in the last four weeks, I have been told I would have to visit the registrar, register with the department and register online. 0 for 3 on that one. Yesterday all the interns got emails saying the head of teacher services had sent our class info to the registrar's office, and we were all set. The hours I spent searching for those offices or the online registration system? Eh, mm, not so useful.

There are multiple examples of such frustrating and stressful logistical complications. The uncertainty of our living situation after the first three weeks, the mysterious five extra hours of contact time in our contacts that haven't been assigned, the internet connections in our current dorms, the date our passports will return to our possession...I could go on. It's enough to make the vein throb on a yoga master's forehead.

But here's the thing: the polychronic sense of time and laidback, helpful attitude is so pervasive in Turkey, you can't help but feel like if anything did go terribly wrong, it would get fixed. Last week I boarded a bus to head home from the gym because my knee was sore. The driver said he was going to middle campus, but when we came close to my street, he kept going to the music building. At the music center, everyone else on the bus got off, and I prepared to give the driver a nasty look for continuing after I said I needed to disembark. Instead, he motioned me to sit down, turned the huge touring bus around, and went back DOWN my street to drop me off. I'm still not entirely sure if this was on the actual route, but you have to love a city where the bus drivers remind you of the nice woman who took you to kindergarten your first day (or second day, sorry Mom, I can't remember if you drove me the first day).

Overall, at least 75% of people I come in contact with at Bilkent I would classify as "nice" or better on the personality scale. In contrast, working at a similar school in China it was definitely closer to 25-50%. Panama wouldn't be a fair comparison, but it's definitely the frontrunner for schools in foreign countries I have worked at (partly because I worked at an NGO there, not a school, and partly because the coolest guy I worked with was Costa Rican, not Panameno). There are good teachers anywhere you go (only in MSAD49, however, do they come close to outnumbering the also-ubiquitous mosquito). But in Ankara, the guy who makes the photocopies, the guys who serve you lunch, and the woman who tells you the police department isn't giving your passport back for another week are all very nice, too. Even the COMPUTER HELP DESK GUY was fairly painless to get help from Saturday!!

So, even if I can't properly subject myself to the masochistic fall ritual of watching the Sox fall apart or bump chests with anyone over the latest TD pass thrown by my favorite male model, at least there is a sense of security in the basic kindness of strangers that, in the long run, will probably account for more.

Arkadash'ed!!

This will be brief for the moment, I have to go back to the dorm and let my roommate in because we only have one key right now. and no internet. honk if you love liminal periods in your life.

Highlights of my trip to Safranbolu and Amasra:
(Marion took some pictures, which can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/marionpenning/sets)
The pensiyon we stayed at in Safranbolu was owned by a wonderfully hospitable family that had bought an Ottoman-era house and made a pensiyon out of it. They had a baby named Effe (I'm not sure if it's spelled the same as the popular beer), who was the cutest baby since the kitten on the street. On Thursday, one of the sons from the family took us on a tour of Yokuk, a preserved Ottoman village nearby. The houses and streets and gave a wonderful feeling of the place's history through their materials, layout, and decoration. We toured a house from back in the day when the grandfather would have lived on the top floor and his son on the third floor and that guy's son on the second and the animals on the bottom floor, which was cool because you could see how it was possible for them to cook, bathe and sleep in one room. After the tour we were offered grapes and conversation by an out-going woman named Felis. She asked if we could get married so that she could come to America with me and I said that sounded fine, so now we are arkadash's (companions/spouses). You should mostly be receiving invitations shortly. Meredith is still first in my heart though.

Going from Safranbolu to Bartin (our connection to Amasra), we finally began to leave the Anatolian Plateau. Our surroundings resembled Maine- coniferously covered hills gave onto deciduous stream valleys. The sun even disappeared as we began descending into Amasra. In Amasra we stayed with another great family, folks named Hava and Zohar, a retired teacher and engineer with daughters teaching in Istanbul. Their house had romantic dark wooden windows looking straight down onto the Black Sea in all her strength and tumult. They brought us gozleme (a nan-esque stapleof turkish diets) and figs fresh from their gardens and drove us to the bus stop when it was raining Sunday morning. Amasra was a beautiful little town, small enough to see most of it and then walk back to the pensiyon, with a great beach for dipping in the Black Sea. I tried to explain to Hava that I want to be a UU minister while we were watching the Turkish national basketball team lose to Slovenia, and couldn't quite do it, but I managed to learn the words for Jesus and Moses (Isa and Musa) in the process, and made her laugh at the fact that we only have call to worship once a week usually in the US, but they do it five times a day in Turkey.

The last tidbit I would like to include for now (I hope to update this in the next couple days with more details) involves the Turkish custom of only accepting an offer after it has been made three times, in case the person doesn't really mean it. Like when Zohar let me have the only couch cushion while we watched women's volleyball, i forgot about this when i was asking him if he wanted it instead and only asked once, so of course he said no. But when Mery and I boarded the bus to head back to Ankara, a woman with a baby was sitting behind us, and one of our seats was stuck in the tilted-back position. After we figured this out, I had to insist several times to get the woman to switch with us, and she did.

Please post or email me if you want to hear more about anything that I am talking about, hope you are all enjoying my attempts at writing about the adventures here!

Republican Turkish History and Kurdish Self-Determination

Article one, section two of the Charter of the United Nations states that the purposes of the UN include:

To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

Since the first Gulf War, US relations with Turkey have been occasionally strained. The principal issues causing tension have been those of Turkish cooperation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and US support for Kurdish nationals in northern Iraq. The creation of a Kurdish state in the ethnically Kurdish regions of Southeastern Turkey and Northern Iraq is quite clearly an issue of self-determination. Since the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, Kurds have been crying out for the right to form an independent and autonomous government. Those demands were originally "suppressed" by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder and monolithic icon of the Turkish Republic. Today, they are suppressed by a lack of engagement of the issue by mainstream Turkey. Kurds are also essentially prevented from participating in parliament because the Kurdish Nationalist Party is incapable of garnering the 10% of the popular vote needed to be represented as a party. Because of its support for the creation of an independent Kurdish state, the friendly relations that the US is attempting to cultivate with Turkey right now, are, in fact, based on the principle of self-determination.

The government policy-makers in the US have formed the stance of supporting Kurdish nationalism through strategic calculations aiming towards creating stability in northern Iraq, but they have inadvertently taken the more morally justifiable stance. Even when it is merely coincidental, Washington deserves praise for taking a stance in line with the most noble aims of the United Nations.

To say that Kurds should be allowed their own state, one must base the argument on the principle of self-determination alone. This is because the PKK, the Kurdish Nationalist Party, has committed despicable acts of terrorism throughout its existence. When I have heard mainstream (non-Kurdish) Turks discuss the issue of a Kurdish state here in Ankara, they object with violent emotion to its creation because the PKK is seen as a terrorist organization. The Kurds need not conduct their quest for self-determination in such a fashion. For an example of a group being denied its right to self-determination that is keeping pressure on the relevant government without the use of violence, they need only look a thousand or so miles to the East, to the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. The Tibetans get more and better press internationally than do the Kurds, partly because of the popularity of the Dali Lama, but also because of their strictly non-violent approach rooted in Buddhism. That exposure allows them to put more pressure on the Chinese government to accede to their demands of an independent and autonomous Tibet. Conversely, every time a PKK terrorist commits an act of terrorism, the Turkish government is only encouraged to dig in its heels and not be seen as giving in to terrorists.