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.

—–

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.

It’s a quiet New Year’s Eve here– my plans fell through, and I’m leaving for Istanbul in the morning to see friends visiting from the US, in any case– so I’m sitting in my window, watching the dark street while the clock ticks closer to midnight.

To be a little introspective for a moment (it’s sanctioned at this time of the year, anyway), it’s been a momentous year for me. Writing my thesis, winning a Fulbright, graduating from college, a summer in Americorps, moving to Turkey, and all the changes since that move. It’s been a momentous decade, too; the decade of becoming an adult is pretty neatly framed by 2000 and 2010 for me. I have no idea what the next ten years will bring.

10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…

On the other hand (δε), my evening class was remarkably successful. This was our first week spending five consecutive hours together, and I was afraid it was going to be a disaster– there are some chronically badly behaved students in the group, and even my best students get worn out and apathetic by the end of the fourth hour, understandably. Five hours feels like begging for trouble. For some reason, though, they seemed invested in the lesson– more so than usual, even. The group that usually leaves after the second hour to go eat actually came back for the end of class.¹ We got through all of the material we needed to get through tonight. The idea may even have made sense by the end. So for the last twenty minutes or so, we played Apples to Apples (not the best game in the world, but excellent for teaching, and even directly relevant to the work we were doing on descriptive paragraphs), and everybody left the room happy and chattering. It felt like a minor, merciful miracle.

I am not yet a good teacher, though I aspire to it. Sometimes my activities fall miserably flat, sometimes I forget what I’m doing in class despite the clearly-marked lesson plans in front of me, sometimes I fail terribly at classroom management, sometimes I worry that I’m not giving them anything more to learn from than me talking. I had a tiny bit of experience with this juggling act before coming here, but in very different contexts, and I’d originally expected to actually be doing the work of my title here (English Teaching Assistant). Instead of an assistant, though, I am an honest-to-god classroom teacher all on my own, struggling and winning and failing with maybe less preparation than normal. Day to day, I often have no idea what will work and what won’t, despite seeking out help and poring over resources. I know that’s to be expected, but I feel like I should have more to offer. Two months in, this is not so terrifying. Two months in, this is still so terrifying.

When this post was bouncing around in my (tired, tired) head, the old cliche of the “little things” came to mind at first. Yet even though class only took up a small part of the day, everything else revolved around it. Teaching is the Big Thing, the mass at the center of my life here, shaping the orbits of my social life, my travel, language learning, bureaucratic frustrations, cultural understandings and misunderstandings, and on and on. Whether it’s recognized or unseen at any given time, it’s exerting its pull on the nature and structure of whatever else I do. It has to– I owe it to the work. And besides, I don’t yet know enough about it to be able to climb out of the gravity well.

1: It is very common and totally acceptable in Turkey to just leave class during the ten-minute break between hours, so that you can go eat or hang out with friends or what-have-you. In the US– by my perception, at least– that would be considered incredibly rude. Here, there’s a certain number of state-mandated hours that you’re allowed to miss class, and most students use them to leave early on Fridays or go get dinner during evening classes. It’s been, surprisingly, one of the hardest things to adjust to in the classroom.

The subject– which I’m pretty confident doesn’t get reused, or I wouldn’t be mentioning it here– was, I kid you not, non-ironic motivational posters. Each student got one more-or-less randomly, and was responsible for telling us what they saw in the picture, as well as the “main idea,” what they thought it represented. Most of the answers were more or less the same, and mostly on-target, though a few interpretations surprised me. A picture of protesters fighting the police, with the caption “Know Your Power,” invariably got the explanation that it was wrong for protesters to try to solve problems that way. As an American reading a probably-American-produced poster, I’m pretty certain the originally-intended idea was the opposite, that protesters should know they have the ability to fight back against ostensibly stronger forces. Coming from a culture where protests are– speaking very, very generally– not the scenes of violent death, I can still understand why the image might evoke different incidents here.

We generally prompted them to relate the main idea to their own life, though, and it was there that the most interesting conversations occurred. It surprises me what my students trust me, and other teachers, with– stories and strongly held beliefs that might rarely be shared in an American classroom. It’s often touching, or sobering;¹ it feels like a rare gift that my students speak about these things with me, when speaking at all is such a challenge for them. When describing a poster labeled “Embrace Life’s Storms,” a student– un-prompted– shared the story of how he’d struggled with medical problems in a foot as a child, and been unable to walk (”or play football,” said with a wry smile) for years. To an outsider, Turkish culture seems a little less open to (and certainly less accommodating of) physical disabilities. Would an American student in that situation have told his story? I don’t know, but I’m doubtful.

The students I teach, even those I most struggle with in class over their behavior and their skills, still surprise me with their earnestness. There is a different culture of teaching here, a perception of the teacher as hocam, my wise teacher, rather than a restrictive force to be battled or escaped. That’s not to say that my classes are angelic, of course; if anything, they’re much more inclined to leave in the middle of a class or talk over me than any American students I’ve worked with. Yet there’s an undercurrent of respect– in both directions– that changes the dynamic of the room. When I get frustrated with students in class, even if I say nothing, they often come to apologize afterward. I know they’re trying, and that their distraction is often the result of not understanding what’s going on, so I build in as much leeway as I can. I want to push them, and they know it; we’re working on it together, bit by bit. Sharing stories gives us all reasons to keep pushing through the hard parts of this partnership.

Tomorrow afternoon I’m proctoring exams again, though it’s paper grammar exams this time, unfreighted by emotional content. In lieu of conversations and stories, I’ll share with them the snickerdoodles I’m baking. Not much, but at least they’ll know that I know what they’re doing is tough, and that they deserve a reward, even if it’s unspoken for now.

