“There are two kinds of relative clauses,” I began. “One is important for understanding the meaning of the sentence and the other is just extra information.”

I stood in front of my students explaining English sentences introduced by which, who, or that. As I wrote an example on the white board, three young men sitting beside the window began talking among themselves. Perhaps they didn’t understand what I was saying, and needed to discuss it.

I turned from the board and waited for them to stop, but they kept on. It now appeared that some kind of unrelated, amusing anecdote was being told. I moved a few paces toward the offenders, catching the eye of one of them. The rest of the class fell quiet. A truck rumbled by outside and the radiator hissed a blast of heat.

I remembered being caught talking in class in my student days. I would halt in mid-sentence, if not mid-word, my face scarlet. And I’d take care to be quiet during the rest of the period. But not these young men.

After a few more moments, all three looked up at me and finally fell silent. Great: I had made my point. I turned and walked back to the board. As I did, a conversation broke out in another part of the room.

What a difference a month had made! I was now so busy that I didn’t have time to question what I was doing here in Turkey or, most of the time, how I was doing it. On the home front, Sankar and I were enjoying a good stretch; most evenings we formed a companionable tableau: husband and wife sharing their workdays over dinner. Sankar was good at listening to my concerns and added office anecdotes to the mix as we tossed around our latest impressions of the Turkish culture. Our lackluster social life was no longer a problem; neither of us had the energy to care.

To my surprise, learning my students’ names had only taken a few days. I’d started with the easiest one on my list, Melike. The word means queen in Arabic, and I had guessed my student would be a young woman. Yes, and Melike was lovely, with wavy hair and big brown eyes. Another student on the list was named Onur, which sounded like Honor. It turned out I was right: onur is actually the Turkish word for honor. A rare cognate. The name seemed to fit this alert, blue-eyed young man.

As my students introduced themselves to me that first day, I scribbled hurried clues on my class list. “Curly hair.” “Tall and thin.” “Pudgy.” For one girl, “Looks like Kristen Wiig.” The first thoughts that popped into my mind, many were politically incorrect. One thin, goateed young man seemed furtive, unable to meet my eyes. “Al Q sleeper cell,” I jotted. But Orhan soon emerged as a class clown, and I found out he was the son of a NATO engineer. One day after class he confided, “We have mountains in Turkey that are hollow and full of NATO weapons.” Good to know.

The young women, fully half the students at this business- and engineering-focused university, were feminine and attractive, with long hair and the latest clothing styles. Particularly eye-catching were their boots, made of soft leather or fine suede in shiny browns and pale tans, and sometimes extending to mid-thigh. The young men looked older and more formidable than the men in the freshman English class I had taught in Minnesota. It was their coloring. Blond peach fuzz on the chin of a 19-year-old is barely visible, but a 5 o’clock shadow on a Turkish youth could turn him into a 30-year-old.

They hailed from cities and towns all over Turkey. Mardin, in the southeast, close to Syria, which in less than a month would erupt in civil war. Bursa, home to Ottoman sultans. Trabzon on the Black Sea, home of the mythical Amazons.

The School of English Language Instruction (SELI) was designed so that students could complete all five eight-week modules in one year. This seemed optimistic, and Sankar and I discussed it. Could either of us, motivated and undistracted by hormones, progress from zero to college level in a foreign language in just one year? We didn’t think so—even if we were totally immersed, which our students were not. There would simply be too much vocabulary to learn. The vast majority of OzU students couldn’t do this either: even the best ones failed a level once or twice, often taking two years to complete SELI. My level, Intermediate was considered the most difficult.

To reinforce grammar concepts, students completed a myriad of worksheets. These were designed by previous teachers and stored deep within the staff’s shared online “Z-drive.” It was great to have this resource, but the materials were often rife with mistakes. A typical example: “The teacher was busy taking the attendances.”

I loved my new colleagues — and have put pictures of some of them in this post, just so you can see how wonderful they are. I admired their near-mastery of English, in many cases accomplished with little or no time spent in English-speaking countries. And I knew it was hard to be corrected. But why weren’t we, the five or six native English speakers, tasked with vetting materials before they were put online?

I felt uneasy each time I got on the Z-drive to pull up materials. I could correct a worksheet and then save it to my own file; nobody would care. But what if I did a Save All—and I sometimes did, when I was feeling puckish—preserving my edits for everyone to access? My intuition warned that I might be overstepping a boundary. Would someone discover I had changed their work, and then reprimand me?

During the first few days, my students had been quiet and respectful, content to watch my PowerPoints and sit through diagnostic tests. On day two I got the chance to directly help a student when Talat, originally from a Kurdish town in the southeast, approached me during a break. How hard it must have been for him to form the words in English: “My family. . . is have . . . trouble. I don’t can buy the books,” came out in a whisper. I later learned that his mother had died when he was small, and that his father was only seasonally employed. I thanked Talat for telling me and went straight to Big Nergis.

“Tell him to come see me,” she suggested, and when he did, she loaned him a copy of the Intermediate textbook. The next day I purchased the supplementary book for 35 lira, about $20, and gave it to him.

