katealaurel

I am leaving Turkey in much the same way that I came to it, in a frantic whirlwind of packing and paperwork up to the last possible minute. (Followed by plane trouble.)¹ This week has been finals week for my students in both department, so it’s been chaotic, to say the least, with a great deal of mind-numbing exam observation followed by a great deal of frantic grading under deadline. I was up almost all of Wednesday night, doing laundry, washing neglected dishes, and trying to get boxes packed. Four trips to two different police stations in two days to get my residence permit renewed. Last-minute meetings as bureaucracy and projects were both dealt with panickedly. A hurried move of my collected belongings and inherited Fulbright house supplies, which happened only by the grace of Nazlı, Nurten, and Serdar, who actually helped me pack in addition to cramming the boxes into Nurten’s car and driving them to Nazlı’s apartment. All came out well, though: my grades are done and (just about) turned in, projects are progressing forward on their tracks, I got my security deposit back on the apartment, and my residence permit is renewed to let me back in the country without trouble in July.

Yes, back. I am staying in Turkey on a Fulbright for a second year, as an extended grantee. I am so terribly lucky to have this, another year to root myself deeper in this place, improve my teaching and my Turkish and my comfort in this part of the world.

In many ways, by now I feel completely at home here. The culture shock didn’t hit me until April and March, seven or eight months into my life here, spurred perhaps by long, back-to-back visits from my parents and a friend. I agonized over whether to stay when the opportunity was offered to me, miserable over the decision whether to go home to my life in Portland. Suddenly, though, at the end of April, the mental clouds cleared and I remembered why I was here, how much I love this place and these people, the whole strange sea of new culture I am swimming through here, all the challenges I am glorying in.

Somehow, over the last month, I became comfortable. Perhaps because my Turkish is finally conversational (stumblingly, awkwardly, dictionary-dependently conversational, but conversational all the same, even for politics and religion). Perhaps because I finally reached a workable cultural equilibrium– knowing what to do in most situations I encounter regularly here, yet confident enough about knowing these rules that I can preserve the Americanisms that really matter to me. Things have fallen into place for next year– teaching, projects, living with Nazlı– and in any case, the path somehow cleared.

It seems natural now to be coming back, and leaving Antep this evening was almost as strange and heart-wrenching as leaving Portland nine months ago. I rode out through the pastel apartment building canyons in the Karataş suburbs, listening to the call to prayer drift in at slightly different places from each minaret we passed, seeing the golden light on the plains fade slowly to purple and down to dusk. Trying to find and see the strangeness that I remembered from when I arrived– tiny rickety buses! enormous apartment complexes! strange vacant lots like wastelands! tall buildings marching up to the edge of the plains and stopping like a wall!– felt so artificial and odd, even though I could still recognize the things that should feel foreign; it just fit wrong over my eyes.

On Tuesday evening, I sat on the balcony of the faculty restaurant with a group of medical professors I taught this semester, and looked out over the whole expanse of the city with my friends as the sun was setting, all bright on the tall walls of the clusters of buildings, with the warm breeze blowing and the sky darkening at the edges. All I could think was, “Why, why, why would I ever leave?”

I’m going home for two weeks. But I’ll come back home afterwards, too.

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And a note: This semester was, in many ways, both much more challenging and much more rewarding than the first term– and yet none of it is up on the internet. Hopefully, I’ll be able to correct some of that– and post some of the thousand-photo backlog– over the next two weeks, as I relive it for friends in Portland.

1: Anadolujet neglected to inform me they’d canceled my flight until after I arrived at the airport. Negotiated a switch to a THY flight in the airport, in Turkish. It all worked out somehow. I am in Istanbul. Hopefully that is my quotient of travel trouble for this trip.