1: On the other hand, two students told me last week– in a discussion of leaders, and the qualities of a good leader– how much they admired Hitler. That was more on the disturbing side. I pushed them on it, but there’s a limit to how much I can pause class to deal with it, and I am not currently close enough to either student to drag them into more than a brief conversation after class. We’ll see what happens over the rest of the term.

Bayram begins tomorrow, and I’m excited for it. I pride myself on being at least somewhat better-informed than the average yabancı about Turkish customs and Islamic traditions, but I really have no idea what the experience of participating in the holiday (even in a limited way) is going to be like. Knowledge of history and practices and religious significance and whatnot doesn’t get me very far in anticipating the emotions of and reactions to the newness of a foreign custom, one entirely outside of my own context. I’ll be visiting with a friend’s family in Adana for the first two days, then traveling to some coastal Roman and Byzantine sites on the third, then stopping by northern Hatay on the fourth day on my way back to Antep. It’s exciting. And makes me a little nervous.

In an odd sort of way, Thanksgiving and Kurban Bayramı fit well in my mind. Both seem like celebrations, on some level, of having enough: enough to get through the winter, enough to give to friends and family, enough to indulge for a day or two in an extravagant feast and celebration of togetherness, enough that you don’t have to endure pain and hardship for a little while. Charity is central. Food and family are central. There’s more to it than that, of course, in both cases– but enough, and being grateful for it, is important.

So instead of one day to remind me to be thankful this year, I’m lucky enough to get five devoted to the idea. I’m thankful for my friends and my family, for the ability to live in this wonderful place, for my health and my happiness and my luck. I’m thankful for the warmth and generosity of my new friends here, for the challenge of my work, for the time that I have to see places and explore experiences so unusual for my peers. I’m thankful for everything I have, for my life, and for the reminder to think on it and appreciate it.

Happy Thanksgiving, and bayramınız kutlu olsun.

1: Roast chicken (turkeys are– ironically, I guess– difficult to find here) over a bed of potatoes and quartered onions, plus tiny onions cooked whole until sweet with slivered spinach and crushed garlic steamed over them as a side. Bread and butter. Apple pie (a lovely success, when I expected a pretty awful failure– I bake a mean apple pie, but the circumstances were not in my favor).

Heirloom tomatoes, picked this evening

Now that it’s September, how do I feel? Mixed. I mean, to give you some context:

1. Summer after my freshman year, I had four herbs in pots on the back stoop. (Basil, thyme, rosemary, and mint, I think.) They all died within a week, presumably from lack of water and sunlight.
2. Summer after my sophomore year, I dug a bed in our clay-soiled back yard and planted some cherry tomatoes in it. We got enough that I could occasionally pick a handful on my way to work, but then they started rotting on the vine from some blight. I planted some other vegetables (zucchini, other tomatoes, rosemary). They all died.

So it’s not like I’m a master-gardener going into this. I have an okay intuitive sense of how to take care of plants, presumably from watching my mother’s enormous vegetable and flower gardens as a kid– I’m just terrible on the follow-through, especially with watering, and for some reason it’s only this year that it occurred to me to look on the internet for advice with plant problems.¹

A Brandywine tomato portrait.

In the end, I actually had a decently successful garden this year by my standards. There’s a large mixing bowl full of heirloom tomatoes sitting on my kitchen counter, with many more still green and on the vine. The basil and thyme survived (more the thyme than the basil, alas) to be transplanted indoors this week. The Mystery Volunteer Squash produced six or seven immature but tasty squash/pumpkin/gourd/whatnots before succumbing to blight. The green and yellow beans reliably produced handfuls of produce through much of the summer, though mostly in snacking quantities. Leafy greens and peppers were more-or-less failures, but I did get a little bit of chard and two ancho hot peppers.

So, what did I learn?

In my case, the obstacle standing in the way of garden success is pretty much solely my own laziness or distraction.

Whoops.

I really did try. But it was a rough summer, in some ways– I’ll write those blog posts eventually– and wrangling the complicated, messy hose system on my way to the bus in the morning in work clothes didn’t work out well. Neither did stopping by the garden on the way into the house after the 40-minute bus commute home. In retrospect, I should have made an earlier effort to set up an alternate system– if I’d spent part of a Saturday setting up a simple irrigation hose, ninety percent of the problems probably would have been solved– but alas. It was not to be.

The fact that I didn’t really weed doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect, however. My tomatoes and peppers and beans are still happy and enthusiastic, even though there’s sparse grass and little vines interrupting them. It offends my aesthetic sensibilities more than their photosynthetic ones.

The fact that I was at least marginally successful this summer, though, makes me want to make it work next time around.² There’s something so terribly satisfying about filling a bowl with striped, strangely shaped heirloom tomatoes, or gathering a handful of green beans to snack on. The mere act of planting, of digging out a space and making it hold living things, was also far more lovely than I remembered. I’m looking forward to having garden space again sometime, when I’m settled somewhere to live more permanently.

It’s also become clear to me that I very much value getting certain things from the garden (read: tomatoes), am pleased by others (read: herbs, beans), and could take or leave the rest. It’d be great to have a successful zucchini plant³, or sweet bell peppers, or green onions, or chard– but it’s apparently not where my hungry mind gravitates. This’ll no doubt be reflected in whatever I plant next time around.

In the meantime, there are more than enough green tomatoes on the vine that I’ll have them until I go. Rich pink-rose Brandywines, striped and twisted and curved Pineapples, cascades of Yellow Pears and Sweet 100s. Good enough to call this a successful third try.

1: I know, right? I mean, I consult the internet for everything on the face of the planet. Why was this one so unexpected?
2: Maybe I’ll try for interesting Turkish spices in pots in Gaziantep…
3: What is it with zucchini? Everyone else has baskets of them to give away, and I can’t get the darn things to grow at all.