The Turks

We haven’t even been here a week and already I feel at home. Before coming to Istanbul something that worried me was the language barrier between the English-speakers and the Turkish, but so far that hasn’t seemed to be much of a problem. I’ve found that most of the people speak enough English to make communicating with them successful (for the most part). Yet, even when someone isn’t able to speak English it’s easy to make hand gestures and use what little Turkish words we do know to get the point across. What interests me is that most all of the people we come into contact with us feel fine speaking English even if they don’t know very much. In my experience, most Americans feel uncomfortable trying to speak a different language if they aren’t fluent or know a lot. Even saying “Merhaba” or “Tesekülar” makes me feel like an idiot because I’m sure I’m pronouncing them wrong.

This doesn’t go only for the language but there are many things that I have felt slightly uncomfortable with since I’m an American. For example, getting accustomed to ignoring people on the streets seems strange to me. When the café workers try to hand us menus and get our attention I feel obligated to say “no thank you” or “sorry” but it seems like most of the Turks just ignore them. Also, I’ve found myself getting unwanted attention from people on the streets because of the habit of making eye contact with people. I never realized how much I look at people until I came here and noticed that most people keep their eyes straight in front of them and give no one else the time of day. The list of minor differences can go on for a while, but don’t get me wrong, I love it here! The people are very forward, they seem like they are always comfortable in their situation and are always willing to attempt to understand or even help us if we need it.

Before coming here I had no idea of what to expect the Turkish people to behave like. I very quickly learned that they are more caring than I’m used to. There are little things that I have seen that depict this quite often. For instance, as we were walking through the streets on the first or second day we saw a women sitting on a blanket begging for money. It was strange because we had one seen maybe 1 or 2 other people like this in Istanbul since we had been here. For a city of 16 million this was very odd for me. Being an American and living in Lawrence it’s normal to see 10 homeless people walking along Mass. Street, or in Minneapolis to see people pushing grocery carts along the highway and holding up signs. When I asked about this, I asked how many homeless people are in Turkey and the answer surprised me. According to Elif (our wonderful professor) there are very few actual homeless people. The woman on the blanket was probably not homeless but just very poor. She went on to tell me that if someone lost their money and their home there were many places for them to find support. Including their families, neighbors, the government, or their church, mosque, or synagogue. After hearing that I began to think of how strange it is that there are so many homeless people living in America, and that although we all feel guilty we rarely do much to help. It doesn’t seem right that there is little to no help that goes to them. Poverty is clearly a problem all over the world, yet it’s very impressive that such a large city is able to give much more help to its people. It really shows how much human life is valued here.