A picture speaks a thousand words. There's nothing else I can say about this person.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Crisis: Averted!!
It's been a couple of weeks since my post about the events on Turkey-Iraq border, and I have to say, things seem to have calmed down here. What at first appeared in the media to be a vengeful all-out Turkish invasion of Northern Iraq looks like it's been downgraded to a secret, Special Forces-type war. Bombs were lobbed over the border, to be sure, but now the Americans appear to be collaborating with the Turks by providing them with intelligence information and maybe some soldiers. Not that this has stopped many people from hating the Americans, who are viewed as being the cause of all of this, and people resent that the attack on Northern Iraq is being carried out on American terms with America's patriarchal assistance.
The Turkish news is talking about something else and I quit paying attention. The English-language news is silent on any Turkey issues. Flags are still waving from most apartment windows, but it takes awhile for them all to come down after a national holiday, and yesterday (November 10) was a type of holiday too. November 10 is the day Atatürk died. In remembrance of the moment of his death, all of Turkey has a minute of silence at 9:05am on November 10. I've never actually been in a crowded area of the city at this time of the morning, but I'm told it's astounding. An air-raid siren sounds, and for one minute, everything stops. Pedestrians stop walking, cars stop driving, people stop talking, vendors stop hawking, and music stops playing. Many people, like my husband, get tears in their eyes.
Having gotten caught up in the last crisis and having had the feeling that I needed to cover LE with my body to protect him from the world coming to an end, I started thinking about some other crises in Turkey since I've been here. Some of them, like this recent one, I've gotten caught up in the hullabaloo, but for others, I'm able to keep my snooty aloofness.
One crisis we all got through okay I mentioned in a previous post, in which former Prime Minister Ecevit's ministers resigned on him. They decided Ecevit was too old, that his reign had gone on long enough, and that he just wasn't doing a very good job anymore. The Lira tanked for that political crisis, and though we spent a sorrowful day at work watching our salary dwindle away against the dollar, things were back to normal in a few weeks, for me and those other teachers, anyway. The greater Turkish economy took a pretty big hit, and that time is still referred to as a mini-crisis. It's nothing like the recent major economic crisis here in 2000, when several banks crashed and several bank owners absconded with all the money and the (old) Turkish Lira went from 600,000 to 1.5 million to the dollar almost overnight.
The year before last, the pet crisis was bird flu. A few contaminated birds were found in Turkey and the crisis exploded. Fear of bird flu was suddenly rampant, and it filled the airwaves. Every evening we were treated to footage of mounds of dead chickens and geese being carted out of the villages. The guys doing the carting were always clad from head to toe in spaceman-like biohazard gear, though invariably the carts were surrounded by gawking villagers and several children dancing around and mugging for the cameras, none of whom had any protection whatsoever from the supposedly contaminated birds. Most smaller chicken and egg producing companies were put out of business, and even now all that remain are a few large corporations that irradiate the products to EU standards and proudly stamp this on the packaging. Fish sales skyrocketed, as did the price of fish while the savvy fishermen cashed in on the birds' misfortune. While I'm sure most of my neighbors stopped buying chicken and were living in fear of bird flu, they continued throwing their uneaten bread out onto the second-floor landings, thus attracting flocks of wild birds to our kitchen windows. I seemed to be the only one bothered by this, not so much because of bird flu, but because the occasional pigeon would get in and poop all over.
As a side note, I find pigeons and their poo particularly disgusting. I'd rather have a rat in my house than a pigeon. In fact, once I did have a rat in my house here (though surely I'm kidding myself by calling it 'a rat' in the singular when logically there's no such thing). At night, he would steal my dirty underwear from the laundry pile and drag it under the bed to nibble, or he would rifle through the trash in the kitchen and knock over the empty wine bottles in there. Once I went on vacation to the States for a couple of weeks, and when I returned, the rat had made himself at home. He'd grown downright cheeky in my absence, and would saunter audaciously down the middle of the hallway while the lights were on, pause in doorways to look at me and sniff contemptuously before continuing about his business. I got used to the rat, but pigeons I can't abide.
As another side note, during the bird flu crisis, BE and I mentioned to his mother that we were thinking of getting a cat. His mother can't abide any animal, particularly one in the house, so she went nuts at this development. She told us we couldn't get a cat because they were so dangerous. She'd seen on the news a story about a village cat that had eaten a bird infected with bird flu, and the cat died. Then a village boy had come along and played with the dead cat, from which he contracted bird flu and also died. To me, the real problem with this story was the boy who played with the dead cat, but not to my mother-in-law. When we told her that news story was untrue and probably biologically impossible, she suddenly remembered my husband is deathly allergic to cats, an ailment that even my husband was unaware of until that moment. In the end, we didn't get the cat, but that's because we live in an apartment and don't want a cat box or a cat who can't go outside, not because of bird flu.
This summer's crisis was the water crisis. Suddenly, according the government, Turkey's reservoirs were down to 30% capacity. It was as though it happened overnight, even though it must take a few years of drought to get water supplies that low. Since I've been in Turkey, I've not heard a peep about water conservation or water shortage. Turkey's always proud to be one of the only countries in this region with ample water. Every morning and several times throughout the day, millions of shopkeepers and housewives pour water on the pavement in front of their doors to keep the dust down. People wash their cars with high-pressure hoses which they leave running into the gutters while they soap the cars. When someone leaves, you're supposed to throw water behind their departing vehicle (it's a superstition and I have no idea of the reasoning behind it). These are just a few examples of water usage here. Most of this behavior continued even after the warnings about a water shortage started to surface. And then it became a crisis. Experts estimated that Istanbul would be completely out of water by September. We were looking at weeks-long water cuts in the dead of summer. BE insisted we store a bunch of water on the balcony in bottles where it still sits, turning greening or reddish, depending on what was in the water to start with. TV commercials about water conservation started to appear. One of them showed a teacup being stirred with sugar cubes and dry tea leaves in the bottom, and warned us that if there is no water, there is no tea. A terrifying prospect indeed, though I'm sure most people, like me, use bottled water for tea because the tap water is very hard and not really drinkable, sometimes with a funny color or smell. On highway overpasses, government-sponsored banners appeared telling us that dishwashers use less water than washing by hand, as though most people here would suddenly be able to afford dishwashers in order to save water.
And now it's November, and the taps are still running. There's been a 30% price increase with more to come, and there's been a baffling increase in the amount of red stuff in the water. Maybe that's what the price increase is for. To be fair, Ankara was without water for several weeks, and the guys that sell plastic storage containers there quadrupled the price of their wares. But here, nothing. No crisis. Not that I'm complaining. Water cuts are a pain. In the center of Istanbul some people's water is cut off weekly, and I'm just glad it's not me. I can't imagine dealing with all the things that regularly come out of a baby without having water readily accessible.
My final crisis for this post is one that happens almost every year, which is the Snow Crisis. At the first hint of anything like snow, the news is suddenly filled with the Snow Crisis, complete with footage of previous years' snowy messes and heart-pounding music. I've spent five winters in Istanbul, and it has snowed pretty heavily four of those years. Nonetheless, no one seems to understand what's happening when it snows. Perhaps because it's supposed to be a hot Mediterranean country, no one can accept the snow. Much like when it rains, everyone promptly forgets how to drive. Panic abounds. Old people hear about the impending Snow Crisis and line up to buy bread. In fact, whenever the news starts shouting about any kind of crisis, old people line up to buy bread. These bread lines get really long, with all these poor old people standing outside shivering. I guess they didn't get the news that lots of bread is readily available from lots of places besides the roadside Halk Ekmek ('public bread') stands where everyone lines up. Snow brings everything to a standstill.
The first year I was here, it dumped a few feet of snow but the government opted to keep schools and everything open. Then a few little kids died trying to get home from school in the snow. So the following two years, as soon as the first flake hit the ground, the government quickly closed all the schools and public offices for several days, but the snow didn't really come, not the kind that sticks anyway. Then the snow came for real, and there was another week of everything closed. For teachers and students (and people who work in public offices, I suppose), this is great. Free days on end with nothing to do but laze around the house and watch home improvement on BBC, occasionally flipping to the news to see if your school is closed the next day. Two years ago, the snow came right after Kurban Bayram, which followed the semester break, and I ended up with a month off work. Admittedly, I got a bit stir crazy because I couldn't really go anywhere, and for a few days, there was no water or electricity during the day, so I was forced to devise low-tech entertainment.
Despite, all these crises, we somehow carry on. The upshot of the bird flu crisis is that chicken and eggs are more expensive and less tasty. The upshot of the water crisis is pinkish baths for LE that smell faintly of blood, and a higher water bill. The upshot of all the snow crises is that this past winter, when I spent most days on the sofa nursing LE, I'd already seen every BBC home improvement and antiques show at least once, and knew how they ended.
I think the important thing is to remember not to get sucked into all these crises.
The Turkish news is talking about something else and I quit paying attention. The English-language news is silent on any Turkey issues. Flags are still waving from most apartment windows, but it takes awhile for them all to come down after a national holiday, and yesterday (November 10) was a type of holiday too. November 10 is the day Atatürk died. In remembrance of the moment of his death, all of Turkey has a minute of silence at 9:05am on November 10. I've never actually been in a crowded area of the city at this time of the morning, but I'm told it's astounding. An air-raid siren sounds, and for one minute, everything stops. Pedestrians stop walking, cars stop driving, people stop talking, vendors stop hawking, and music stops playing. Many people, like my husband, get tears in their eyes.
