Merhaba arkadașlar! A few days from now I depart for Turkey. For nine months, I will be working as a Teaching Assistant at Ataturk University in Erzurum--a city in the northeast of the country.
I feel as if I’ve been repeating the above over and over since I found out that I was going to Turkey this May. Those are the facts and they are easy to recite. The next question is always harder. Why Turkey? I went there last summer and I loved it. That’s my simplified answer. And it’s true. I went there last summer for two weeks with a scholarship for a language program that I nabbed through a quite circuitous, nearly random, series of conversations and BAM in exactly five days I’m boarding a plane to Ankara and then to Erzurum to stay for nine months.
My goal with this blog is to answer the “why?” question in greater detail. For everyone who has asked me that question in the past few weeks, but also for myself. I hope that more reasons for why I am in Turkey are revealed to me over time in Erzurum and I plan to document those discoveries here.
So! Let’s get started. Here’s what I can say to answer to the question so far. When I went to Turkey last summer, I made friends. I was one of only two Americans on the trip and the people I met there were people that I would never have met in the United States. Those I still keep in touch with today are from Syria, Poland, Finland and Iran. They were students like me but were not ones who would have ever traveled to the U.S. I was privileged, therefore, to hear perspectives that I had not heard from the foreign students on my college campus or other foreigners my age in the U.S. In a short two weeks, we shared many conversations about topics great and small, ones that we continue today. Our friendship has given me such an invaluable insight into their worlds--their faces are what immediately comes to my mind when I think of my two weeks in Turkey.
Still not a reason to go back. The friends I mentioned aren’t even Turkish.
I’m a steadfast believer in the power of place. There was something about the dramatically diverse and cross cultural setting of Turkey that made the friendships I described flourish. The direct questions we asked each other about faith, about politics, about family seemed natural in a place where cultures have clashed (figuratively and not) for centuries. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more motivated to learn than when I was in Turkey. There were so many stories to be told around me--it could be seen in the diversity of architecture, clothing, even the faces of the people on the street. I asked way more than my normal amount of questions, I never before so badly wanted to read simultaneously The Economist and National Geographic, and never stop reading them. And with all the questions building in my head, the conversations I had with my fellow Turkish Summer School-ers followed, as did our friendships.
Days after I arrived back in DC from Turkey last summer, I saw a poster in a church basement that read: “World peace begins with the relationship between two people.” Having just sent my Facebook friend requests through cyberspace across the globe, that quote, of course, made me feel overly sentimental. Why would I not want to return to a place that cultivated the friendships that may someday be responsible for world peace??
A few weeks later, a benevolent professor encouraged me to channel my enthusiasm and emotion about Turkey into a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship application. Many months later, I found out I was selected. And now I’m off to Erzurum. That concludes Chapter 1 of “Why I am going to Turkey”. As I said above, I hope that more reasons are revealed to me in time.
I’ll end with some practical information. I leave on Sunday, September 2nd at 7:15 Detroit time. I’ll arrive in Ankara for 10 day orientation. I’m not sure what the orientation will be like, and, honestly, I’m not sure what my entire job and life will be like. But I’m ready to be baptized by fire. And although I’m trying to ignore it, I’m terribly nervous as well. But I won’t dwell on that. Instead, I’m going to do a little more packing, a little more room cleaning, a little more Cub soccer game viewing, and then I will see you in Ankara.