Having gotten caught up in the last crisis and having had the feeling that I needed to cover LE with my body to protect him from the world coming to an end, I started thinking about some other crises in Turkey since I've been here. Some of them, like this recent one, I've gotten caught up in the hullabaloo, but for others, I'm able to keep my snooty aloofness.
One crisis we all got through okay I mentioned in a previous post, in which former Prime Minister Ecevit's ministers resigned on him. They decided Ecevit was too old, that his reign had gone on long enough, and that he just wasn't doing a very good job anymore. The Lira tanked for that political crisis, and though we spent a sorrowful day at work watching our salary dwindle away against the dollar, things were back to normal in a few weeks, for me and those other teachers, anyway. The greater Turkish economy took a pretty big hit, and that time is still referred to as a mini-crisis. It's nothing like the recent major economic crisis here in 2000, when several banks crashed and several bank owners absconded with all the money and the (old) Turkish Lira went from 600,000 to 1.5 million to the dollar almost overnight.
The year before last, the pet crisis was bird flu. A few contaminated birds were found in Turkey and the crisis exploded. Fear of bird flu was suddenly rampant, and it filled the airwaves. Every evening we were treated to footage of mounds of dead chickens and geese being carted out of the villages. The guys doing the carting were always clad from head to toe in spaceman-like biohazard gear, though invariably the carts were surrounded by gawking villagers and several children dancing around and mugging for the cameras, none of whom had any protection whatsoever from the supposedly contaminated birds. Most smaller chicken and egg producing companies were put out of business, and even now all that remain are a few large corporations that irradiate the products to EU standards and proudly stamp this on the packaging. Fish sales skyrocketed, as did the price of fish while the savvy fishermen cashed in on the birds' misfortune. While I'm sure most of my neighbors stopped buying chicken and were living in fear of bird flu, they continued throwing their uneaten bread out onto the second-floor landings, thus attracting flocks of wild birds to our kitchen windows. I seemed to be the only one bothered by this, not so much because of bird flu, but because the occasional pigeon would get in and poop all over.
As a side note, I find pigeons and their poo particularly disgusting. I'd rather have a rat in my house than a pigeon. In fact, once I did have a rat in my house here (though surely I'm kidding myself by calling it 'a rat' in the singular when logically there's no such thing). At night, he would steal my dirty underwear from the laundry pile and drag it under the bed to nibble, or he would rifle through the trash in the kitchen and knock over the empty wine bottles in there. Once I went on vacation to the States for a couple of weeks, and when I returned, the rat had made himself at home. He'd grown downright cheeky in my absence, and would saunter audaciously down the middle of the hallway while the lights were on, pause in doorways to look at me and sniff contemptuously before continuing about his business. I got used to the rat, but pigeons I can't abide.
As another side note, during the bird flu crisis, BE and I mentioned to his mother that we were thinking of getting a cat. His mother can't abide any animal, particularly one in the house, so she went nuts at this development. She told us we couldn't get a cat because they were so dangerous. She'd seen on the news a story about a village cat that had eaten a bird infected with bird flu, and the cat died. Then a village boy had come along and played with the dead cat, from which he contracted bird flu and also died. To me, the real problem with this story was the boy who played with the dead cat, but not to my mother-in-law. When we told her that news story was untrue and probably biologically impossible, she suddenly remembered my husband is deathly allergic to cats, an ailment that even my husband was unaware of until that moment. In the end, we didn't get the cat, but that's because we live in an apartment and don't want a cat box or a cat who can't go outside, not because of bird flu.
This summer's crisis was the water crisis. Suddenly, according the government, Turkey's reservoirs were down to 30% capacity. It was as though it happened overnight, even though it must take a few years of drought to get water supplies that low. Since I've been in Turkey, I've not heard a peep about water conservation or water shortage. Turkey's always proud to be one of the only countries in this region with ample water. Every morning and several times throughout the day, millions of shopkeepers and housewives pour water on the pavement in front of their doors to keep the dust down. People wash their cars with high-pressure hoses which they leave running into the gutters while they soap the cars. When someone leaves, you're supposed to throw water behind their departing vehicle (it's a superstition and I have no idea of the reasoning behind it). These are just a few examples of water usage here. Most of this behavior continued even after the warnings about a water shortage started to surface. And then it became a crisis. Experts estimated that Istanbul would be completely out of water by September. We were looking at weeks-long water cuts in the dead of summer. BE insisted we store a bunch of water on the balcony in bottles where it still sits, turning greening or reddish, depending on what was in the water to start with. TV commercials about water conservation started to appear. One of them showed a teacup being stirred with sugar cubes and dry tea leaves in the bottom, and warned us that if there is no water, there is no tea. A terrifying prospect indeed, though I'm sure most people, like me, use bottled water for tea because the tap water is very hard and not really drinkable, sometimes with a funny color or smell. On highway overpasses, government-sponsored banners appeared telling us that dishwashers use less water than washing by hand, as though most people here would suddenly be able to afford dishwashers in order to save water.
And now it's November, and the taps are still running. There's been a 30% price increase with more to come, and there's been a baffling increase in the amount of red stuff in the water. Maybe that's what the price increase is for. To be fair, Ankara was without water for several weeks, and the guys that sell plastic storage containers there quadrupled the price of their wares. But here, nothing. No crisis. Not that I'm complaining. Water cuts are a pain. In the center of Istanbul some people's water is cut off weekly, and I'm just glad it's not me. I can't imagine dealing with all the things that regularly come out of a baby without having water readily accessible.
My final crisis for this post is one that happens almost every year, which is the Snow Crisis. At the first hint of anything like snow, the news is suddenly filled with the Snow Crisis, complete with footage of previous years' snowy messes and heart-pounding music. I've spent five winters in Istanbul, and it has snowed pretty heavily four of those years. Nonetheless, no one seems to understand what's happening when it snows. Perhaps because it's supposed to be a hot Mediterranean country, no one can accept the snow. Much like when it rains, everyone promptly forgets how to drive. Panic abounds. Old people hear about the impending Snow Crisis and line up to buy bread. In fact, whenever the news starts shouting about any kind of crisis, old people line up to buy bread. These bread lines get really long, with all these poor old people standing outside shivering. I guess they didn't get the news that lots of bread is readily available from lots of places besides the roadside Halk Ekmek ('public bread') stands where everyone lines up. Snow brings everything to a standstill.
The first year I was here, it dumped a few feet of snow but the government opted to keep schools and everything open. Then a few little kids died trying to get home from school in the snow. So the following two years, as soon as the first flake hit the ground, the government quickly closed all the schools and public offices for several days, but the snow didn't really come, not the kind that sticks anyway. Then the snow came for real, and there was another week of everything closed. For teachers and students (and people who work in public offices, I suppose), this is great. Free days on end with nothing to do but laze around the house and watch home improvement on BBC, occasionally flipping to the news to see if your school is closed the next day. Two years ago, the snow came right after Kurban Bayram, which followed the semester break, and I ended up with a month off work. Admittedly, I got a bit stir crazy because I couldn't really go anywhere, and for a few days, there was no water or electricity during the day, so I was forced to devise low-tech entertainment.
Despite, all these crises, we somehow carry on. The upshot of the bird flu crisis is that chicken and eggs are more expensive and less tasty. The upshot of the water crisis is pinkish baths for LE that smell faintly of blood, and a higher water bill. The upshot of all the snow crises is that this past winter, when I spent most days on the sofa nursing LE, I'd already seen every BBC home improvement and antiques show at least once, and knew how they ended.
I think the important thing is to remember not to get sucked into all these crises.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Dear Anonymous...
To be honest, I was kind of waiting to get slammed for the post entitled 'Open Letter To Turks Dealing With Foreigners'. I’m surprised it took anyone this long to get their undies in a bundle over it, actually. This morning, I received a lengthy comment from Anonymous, who was obviously very upset about the post. Since Anonymous took the time to read and respond to me, I’ll give him or her the same courtesy.
According to Anonymous, it’s only Westerners who hate Turks, not the whole world. Okay, point taken. Perhaps I overgeneralized. But I’ll invite Anonymous to read the OP more carefully, in which I say that prior to coming to Turkey (from the West, I might add), I’d never met anyone who even had an opinion on Turks or Turkey, or had even thought about them very much. It’s true, I promise. I also would like to remind Anonymous that the entire West is not made up of a single group of people who all think and do the same things.
As for camels in Istanbul, fair enough. I’ve never seen one here either. The only camels I’ve ever seen in Turkey were on Camel Beach near Bodrum, and they were there for the benefit of tourists. Lucky thing, there not being camels here, as I find camels one of Nature’s more unpleasant beasts. I also don’t think camel racing is a big sport here, so probably there aren’t very many people in Istanbul inseminating camels for this (or any other) purpose. In fact, the reference to inseminating racing camels was a literary device we call ‘exaggeration’ or ‘overstatement,’ sometimes used for comic effect. If the humor was lost on our friend Anonymous, I do apologize. Might I suggest replacing the reference to camels with 'changing the bags in biohazardous waste containers,' as this is another group of people who's hands I don't want in my baby's mouth.
As for Anonymous' other comments, which he or she gave in list form, I would like to treat them one by one:
1- Don`t call them names like barbarians, mongols, smelly muslims etc...
I agree-- these are awful names to call someone. Interestingly, the only people I've heard refer to Turks as 'barbarians' are Turks, either repeating what they believe Westerners think of them, or proudly, when they talk about winning some war or other. By 'mongols,' I'm not sure if you mean 'Mongolians' or 'people with Down's Syndrome (in Turkish, for my other readers, 'mongol' means 'retard'),' but one is inaccurate and the other is just mean. As for 'smelly Muslims,' I'd say, because of all the abdest and general obsession with cleanliness, Muslims are, by and large, among the least smelly people on Earth.
2- Don`t treat them like terrorists in airports just because they hold a Turkish passport.
I can't agree with you more here. This sucks beyond belief, and does a disservice to everyone involved. My husband had a terrible time getting a visa because of this prejudice. I was once questioned by the border police in Portland Airport about my involvement in the HSBC bombings because I'd arrived from Turkey a few weeks after. My poor little son is looking at a lifetime of bigotry due to being half Turkish, though you can bet we'll use his American passport when travelling. Lucky for him. But really, this treatment in airports is a matter of policy dreamed up by the idiots in authority, and is not the opinion held by every Westerner.
3-Don`t ask them silly questions like "how many wives do you have?" "have you killed anyone before?" "how come you don`t wear fez?"
The only people I've seen wearing the fez are ice cream sellers. I'm starting to wonder, dear Anonymous, where you live and how you've come to be surrounded by such ignorant Westerners.
4-We know that the western world has always been angelic elves to the others but forget how perfect you are at least for a little while and don`t accuse Turkish individuals of various "genocides" such as "armenian genocide" "assyrian genocide" "greek genocide" "anzac genocide" "british genocide" "polar bear genocide" "x genocide" "y genocide" etc.
What on did the Turks do to the Assyrians? I'll have to look into that one. I've never heard Turks accused of 'Greek genocide' or 'ANZAC genocide'-- I was always under the impression those were mutual slaughters carried out in a time of war. The Armenian issue is a big can of worms that I've been avoiding in this blog. Suffice it to say here that I think the Turks' all-out denial of The Armenian Thing That Never Happened is rather foolish. By pretending it never happened, they've lost the ability to participate sensibly in the international historical debate around these events. Today's Turks aren't exactly responsible for what happened to the Armenians, as it happened before Turkey was even a Republic, and, as I understand it, the wholesale slaughter was mostly done by Kurdish mercenaries as they forcibly marched the Armenians to Syria (though I happily admit my source on this is Louis de Bernieres' Birds Without Wings, a work of fiction). I quite understand that this is a sensitive issue, and I quite agree that Turkey is unfairly portrayed in the international media. But, like I said, as long as Turkey continues to take the position that it never happened, they will never have a chance to have their voice properly heard or taken seriously.
5-Don`t hang signs on your bars clubs etc. saying "no dogs and Turks allowed"
6- Don`t shout out "I would be a Paki rather than a Turk" in soccer games.
7- Don`t insult them just because they are not descended from the "superior" christian white race.
8- Don`t make fun of them just because they are poorer than you.
Again, I have to wonder where you live? Perhaps you should consider moving, as the people around you seem to be the worst kinds of bigots. I myself never really even heard the word 'Paki' until I came to Turkey and met a lot of British expats. For a long time, I wasn't even sure what 'Paki' meant, and I thought it had something to do with elephants.
9- Don`t generalize stuff if you come up with a Turk that has smt disturbing to you. there are some 300 millions of them and not all are the same.
Thank God for that! I don't know what I'd do if all 300 million Turks were trying to touch my baby.
You're preaching to the choir, Anonymous. I think we can apply this last comment to both of us, though if you'd read the OP and my other posts more carefully, you might understand that this is where I'm already coming from. It sounds like we're both expats living abroad, and when a few people do or say hurtful things to us, it's easy develop an 'Us and Them' mentality, and assume it's the entire race who's bigoted, ignorant, and against us, which of course is never the case.
I won't take back anything I've said (except perhaps the camel thing), and I won't always deal with comments this extensively in the blog. But in this case, Anonymous took a lot of time to respond to me, and, given some of the things he or she appears to be facing in his or her host country, I think this person has some legitimate beefs.
According to Anonymous, it’s only Westerners who hate Turks, not the whole world. Okay, point taken. Perhaps I overgeneralized. But I’ll invite Anonymous to read the OP more carefully, in which I say that prior to coming to Turkey (from the West, I might add), I’d never met anyone who even had an opinion on Turks or Turkey, or had even thought about them very much. It’s true, I promise. I also would like to remind Anonymous that the entire West is not made up of a single group of people who all think and do the same things.
As for camels in Istanbul, fair enough. I’ve never seen one here either. The only camels I’ve ever seen in Turkey were on Camel Beach near Bodrum, and they were there for the benefit of tourists. Lucky thing, there not being camels here, as I find camels one of Nature’s more unpleasant beasts. I also don’t think camel racing is a big sport here, so probably there aren’t very many people in Istanbul inseminating camels for this (or any other) purpose. In fact, the reference to inseminating racing camels was a literary device we call ‘exaggeration’ or ‘overstatement,’ sometimes used for comic effect. If the humor was lost on our friend Anonymous, I do apologize. Might I suggest replacing the reference to camels with 'changing the bags in biohazardous waste containers,' as this is another group of people who's hands I don't want in my baby's mouth.
As for Anonymous' other comments, which he or she gave in list form, I would like to treat them one by one:
1- Don`t call them names like barbarians, mongols, smelly muslims etc...
I agree-- these are awful names to call someone. Interestingly, the only people I've heard refer to Turks as 'barbarians' are Turks, either repeating what they believe Westerners think of them, or proudly, when they talk about winning some war or other. By 'mongols,' I'm not sure if you mean 'Mongolians' or 'people with Down's Syndrome (in Turkish, for my other readers, 'mongol' means 'retard'),' but one is inaccurate and the other is just mean. As for 'smelly Muslims,' I'd say, because of all the abdest and general obsession with cleanliness, Muslims are, by and large, among the least smelly people on Earth.
2- Don`t treat them like terrorists in airports just because they hold a Turkish passport.
I can't agree with you more here. This sucks beyond belief, and does a disservice to everyone involved. My husband had a terrible time getting a visa because of this prejudice. I was once questioned by the border police in Portland Airport about my involvement in the HSBC bombings because I'd arrived from Turkey a few weeks after. My poor little son is looking at a lifetime of bigotry due to being half Turkish, though you can bet we'll use his American passport when travelling. Lucky for him. But really, this treatment in airports is a matter of policy dreamed up by the idiots in authority, and is not the opinion held by every Westerner.
3-Don`t ask them silly questions like "how many wives do you have?" "have you killed anyone before?" "how come you don`t wear fez?"
The only people I've seen wearing the fez are ice cream sellers. I'm starting to wonder, dear Anonymous, where you live and how you've come to be surrounded by such ignorant Westerners.
4-We know that the western world has always been angelic elves to the others but forget how perfect you are at least for a little while and don`t accuse Turkish individuals of various "genocides" such as "armenian genocide" "assyrian genocide" "greek genocide" "anzac genocide" "british genocide" "polar bear genocide" "x genocide" "y genocide" etc.
What on did the Turks do to the Assyrians? I'll have to look into that one. I've never heard Turks accused of 'Greek genocide' or 'ANZAC genocide'-- I was always under the impression those were mutual slaughters carried out in a time of war. The Armenian issue is a big can of worms that I've been avoiding in this blog. Suffice it to say here that I think the Turks' all-out denial of The Armenian Thing That Never Happened is rather foolish. By pretending it never happened, they've lost the ability to participate sensibly in the international historical debate around these events. Today's Turks aren't exactly responsible for what happened to the Armenians, as it happened before Turkey was even a Republic, and, as I understand it, the wholesale slaughter was mostly done by Kurdish mercenaries as they forcibly marched the Armenians to Syria (though I happily admit my source on this is Louis de Bernieres' Birds Without Wings, a work of fiction). I quite understand that this is a sensitive issue, and I quite agree that Turkey is unfairly portrayed in the international media. But, like I said, as long as Turkey continues to take the position that it never happened, they will never have a chance to have their voice properly heard or taken seriously.
5-Don`t hang signs on your bars clubs etc. saying "no dogs and Turks allowed"
6- Don`t shout out "I would be a Paki rather than a Turk" in soccer games.
7- Don`t insult them just because they are not descended from the "superior" christian white race.
8- Don`t make fun of them just because they are poorer than you.
Again, I have to wonder where you live? Perhaps you should consider moving, as the people around you seem to be the worst kinds of bigots. I myself never really even heard the word 'Paki' until I came to Turkey and met a lot of British expats. For a long time, I wasn't even sure what 'Paki' meant, and I thought it had something to do with elephants.
9- Don`t generalize stuff if you come up with a Turk that has smt disturbing to you. there are some 300 millions of them and not all are the same.
Thank God for that! I don't know what I'd do if all 300 million Turks were trying to touch my baby.
You're preaching to the choir, Anonymous. I think we can apply this last comment to both of us, though if you'd read the OP and my other posts more carefully, you might understand that this is where I'm already coming from. It sounds like we're both expats living abroad, and when a few people do or say hurtful things to us, it's easy develop an 'Us and Them' mentality, and assume it's the entire race who's bigoted, ignorant, and against us, which of course is never the case.
I won't take back anything I've said (except perhaps the camel thing), and I won't always deal with comments this extensively in the blog. But in this case, Anonymous took a lot of time to respond to me, and, given some of the things he or she appears to be facing in his or her host country, I think this person has some legitimate beefs.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Child Development
In an earlier post, I admitted to plopping LE in front of the Teletubbies while I eat my breakfast. I'm ashamed, but LE absolutely loves the TV. He has ever since his eyes opened from swollen little slits, even before he could focus properly. The love affair has just increased as he's started to be able to make some sense of what's going on in there. Gone are the days of nursing and watching DIY and antiques programs on BBC, because LE, no matter how much he wants the milk, can't stop himself from whipping his head around every ten seconds to see what's going on. Sometimes he forgets to let go of my nipple for this, but as it turns out, that's a part of my anatomy that's much more elastic than I had previously believed. In his favor, I also can't read while nursing anymore, not until he's half asleep at least, because as soon as he hears the pages of the book, he whips around and starts reaching. Now I can kid myself that this is because he's really clever and that it bodes future bookishness, but really, he's not interested in what the book says. He just wants to grab the pages so he can crumple and rip them and see if they taste good.
In Turkish, before someone says something, they often say "I'm going to say something." On Turkish TV, there is a short pre-commercial thing to announce the commercials, so when your show cuts out, it doesn't always go straight to the commercial. It goes to a girl eating an apple, or a bride and groom on a trampoline, or a cup of tea being stirred, and it says Reklam ('commercial') at the bottom. Sometimes it rather bafflingly says 'Advertorial.' One of these commercial announcements is LE's favorite thing on TV-- there's a bell sound, and some music, and a martini glass full of green olives and vodka being swirled. He drops everything and stares when he hears that one coming on. That's my boy! Someday I'll have to teach him, though, that a twist of lemon is a better garnish for a martini. The olive, as Auntie Mame chides us, takes up too much room in that little glass.
On one hand, I wish LE didn't like TV so much. I try to limit our TV time as much as possible, especially TV with a lot of commercials. I know TV is bad for kids. I know it's burning unwanted pathways into his little brain and possibly lowering his IQ. I know it teaches him bad things about the world and our society, and that it will someday soon make him covet crappy plastic toys that kill the imagination and food in lurid colors that's full of things I can't pronounce. On the other hand, it's not like I can pretend TV doesn't exist. Electronic media and screens are a fact of LE's future. I wouldn't be surprised if students' desks all contain monitors by the time he's in high school. And it's not like I'll ever convince my husband to ban the TV from our house so we can occupy ourselves with loftier pursuits. This is Turkey, where they haven't even had non-State-owned channels for very long, and every home, business, restaurant, and hospital has a TV blaring every waking moment whether anyone's watching it or not. So the way it works now is, LE watches TV sometimes while I need my hands free, but if anyone else (for example, my in-laws) tries to put him in front of their TV because they think it's cute, I get all huffy and use it as an example of how they don't listen to me or respect my rules for my child. So it all works out in the end.
Because of the time change last week, LE has still been waking up an hour or more earlier than usual. Generally, he's had his breakfast and I'm ready for mine by 9am, just in time for 'Big Cook Little Cook,' a kids' show on BBC that I find highly amusing but that LE doesn't really care about (he just likes the songs), followed by the Teletubbies, which I've already covered. Lately, he's been up (gasp!) before 7, meaning he's had his breakfast in time for this show I can't stand called 'Balamory.' The only redeeming feature of 'Balamory' is that everyone has a delightful Scottish accent, but the fun stops there. It's positively insipid, with this awful theme song that stays in my head for weeks after I've watched it. I leave it on for LE as much as I can stand (again, he likes the songs and the people dancing around), but often I switch to the news to check the tickers for any disasters I may have missed, or I just flip around the Turkish stations until I get so annoyed with them that 'Balamory' starts looking pretty good.
Yesterday morning, I flipped to a Turkish kids' show, and inevitably began comparing it to 'Balamory.' On 'Balamory,' someone was moving house and they needed labels for their boxes so they'd know which rooms to put them in. Rather than simply use a pen and write the rooms on the boxes, they got Spencer the Painter to take some bits of paper to the nursery school so the kids could make the labels. Spencer gathered the kids around and explained what they were doing, then elicited from the kids the kinds of pictures they should draw for these labels. 'A horse!' said one. 'A spaceship!' said another. 'A bed!' said a third. Now, obviously 'a bed' is the only 'right' answer here, but Spencer told all the kids they had wonderful ideas and set them to drawing. Compare this with the Turkish kids' show, in which the kids were lined up by their minders, and divided into teams. The minders told them the teams would be called 'Bıcır' and 'Gıcır' (I don't know what these words mean, if indeed they mean anything, but they sound 'cute'). Two kids were chosen by the minders to climb into a basket full of balls, then instructed to find the balls with certain letters on them, then pass them to their teammates, who would pass them down a line of kids, where the last kid would put the ball into a smaller basket.
On the Turkish program, there was some shuffling and escaping by some of the kids who didn't like which team they had been put on. There was a bit of jealousy at not being chosen to be the kid to go into the basket with the balls. One little girl named Zeynep was put on a team of all boys, which she didn't like, and she was the one who had to put the passed ball into the small basket, but because she was about 3, and the boys were all screaming and jumping around, she wasn't doing a very good job and the boy next to her started putting the ball in for her. The winning team was praised and the losing team was ignored. On the British program, all the kids were told everything they did was wonderful and they happily drew their pictures. There were plenty of markers to go around.
From a pedagogical point of view, it can be said that the British activity was more 'modern,' and more in line with current philosophies of child development. But I'm not quite willing to jump on that bandwagon and say the things the kids on 'Balamory' were learning are better than the things the kids on the Turkish program were learning. On one show, creativity was being encouraged, and on the other, obedience and competition were the goals. At the end of the respective activities, all of the 'Balamory' kids felt good and validated, while just a few of the Turkish kids felt they had received metaphorical gold stars, and by then, most of them weren't paying attention anymore anyway.
Of course, I'm inclined to think an activity isn't really good when most of the kids are left feeling bad at the end, and of course it seems nicer to see kids' ideas being elicited and respected, and their creativity encouraged to flower. But in the grand scheme of things, how much does it matter? Are the kids on 'Balamory' any better off in the end? In real life, most people don't get to be creative. Most people get the wrong answers. Some people win while most people lose. Hardly anyone gets a gold star. On one hand, we can say that it's good for children to experience mostly good things when they're small, because it just goes downhill from there. On the other hand, there's something to be said for having a little reality in our learning experiences.
One of my big worries if we stay in Turkey is LE's education. The education system here is about fifty years out of date. The schools are overcrowded and underfunded, and the focus is on memorization and competition, where students spend most of their time memorizing unanalyzed facts to regurgitate for standardized multiple choice tests which will then be used to determine which students get to fill the very limited places in decent universities. Turkish students are great at memorizing, which is a skill most of us in America have lost. I always wished I could find a good way to use memorization in my EFL classes, though generally I spent a lot of time working to stop them trying to memorize everything because it's not really possible to memorize an entire language. I don't know how many oral reports I had to listen to in which the student had memorized pages of information lifted from the Internet, most of which he or she had no idea of the meaning or pronunciation. And no matter how hard I tried to get them to use original ideas or critical thinking, most students were only interested in what was going to be on the exam, because in the end, that was all that mattered. It wasn't really that the students were wrong or that I was bad. It was that we came from entirely disparate educational backgrounds and philosophies and never could quite find a way to work together. And while from a humanist perspective I appreciate the American and British systems' approach to early childhood education, Turkish students far outrank American and British students in mathematics and the physical sciences, which are arguably much more useful skills in the real world than having a good imagination. It hardly matters that I think a lifelong love of learning, a focus on the whole person, and a well-rounded education are more important. It's what I want for my son, of course, but it may not be what he really needs.
If LE goes to elementary school here, he's looking at being in a classroom of as many as 65 kids. From a young age, he will be made to line up with the other children in the morning to fidget and not pay attention while someone shouts nationalist slogans into a megaphone (is it any wonder my students couldn't listen to me for more than five minutes at a time?). If he keeps trying to be different and more interesting than the other 64 kids in his class, he will learn very quickly that this will get him nowhere and will only incur the wrath of his overworked and underpaid teacher. So if this is the case, which is the more appropriate kids' TV show for him to watch? The one that shows the world as all sunshine and lollipops where everyone gets a gold star for having interesting ideas, or the one that shows him how to do what he's told, follow the leaders, and not to think too much?
These days, LE is working on self-feeding. Even when he sticks the apple wedge into his eye instead of his mouth, I praise him and tell him what a good boy he is. Perhaps I'm doing some sort of lifelong damage to him, but I don't care. I'm his Mommy and I think he does a pretty good job no matter what.
In Turkish, before someone says something, they often say "I'm going to say something." On Turkish TV, there is a short pre-commercial thing to announce the commercials, so when your show cuts out, it doesn't always go straight to the commercial. It goes to a girl eating an apple, or a bride and groom on a trampoline, or a cup of tea being stirred, and it says Reklam ('commercial') at the bottom. Sometimes it rather bafflingly says 'Advertorial.' One of these commercial announcements is LE's favorite thing on TV-- there's a bell sound, and some music, and a martini glass full of green olives and vodka being swirled. He drops everything and stares when he hears that one coming on. That's my boy! Someday I'll have to teach him, though, that a twist of lemon is a better garnish for a martini. The olive, as Auntie Mame chides us, takes up too much room in that little glass.
On one hand, I wish LE didn't like TV so much. I try to limit our TV time as much as possible, especially TV with a lot of commercials. I know TV is bad for kids. I know it's burning unwanted pathways into his little brain and possibly lowering his IQ. I know it teaches him bad things about the world and our society, and that it will someday soon make him covet crappy plastic toys that kill the imagination and food in lurid colors that's full of things I can't pronounce. On the other hand, it's not like I can pretend TV doesn't exist. Electronic media and screens are a fact of LE's future. I wouldn't be surprised if students' desks all contain monitors by the time he's in high school. And it's not like I'll ever convince my husband to ban the TV from our house so we can occupy ourselves with loftier pursuits. This is Turkey, where they haven't even had non-State-owned channels for very long, and every home, business, restaurant, and hospital has a TV blaring every waking moment whether anyone's watching it or not. So the way it works now is, LE watches TV sometimes while I need my hands free, but if anyone else (for example, my in-laws) tries to put him in front of their TV because they think it's cute, I get all huffy and use it as an example of how they don't listen to me or respect my rules for my child. So it all works out in the end.
Because of the time change last week, LE has still been waking up an hour or more earlier than usual. Generally, he's had his breakfast and I'm ready for mine by 9am, just in time for 'Big Cook Little Cook,' a kids' show on BBC that I find highly amusing but that LE doesn't really care about (he just likes the songs), followed by the Teletubbies, which I've already covered. Lately, he's been up (gasp!) before 7, meaning he's had his breakfast in time for this show I can't stand called 'Balamory.' The only redeeming feature of 'Balamory' is that everyone has a delightful Scottish accent, but the fun stops there. It's positively insipid, with this awful theme song that stays in my head for weeks after I've watched it. I leave it on for LE as much as I can stand (again, he likes the songs and the people dancing around), but often I switch to the news to check the tickers for any disasters I may have missed, or I just flip around the Turkish stations until I get so annoyed with them that 'Balamory' starts looking pretty good.
Yesterday morning, I flipped to a Turkish kids' show, and inevitably began comparing it to 'Balamory.' On 'Balamory,' someone was moving house and they needed labels for their boxes so they'd know which rooms to put them in. Rather than simply use a pen and write the rooms on the boxes, they got Spencer the Painter to take some bits of paper to the nursery school so the kids could make the labels. Spencer gathered the kids around and explained what they were doing, then elicited from the kids the kinds of pictures they should draw for these labels. 'A horse!' said one. 'A spaceship!' said another. 'A bed!' said a third. Now, obviously 'a bed' is the only 'right' answer here, but Spencer told all the kids they had wonderful ideas and set them to drawing. Compare this with the Turkish kids' show, in which the kids were lined up by their minders, and divided into teams. The minders told them the teams would be called 'Bıcır' and 'Gıcır' (I don't know what these words mean, if indeed they mean anything, but they sound 'cute'). Two kids were chosen by the minders to climb into a basket full of balls, then instructed to find the balls with certain letters on them, then pass them to their teammates, who would pass them down a line of kids, where the last kid would put the ball into a smaller basket.
On the Turkish program, there was some shuffling and escaping by some of the kids who didn't like which team they had been put on. There was a bit of jealousy at not being chosen to be the kid to go into the basket with the balls. One little girl named Zeynep was put on a team of all boys, which she didn't like, and she was the one who had to put the passed ball into the small basket, but because she was about 3, and the boys were all screaming and jumping around, she wasn't doing a very good job and the boy next to her started putting the ball in for her. The winning team was praised and the losing team was ignored. On the British program, all the kids were told everything they did was wonderful and they happily drew their pictures. There were plenty of markers to go around.
From a pedagogical point of view, it can be said that the British activity was more 'modern,' and more in line with current philosophies of child development. But I'm not quite willing to jump on that bandwagon and say the things the kids on 'Balamory' were learning are better than the things the kids on the Turkish program were learning. On one show, creativity was being encouraged, and on the other, obedience and competition were the goals. At the end of the respective activities, all of the 'Balamory' kids felt good and validated, while just a few of the Turkish kids felt they had received metaphorical gold stars, and by then, most of them weren't paying attention anymore anyway.
Of course, I'm inclined to think an activity isn't really good when most of the kids are left feeling bad at the end, and of course it seems nicer to see kids' ideas being elicited and respected, and their creativity encouraged to flower. But in the grand scheme of things, how much does it matter? Are the kids on 'Balamory' any better off in the end? In real life, most people don't get to be creative. Most people get the wrong answers. Some people win while most people lose. Hardly anyone gets a gold star. On one hand, we can say that it's good for children to experience mostly good things when they're small, because it just goes downhill from there. On the other hand, there's something to be said for having a little reality in our learning experiences.
One of my big worries if we stay in Turkey is LE's education. The education system here is about fifty years out of date. The schools are overcrowded and underfunded, and the focus is on memorization and competition, where students spend most of their time memorizing unanalyzed facts to regurgitate for standardized multiple choice tests which will then be used to determine which students get to fill the very limited places in decent universities. Turkish students are great at memorizing, which is a skill most of us in America have lost. I always wished I could find a good way to use memorization in my EFL classes, though generally I spent a lot of time working to stop them trying to memorize everything because it's not really possible to memorize an entire language. I don't know how many oral reports I had to listen to in which the student had memorized pages of information lifted from the Internet, most of which he or she had no idea of the meaning or pronunciation. And no matter how hard I tried to get them to use original ideas or critical thinking, most students were only interested in what was going to be on the exam, because in the end, that was all that mattered. It wasn't really that the students were wrong or that I was bad. It was that we came from entirely disparate educational backgrounds and philosophies and never could quite find a way to work together. And while from a humanist perspective I appreciate the American and British systems' approach to early childhood education, Turkish students far outrank American and British students in mathematics and the physical sciences, which are arguably much more useful skills in the real world than having a good imagination. It hardly matters that I think a lifelong love of learning, a focus on the whole person, and a well-rounded education are more important. It's what I want for my son, of course, but it may not be what he really needs.
If LE goes to elementary school here, he's looking at being in a classroom of as many as 65 kids. From a young age, he will be made to line up with the other children in the morning to fidget and not pay attention while someone shouts nationalist slogans into a megaphone (is it any wonder my students couldn't listen to me for more than five minutes at a time?). If he keeps trying to be different and more interesting than the other 64 kids in his class, he will learn very quickly that this will get him nowhere and will only incur the wrath of his overworked and underpaid teacher. So if this is the case, which is the more appropriate kids' TV show for him to watch? The one that shows the world as all sunshine and lollipops where everyone gets a gold star for having interesting ideas, or the one that shows him how to do what he's told, follow the leaders, and not to think too much?
These days, LE is working on self-feeding. Even when he sticks the apple wedge into his eye instead of his mouth, I praise him and tell him what a good boy he is. Perhaps I'm doing some sort of lifelong damage to him, but I don't care. I'm his Mommy and I think he does a pretty good job no matter what.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Politically Correct Revisited
At least once a day, I open this blog with great excitement to see if I've gotten any comments. It's like a mini-Christmas over here during LE's naptime, finding out if I've written anything that's inspired someone to respond. Often the comments are from people I know, and it's nice to know people I care about are reading me. Other times the comments are from perfect strangers, which gives me a little thrill every time-- someone who isn't obligated to be nice to me who's reading me and maybe even thinking I'm interesting. It's a much-needed ego boost, as even LE's interest in me is waning since he learned how to crawl a couple of weeks ago.
The post on PC, I'm pleased to say, generated some interest. Kataroma, a poster living in Rome, mentioned that the PC phenomenon in Italy is similar to here in that they are starting to pay some attention to the issue, but people there come out with racist things all the time. And here I was referring to "the West" as a place where PC is firmly entrenched, so I'm reminded now to be more careful with my choice of words. As a side note, my brother and I once had this huge argument over whether Italy is in Western or Eastern Europe. It wasn't so much emotional and divisive as it was a long argument lasting for days, in which we'd think of clever points to be made for the next time we saw each other. To be fair, it was mostly me continuing the argument. My brother contended that Italy was geographically in the East of Europe, making it 'Eastern Europe,' while I claimed that the term 'Eastern Europe' refers not only to a geographical place, but to culturally Eastern (that is, Slavic or Former Soviet Union) countries, of which Italy is not one. After a few days our friends were begging us to shut up about it. My brother said, 'Okay, what about Turkey-- is that Eastern or Western Europe?' and we had a good laugh because we were completely stumped on that one. Little did I know that 10 years later not only I and the Turks, but the whole European Union would would still be struggling with the same question.
But I digress. In the post about political correctness, I mentioned the Turkish word for Black people, zenci. I pointed out that this is a neutral word, but, much like the word 'Black' in English, can be taken as a slur (perhaps even unintentionally) depending on how it's used. One commenter, Bülent M. (I'm not sure he'd appreciate me using his full name on a site that can be searched, but his full comments can be found here), mentioned a couple of Turkish slurs for Black people: gündüz feneri ('daytime lantern') and marsık (like 'bad charcoal'). I've never heard those expressions for Black people (or maybe I have, but didn't realize what they meant, here in my yabancı language haze of getting about 50% of what's going on around me). Of course there are all kinds of other bad words for Blacks in English which I just didn't get into. I'm reminded of a song 'Colored Spade' from the musical 'Hair,' which is a Black man singing just about every racial slur there is, in America at least. Bülent M. also directed me to this webpage from Ekşi Sözlük, a Wikipedia-like 'dictionary' where Turks discuss the meanings of words as they understand them, and contexts in which they've seen them (apologies to my non-Turkish-speaking readers-- it's in Turkish and I'm not confident enough of my translations to post them here). A lot of what's in there is what I talked about in the original PC post, including people who express their confusion over whether 'nigger' is a bad word or not, based on the American media where they've seen or heard it.
As I mentioned in the original PC post, the language of political correctness is very much culturally bound. Bülent M. mentioned an issue of PC language in Turkey, which is how to politely refer to Gypsies. Technically, in PC English, we're not supposed to say 'Gypsy' anymore. We're supposed to say 'Romany,' but there aren't very many Gypsies in America to take offense(meaning, you don't often have to look over your shoulder to make sure one isn't listening) and not many people who will take offense on their behalf. Even still, it's generally considered bad form in English to say 'gyp' to mean 'cheat' or 'rip off.' Apparently çingene, the word I know for 'Gypsy' in Turkish, is now considered un-PC, and the correct word should be Roman. I've just started noticing Roman for Gypsy, but it took me awhile to figure out what it meant. Bülent M. writes in his comment, "They used to be called 'esmer vatandas' in an attempt to be PC but the un-PC-ness of that must have become obvious at some point (esmer vatandaş means 'dark citizen')." Interestingly, as Bülent M. points out, Gypsies here still happily use çingene or çingen to refer to themselves. It's not clear whether it's because the news hasn't reached them that it's un-PC, or if they've appropriated the 'bad' word to use amongst themselves much as American Blacks use 'nigger' or gays use 'queer.'
A lot of PC is about who's saying the words and where they're coming from. I'm reading Orhan Pamuk The Black Book right now, and he really has his moments of capturing the enigma and humor of Turkishness, but when Orhan Pamuk says stuff about Turks, you can sense his annoyance and ambivalence and affection behind the words. When I say things about Turks, it can easily be taken the wrong way, as being rude or patronizing or somehow implying my cultural superiority. This is one reason why I liked the Ekşi Sözlük link, because there are some Turks saying the same things about themselves that I'm saying about them. Even Orhan Pamuk complains that Turks aren't very good about standing in line and waiting their turn.
LE has just woken up and it's time for his lunch, so let me conclude this post by saying I'm glad there are people reading my blog. I'm glad that people are commenting and forcing me to think about what I write, and that I'm not just writing into a vacuum. I'm glad there are Turkish people reading my blog too-- not that this will make me try to be more PC, but it'll make me think twice about throwing out bitchy comments about Turks when I get frustrated with life here. Thank you, everyone!
The post on PC, I'm pleased to say, generated some interest. Kataroma, a poster living in Rome, mentioned that the PC phenomenon in Italy is similar to here in that they are starting to pay some attention to the issue, but people there come out with racist things all the time. And here I was referring to "the West" as a place where PC is firmly entrenched, so I'm reminded now to be more careful with my choice of words. As a side note, my brother and I once had this huge argument over whether Italy is in Western or Eastern Europe. It wasn't so much emotional and divisive as it was a long argument lasting for days, in which we'd think of clever points to be made for the next time we saw each other. To be fair, it was mostly me continuing the argument. My brother contended that Italy was geographically in the East of Europe, making it 'Eastern Europe,' while I claimed that the term 'Eastern Europe' refers not only to a geographical place, but to culturally Eastern (that is, Slavic or Former Soviet Union) countries, of which Italy is not one. After a few days our friends were begging us to shut up about it. My brother said, 'Okay, what about Turkey-- is that Eastern or Western Europe?' and we had a good laugh because we were completely stumped on that one. Little did I know that 10 years later not only I and the Turks, but the whole European Union would would still be struggling with the same question.
But I digress. In the post about political correctness, I mentioned the Turkish word for Black people, zenci. I pointed out that this is a neutral word, but, much like the word 'Black' in English, can be taken as a slur (perhaps even unintentionally) depending on how it's used. One commenter, Bülent M. (I'm not sure he'd appreciate me using his full name on a site that can be searched, but his full comments can be found here), mentioned a couple of Turkish slurs for Black people: gündüz feneri ('daytime lantern') and marsık (like 'bad charcoal'). I've never heard those expressions for Black people (or maybe I have, but didn't realize what they meant, here in my yabancı language haze of getting about 50% of what's going on around me). Of course there are all kinds of other bad words for Blacks in English which I just didn't get into. I'm reminded of a song 'Colored Spade' from the musical 'Hair,' which is a Black man singing just about every racial slur there is, in America at least. Bülent M. also directed me to this webpage from Ekşi Sözlük, a Wikipedia-like 'dictionary' where Turks discuss the meanings of words as they understand them, and contexts in which they've seen them (apologies to my non-Turkish-speaking readers-- it's in Turkish and I'm not confident enough of my translations to post them here). A lot of what's in there is what I talked about in the original PC post, including people who express their confusion over whether 'nigger' is a bad word or not, based on the American media where they've seen or heard it.
As I mentioned in the original PC post, the language of political correctness is very much culturally bound. Bülent M. mentioned an issue of PC language in Turkey, which is how to politely refer to Gypsies. Technically, in PC English, we're not supposed to say 'Gypsy' anymore. We're supposed to say 'Romany,' but there aren't very many Gypsies in America to take offense(meaning, you don't often have to look over your shoulder to make sure one isn't listening) and not many people who will take offense on their behalf. Even still, it's generally considered bad form in English to say 'gyp' to mean 'cheat' or 'rip off.' Apparently çingene, the word I know for 'Gypsy' in Turkish, is now considered un-PC, and the correct word should be Roman. I've just started noticing Roman for Gypsy, but it took me awhile to figure out what it meant. Bülent M. writes in his comment, "They used to be called 'esmer vatandas' in an attempt to be PC but the un-PC-ness of that must have become obvious at some point (esmer vatandaş means 'dark citizen')." Interestingly, as Bülent M. points out, Gypsies here still happily use çingene or çingen to refer to themselves. It's not clear whether it's because the news hasn't reached them that it's un-PC, or if they've appropriated the 'bad' word to use amongst themselves much as American Blacks use 'nigger' or gays use 'queer.'
A lot of PC is about who's saying the words and where they're coming from. I'm reading Orhan Pamuk The Black Book right now, and he really has his moments of capturing the enigma and humor of Turkishness, but when Orhan Pamuk says stuff about Turks, you can sense his annoyance and ambivalence and affection behind the words. When I say things about Turks, it can easily be taken the wrong way, as being rude or patronizing or somehow implying my cultural superiority. This is one reason why I liked the Ekşi Sözlük link, because there are some Turks saying the same things about themselves that I'm saying about them. Even Orhan Pamuk complains that Turks aren't very good about standing in line and waiting their turn.
LE has just woken up and it's time for his lunch, so let me conclude this post by saying I'm glad there are people reading my blog. I'm glad that people are commenting and forcing me to think about what I write, and that I'm not just writing into a vacuum. I'm glad there are Turkish people reading my blog too-- not that this will make me try to be more PC, but it'll make me think twice about throwing out bitchy comments about Turks when I get frustrated with life here. Thank you, everyone!
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
My Cleaner
One huge advantage of living in Turkey is that labor, particularly domestic labor, is cheap. For me, this means that once a week I get to have a woman come to my house and clean it from top to bottom. It's not unusual for people to have cleaners-- sometimes even the cleaners have cleaners. And even though I'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea of this 'servant' coming over to scrub out the toilet, it's way better than scrubbing out the toilet myself and this easily outweighs any discomfort. I recognize that having a cleaner is a wonderful luxury. She's totally worth the $45 or so a week I pay her, not only because it leaves me lots more time throughout the week to sit around and play with LE, that $45 a week completely ended the arguments BE and I used to have every weekend about housework. See, his idea was that I should work full-time and also keep the house on the weekends, leaving him free to sleep all day, hang out at the barbershop, and play video games. As you might imagine, this didn't sit well with me.
Finding a good cleaner isn't easy. Sometimes they're just not very bright, and you have to follow them around every time they come, telling them what to do and how to do it. Some of them do really stupid things, like my friend's former cleaner, who hosed off her balcony table, candles and all, and who opened a new package of dishtowels to use with bleach rather than use the rags from the drawer she'd been using for months. Other cleaners take it upon themselves to rearrange your house-- cupboards, furniture, knick-knacks. Once my mother-in-law came to my house with her cleaner. They chased me out of their way and I came back to find the whole living room reversed, and my entire kitchen re-organized in such a way that I couldn't find anything. It took me about three weeks to get everything back in order. Needless to say, I'm wary of letting my mother-in-law loose in my house unsupervised since then.
In my old house, my roommate's mother referred us to her old cleaner, who was the kapıcı's wife in her old building (a kapıcı is like a superintendent-- he keeps the building and grounds, but also will do stuff like run to the shop for you, or stand in line at the bank to pay your bills). That cleaner wasn't very good. I mean, she did a better job than we did, but not much. She brought her young son over with her, and both of them were terrified of me (sometimes people here are really scared of foreigners). She was Kurdish and her Turkish wasn't very good, but since her son was too scared to speak to me, communication breakdowns were common. Her son was also terrified of our kitten, and would scream and run away whenever it came near him. I assumed from his size, shyness, and his fear of the kitten that this boy was about 8, and was shocked when the cleaner told me he was actually 12. Since she'd been referred to us by my roommate's mother, we assumed she was trustworthy and left her in the house to clean while we were at work. One day, she apparently took her time going through all my stuff and just helped herself to money, jewelry, a portable CD player, and whatever else struck her fancy (though she didn't take even a kuruş of my roommate's spare change he left lying around). We fired her, of course, and confronted her about the stealing. She and her husband came to meet us at the school where we worked, the cleaner in tears and both of them swearing up, down and sideways that she hadn't stolen anything. They were afraid we'd tell the police, or the building manager where the husband was the kapıcı, which would put them out of both job and home (kapıcıs usually get free rent). They were both very tiny people, and very poor, and even though I was furious about the stealing it made me sad to have that much power over someone. In the end, after reaching an impasse (she wouldn't admit to the theft and we wouldn't rescind the accusation), they asked if we'd give her the cleaning job back.
The cleaner I have now is great. She doesn't need to be told what to do (and even scolds me for stuff like mixing white and colored laundry), and she puts everything back where she found it. She takes initiative about stuff like cleaning the windows every other week (which involves dangling out the 7th floor) and scrubbing the carpets. She's Alevi, like my husband, and very proud of that. She's also Kurdish, and is one of the few Kurds I've met who is openly proud of being Kurdish and speaking Kurdish. LE adores her and she lets him grab her face and hair while bouncing him on her knee and singing Kurdish wedding songs to him. The only bad thing my cleaner has ever done was shove a spoonful of jam into LE's mouth when I wasn't looking. He was about 4 months old when that happened, but it was easily cured by just not serving jam anymore with our breakfast.
It seems that my cleaner is sick every week with something new. She's a few years younger than me, but looks 10 years older. If she's not sick herself, someone in her family is, or they're having some new crisis or other. One week, her father's house got broken into. Another week, her youngest sister "ran away." I used the quotes because I can't really consider it running away when the girl is 20 years old. She's never asked for money or anything like that, but all of these sicknesses and crises, plus her son's school expenses, cost a lot, and reminds me it's really expensive to be poor in Turkey, too.
My cleaner is somewhere in the middle of 13 brothers and sisters. Kurdish families are usually huge like this. They've always had big families, so about ten years ago the Turkish government sent some nurses out to the villages to educate women about birth control. The local leaders got wind of this, and told the villagers the government was just trying to reduce their population to get rid of them, and encouraged them to make even more babies, not fewer. While I was pregnant, my cleaner and I talked a lot about birth and babies. She told me that her mother only lost one baby, a twin, and she had all her babies at home. She also told me that the village midwife was only available or affordable for a few of the births, so the rest her mother delivered by herself, including a footling breech and a set of twins that lived. My cleaner herself was married at 15. She was engaged the year before that, but they didn't marry her off until she'd started menstruating. Her first and only baby, a son, was born when she was 16. He weighed 10 pounds, which is astounding because I'll bet my cleaner barely weighs 100. She's about five foot two.
Her son is now 15 and just starting high school. I'm really impressed with this woman for a lot of reasons. She's marginalized in so many ways-- poor, Kurdish, female, and uneducated, yet she found the one way of taking some power in her world, which was to have only one child. She's quietly proud of herself for getting away with this (her family still pressures her to have more, to which she answers by wincingly touching her belly and claiming female sickness, though I suspect she's lying), and she's fiercely proud of her son. She cleans houses as part of her mission to get him to be someone (she's had to pay bribes all along to get him into better public schools than the ones they're zoned for), and to make sure he doesn't end up cleaning houses like her, or doing mindless labor in a factory like his dad. Like most teenaged boys, her son sounds like he's a bit shiftless and he doesn't do well in school (though he is quite handsome), but she's not giving up and I do hope one day he really is able to understand what his mother did for him.
For my part, it's not just the fresh-smelling and spotless house that makes me look forward to having my cleaner come each week. I like the chats we have over breakfast and I'm more than happy to hand over the $45 each time. I give her everything I can that I don't use, as much as she can carry-- clothes, baby things, kitchen things, bedding-- and I know it's going to good use in her huge family. But, like anyone from my background who's not used to a servant class, I always wish I could do more.
Finding a good cleaner isn't easy. Sometimes they're just not very bright, and you have to follow them around every time they come, telling them what to do and how to do it. Some of them do really stupid things, like my friend's former cleaner, who hosed off her balcony table, candles and all, and who opened a new package of dishtowels to use with bleach rather than use the rags from the drawer she'd been using for months. Other cleaners take it upon themselves to rearrange your house-- cupboards, furniture, knick-knacks. Once my mother-in-law came to my house with her cleaner. They chased me out of their way and I came back to find the whole living room reversed, and my entire kitchen re-organized in such a way that I couldn't find anything. It took me about three weeks to get everything back in order. Needless to say, I'm wary of letting my mother-in-law loose in my house unsupervised since then.
In my old house, my roommate's mother referred us to her old cleaner, who was the kapıcı's wife in her old building (a kapıcı is like a superintendent-- he keeps the building and grounds, but also will do stuff like run to the shop for you, or stand in line at the bank to pay your bills). That cleaner wasn't very good. I mean, she did a better job than we did, but not much. She brought her young son over with her, and both of them were terrified of me (sometimes people here are really scared of foreigners). She was Kurdish and her Turkish wasn't very good, but since her son was too scared to speak to me, communication breakdowns were common. Her son was also terrified of our kitten, and would scream and run away whenever it came near him. I assumed from his size, shyness, and his fear of the kitten that this boy was about 8, and was shocked when the cleaner told me he was actually 12. Since she'd been referred to us by my roommate's mother, we assumed she was trustworthy and left her in the house to clean while we were at work. One day, she apparently took her time going through all my stuff and just helped herself to money, jewelry, a portable CD player, and whatever else struck her fancy (though she didn't take even a kuruş of my roommate's spare change he left lying around). We fired her, of course, and confronted her about the stealing. She and her husband came to meet us at the school where we worked, the cleaner in tears and both of them swearing up, down and sideways that she hadn't stolen anything. They were afraid we'd tell the police, or the building manager where the husband was the kapıcı, which would put them out of both job and home (kapıcıs usually get free rent). They were both very tiny people, and very poor, and even though I was furious about the stealing it made me sad to have that much power over someone. In the end, after reaching an impasse (she wouldn't admit to the theft and we wouldn't rescind the accusation), they asked if we'd give her the cleaning job back.
The cleaner I have now is great. She doesn't need to be told what to do (and even scolds me for stuff like mixing white and colored laundry), and she puts everything back where she found it. She takes initiative about stuff like cleaning the windows every other week (which involves dangling out the 7th floor) and scrubbing the carpets. She's Alevi, like my husband, and very proud of that. She's also Kurdish, and is one of the few Kurds I've met who is openly proud of being Kurdish and speaking Kurdish. LE adores her and she lets him grab her face and hair while bouncing him on her knee and singing Kurdish wedding songs to him. The only bad thing my cleaner has ever done was shove a spoonful of jam into LE's mouth when I wasn't looking. He was about 4 months old when that happened, but it was easily cured by just not serving jam anymore with our breakfast.
It seems that my cleaner is sick every week with something new. She's a few years younger than me, but looks 10 years older. If she's not sick herself, someone in her family is, or they're having some new crisis or other. One week, her father's house got broken into. Another week, her youngest sister "ran away." I used the quotes because I can't really consider it running away when the girl is 20 years old. She's never asked for money or anything like that, but all of these sicknesses and crises, plus her son's school expenses, cost a lot, and reminds me it's really expensive to be poor in Turkey, too.
My cleaner is somewhere in the middle of 13 brothers and sisters. Kurdish families are usually huge like this. They've always had big families, so about ten years ago the Turkish government sent some nurses out to the villages to educate women about birth control. The local leaders got wind of this, and told the villagers the government was just trying to reduce their population to get rid of them, and encouraged them to make even more babies, not fewer. While I was pregnant, my cleaner and I talked a lot about birth and babies. She told me that her mother only lost one baby, a twin, and she had all her babies at home. She also told me that the village midwife was only available or affordable for a few of the births, so the rest her mother delivered by herself, including a footling breech and a set of twins that lived. My cleaner herself was married at 15. She was engaged the year before that, but they didn't marry her off until she'd started menstruating. Her first and only baby, a son, was born when she was 16. He weighed 10 pounds, which is astounding because I'll bet my cleaner barely weighs 100. She's about five foot two.
Her son is now 15 and just starting high school. I'm really impressed with this woman for a lot of reasons. She's marginalized in so many ways-- poor, Kurdish, female, and uneducated, yet she found the one way of taking some power in her world, which was to have only one child. She's quietly proud of herself for getting away with this (her family still pressures her to have more, to which she answers by wincingly touching her belly and claiming female sickness, though I suspect she's lying), and she's fiercely proud of her son. She cleans houses as part of her mission to get him to be someone (she's had to pay bribes all along to get him into better public schools than the ones they're zoned for), and to make sure he doesn't end up cleaning houses like her, or doing mindless labor in a factory like his dad. Like most teenaged boys, her son sounds like he's a bit shiftless and he doesn't do well in school (though he is quite handsome), but she's not giving up and I do hope one day he really is able to understand what his mother did for him.
For my part, it's not just the fresh-smelling and spotless house that makes me look forward to having my cleaner come each week. I like the chats we have over breakfast and I'm more than happy to hand over the $45 each time. I give her everything I can that I don't use, as much as she can carry-- clothes, baby things, kitchen things, bedding-- and I know it's going to good use in her huge family. But, like anyone from my background who's not used to a servant class, I always wish I could do more.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Crisis!!
In Turkey, everything is a crisis. People are so easily whipped up into a frenzy, and the news media here blurs the line between news and entertainment even more than in the US. Newspapers are full of luridly colored pictures that make USA Today seem like downright heavy reading, and TV news footage is often accompanied by a soundtrack. Wherever there are wailing mothers to be found tearing at their hair, the Turkish news media finds them.
I've seen a lot of these crises in the 6 years I've been here. Some were quite real, like the bombing of HSBC and the British Consulate. Some were less pressing, like when Ecevit's coalition all resigned on him, causing a brief economic crash. That day at work, we tuned into a live online currency converter and watched our lira salaries drop 30% against the dollar in a few hours before heading off to class. Then there are the fears that always lurk in the back of your mind, like Fear of Earthquakes and Fear of Bombs. They're there, but you get used to it. Fear of Getting Hit By A Bus is much more salient on a day-to-day basis.
A couple weeks ago, the crisis was the US House of Representatives preparing to vote on a bill labelling what happened to Armenians here at the beginning of the century a 'genocide.' There's a lot to be said on this, but I'll refrain from straying too much from my topic. In Turkey, The Armenian Thing That Didn't Happen is highly sensitive, and threats were thrown all around. I saw a press conference in which American leaders were urging the Turks "Don't overreact!" which is a little like telling a bear not to shit in the woods.
Now, of course, the crisis is the Turkish assault on PKK troops in Northern Iraq. Last weekend, the PKK killed 12 Turkish soldiers, so the retaliatory slaughter has begun. By the end of the next day, the Turks had killed 34 PKK soldiers, and BE and his family were watching the news tally up the deaths and cheering like they were scoring goals. The Americans tried to stop the Turks from invading Northern Iraq, but there's no stopping the Turks when the chance to kill Kurds arises. Again, I'll refrain from spouting my opinions on the Turkish/Kurdish issue because it's not really what I want to get into right now.
The Turks have been whipped into their predictable frenzy. Already there are reports of Kurds getting beaten on the streets. There are protests and demonstrations everywhere, even out in the sticks where I live. The city hasn't quite incorporated this area, so the Jandarma (military police) do a lot of the law enforcement instead of the regular police force. Every night this week there has been a huge demonstration outside the nearby Jandarma base. The first night, I was home alone, and had no idea what was going on. It sounded like Turkey had come in 3rd in the World Cup again. I called BE, and he said they were protesting terrorism. The exact goal of this protest is unclear to me, as I doubt the Jandarma like terrorism either, and it's not like they sit on their butts and let it happen. BE says it's about people's psychology, which is one of those catch-all Turkish explanations for a lot of things that can't really be explained.
The second night of the protest, I went out on the balcony and saw lights flashing on and off in many apartment windows. Again, I was home alone, and again, I had no idea why that was happening. Already feeling unsettled with recent events plus some unpleasantness with the in-laws the previous day, I assumed the lights were some kind of secret signal and that everything was sure to come down at any moment. A low-flying plane didn't help, but it woke LE and gave me an excuse to pick him up and hold him. I couldn't bring myself to put him down for an hour, sitting away from the windows just in case. BE later explained that this was a 'light protest,' and apparently the news had urged people to do this. I don't understand the point of this either, but it's apparently also related to people's psychology.
So Turkey's gearing up to enter the war with Iraq, and some preliminary border assaults have already begun. Every night, what sounds like hundreds of people (mostly young men with nothing better to do, I'm sure, from the sound of all that male barking) gather outside the Jandarma base to honk their horns and yell and whistle, and people (including BE) turn their lights on and off. It reminds me that it doesn't take much to make a place like this to return to a 3rd world mess. At the moment, the Friday ezan is being drowned out by a parade with lots of banging drums. Turkish flags fly from every apartment window, and the upcoming Cumhüriyet Bayramı (Republic Day) on Monday is feeding the flames.
Before I had a baby here, this kind of excitement was fun. It made me feel adventurous and energized. It felt good to take calls from family, and assure them that yes, things were happening but it was far from me and all was well. Now that's all different, with the baby. Now I just hate the PKK for being terrorists, and I hate the Turkish government for provoking them. I hate them equally and I don't give a shit about any of their reasons or justifications. Right now, Turkish nationalism is just a bunch of annoying noise and flags and words and oft-repeated stock phrases and I wish they would all get over themselves and shut up. LE is a helpless, smiling, perfect little being cooing in his crib, and I'm in charge of caring for him and protecting him, and all I can think of is the buses and trash cans and unidentified boxes that are going to start blowing up everywhere.
It's times like this that I'm reminded how much I'm an outsider here, and how I'm free to leave whenever it gets ugly. I'm reminded of how little feeling I have about Turkey and the Republic and its position in the world. I feel that I care nothing at all about anybody here except my son, and all the rest of them can go to hell for doing anything to threaten him. All of this has nothing to do with me. LE is as innocent as anyone can be. I don't care who's responsible. I don't care why it's happening. I just want it to go away.
I've seen a lot of these crises in the 6 years I've been here. Some were quite real, like the bombing of HSBC and the British Consulate. Some were less pressing, like when Ecevit's coalition all resigned on him, causing a brief economic crash. That day at work, we tuned into a live online currency converter and watched our lira salaries drop 30% against the dollar in a few hours before heading off to class. Then there are the fears that always lurk in the back of your mind, like Fear of Earthquakes and Fear of Bombs. They're there, but you get used to it. Fear of Getting Hit By A Bus is much more salient on a day-to-day basis.
A couple weeks ago, the crisis was the US House of Representatives preparing to vote on a bill labelling what happened to Armenians here at the beginning of the century a 'genocide.' There's a lot to be said on this, but I'll refrain from straying too much from my topic. In Turkey, The Armenian Thing That Didn't Happen is highly sensitive, and threats were thrown all around. I saw a press conference in which American leaders were urging the Turks "Don't overreact!" which is a little like telling a bear not to shit in the woods.
Now, of course, the crisis is the Turkish assault on PKK troops in Northern Iraq. Last weekend, the PKK killed 12 Turkish soldiers, so the retaliatory slaughter has begun. By the end of the next day, the Turks had killed 34 PKK soldiers, and BE and his family were watching the news tally up the deaths and cheering like they were scoring goals. The Americans tried to stop the Turks from invading Northern Iraq, but there's no stopping the Turks when the chance to kill Kurds arises. Again, I'll refrain from spouting my opinions on the Turkish/Kurdish issue because it's not really what I want to get into right now.
The Turks have been whipped into their predictable frenzy. Already there are reports of Kurds getting beaten on the streets. There are protests and demonstrations everywhere, even out in the sticks where I live. The city hasn't quite incorporated this area, so the Jandarma (military police) do a lot of the law enforcement instead of the regular police force. Every night this week there has been a huge demonstration outside the nearby Jandarma base. The first night, I was home alone, and had no idea what was going on. It sounded like Turkey had come in 3rd in the World Cup again. I called BE, and he said they were protesting terrorism. The exact goal of this protest is unclear to me, as I doubt the Jandarma like terrorism either, and it's not like they sit on their butts and let it happen. BE says it's about people's psychology, which is one of those catch-all Turkish explanations for a lot of things that can't really be explained.
The second night of the protest, I went out on the balcony and saw lights flashing on and off in many apartment windows. Again, I was home alone, and again, I had no idea why that was happening. Already feeling unsettled with recent events plus some unpleasantness with the in-laws the previous day, I assumed the lights were some kind of secret signal and that everything was sure to come down at any moment. A low-flying plane didn't help, but it woke LE and gave me an excuse to pick him up and hold him. I couldn't bring myself to put him down for an hour, sitting away from the windows just in case. BE later explained that this was a 'light protest,' and apparently the news had urged people to do this. I don't understand the point of this either, but it's apparently also related to people's psychology.
So Turkey's gearing up to enter the war with Iraq, and some preliminary border assaults have already begun. Every night, what sounds like hundreds of people (mostly young men with nothing better to do, I'm sure, from the sound of all that male barking) gather outside the Jandarma base to honk their horns and yell and whistle, and people (including BE) turn their lights on and off. It reminds me that it doesn't take much to make a place like this to return to a 3rd world mess. At the moment, the Friday ezan is being drowned out by a parade with lots of banging drums. Turkish flags fly from every apartment window, and the upcoming Cumhüriyet Bayramı (Republic Day) on Monday is feeding the flames.
Before I had a baby here, this kind of excitement was fun. It made me feel adventurous and energized. It felt good to take calls from family, and assure them that yes, things were happening but it was far from me and all was well. Now that's all different, with the baby. Now I just hate the PKK for being terrorists, and I hate the Turkish government for provoking them. I hate them equally and I don't give a shit about any of their reasons or justifications. Right now, Turkish nationalism is just a bunch of annoying noise and flags and words and oft-repeated stock phrases and I wish they would all get over themselves and shut up. LE is a helpless, smiling, perfect little being cooing in his crib, and I'm in charge of caring for him and protecting him, and all I can think of is the buses and trash cans and unidentified boxes that are going to start blowing up everywhere.
It's times like this that I'm reminded how much I'm an outsider here, and how I'm free to leave whenever it gets ugly. I'm reminded of how little feeling I have about Turkey and the Republic and its position in the world. I feel that I care nothing at all about anybody here except my son, and all the rest of them can go to hell for doing anything to threaten him. All of this has nothing to do with me. LE is as innocent as anyone can be. I don't care who's responsible. I don't care why it's happening. I just want it to go away.
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