By the end of the first week, my students’ behavior had begun to deteriorate. I started to notice murmuring that soon became a buzz of outright talking and occurred throughout the four hours I taught them. Most were attentive when I presented a new grammar concept, but whenever I told an anecdote, for example, about how a particular phrase was used in the U.S., or about my own strategies in learning a new language, they turned their faces from me, clearly uninterested. In a language class in which listening was key, the increasing noise was disruptive and worrisome.

Big Nergis believed in team teaching and so each of us had a teaching partner with whom, a couple of days each week, we switched classes. Although this added complexity to our jobs, it gave the students variety in accents and teaching styles.

During my first module, I teamed with Halime, a bright young woman who, like many of the SELI teachers, had graduated from large, prestigious Bilkent University in Ankara. As part of her training, she and several others now teaching at Ozyegin had been sent to Ames, Iowa, for several months to teach English literature to high school students. Caitlin and I laughed when we discovered that this had taken place during the winter months, and teased them that perhaps their “opportunity” had actually been a punishment. They laughed: the trip had had its challenges, most notably the freezing weather and lack of fresh produce, but they’d also spent time in both Chicago and New York.

Since I spent two days each week with Halime’s students, I had a whole new roster of names to learn—and students to shush. And the shushing was more difficult because these students treated me more like a substitute.

This rudeness, in an otherwise exquisitely polite culture, surprised me. I had been warned that 19-year-old Turks, sheltered and rarely given the chance to make their own decisions, might seem like 15-year old Americans. But I’d long had the impression that, while American students are exceedingly casual—putting their feet up, wearing pajamas to class, munching on snacks during lectures—the rest of the world’s students show their teachers great respect. Not so here.

My students’ inattentive behavior—and my uncertainty over how to manage it—made me feel less like a teacher. It reinforced my fear that I was merely an imposter. The students I was supposed to be helping were denying me the satisfaction of a job well done. I had never been treated in such an overtly dismissive way.

Observing Caitlin try to teach over student chatter just weeks before, I had vowed that I’d have a quiet class. Ah, the hubris of inexperience. I simply hadn’t imagined having this kind of discipline problem at the university level.

I tried to come up with reasons for the racket. I knew most of my students were living away from their parents’ control for the first time. They were trying to adjust to new freedoms and they wanted to make friends as quickly as possible. This led to a lot of socializing.

And the over-optimistic design of our program seemed to set students up for failure. Most were not particularly word-oriented in the first place, so they were bored by vocabulary and grammar lessons—and had little hope of success even if they did apply themselves. That made just about anything else in the room more interesting.

The physical setting was another culprit. Students sat in small chairs with desk arms that curved toward them, and their chairs were packed closely together along three sides of the room. The crowding, I felt, made everyone restless. The school had given each student a small Netbook laptop that they carried along with their textbook. That was too much for the tiny desk arms. After chatter, the most common sound in my classroom wasn’t tortured English pronunciation, but a sharp, slapping noise when a textbook or Netbook hit the floor. I couldn’t complain or ask for changes: the following year the entire university was moving to a brand new, multi-building campus some miles east.

Umit offered his take. “They study with money” he told me. ÖzU was not a public university; it was private. Here in Turkey, the general belief was that public university students, subject to more stringent entrance requirements and lower tuition, were disciplined, respectable scholars of modest means, while private university attendees were pampered, affluent brats. Upon hearing of my new teaching venue, every Turk I talked to made the same comment: “Oh, you have the spoiled kids.”

Back home, college students either went to a lecture intending to listen, or stayed away. They didn’t usually show up and disrupt the class. But here, students didn’t have the option of missing class: if they missed more than three days without excuse, they failed the entire module. To monitor this, I went down the class list making checks four times each day, at the beginning of every class period. This spawned resentment and a flurry of doctor’s excuses, causing me to joke about the “feeble health” of my students.

We were treating our students like children. “Why do we take attendance every hour?” I asked Little Nergis. She sighed, and replied that ÖzU had tried doing away with attendance, but that had resulted in students wandering in and out of classes at will.

I also wondered whether student anger might have also played a role. Anger at the lack of control they had as they were processed through the rigid Turkish educational system. After taking a grueling national exam during their senior year of high school, they were herded into universities based solely upon their scores; neither character, talent, nor other accomplishments were considered. And they were told to feel lucky if they gained a spot; a half million students were turned away each year due to lack of space. Once enrolled, students were expected to continue straight through to graduation. Semesters abroad or, heaven forbid, gap years, were viewed as frivolous, if not educationally fatal detours.

Hmm. . .  anger over loss of control. Who felt this more acutely — my students or their teacher?

What could be done? In the past, Turkish teachers had apparently used corporal punishment, and national laws had recently been passed protecting students of all ages. The upshot was that teachers were legally forbidden from asking misbehaving students to leave the room. At ÖzU, all I could do was write up an “incident report” and send the offender to talk with Big Nergis after class, guaranteeing an even poorer attitude once the student returned.

One small tool I did have was the Classroom Participation Grade (CPG), an extra half-point awarded to each student each week for good behavior. This didn’t sound like much, but could total five points at the end of the module and mean the difference between passing and failing. Students that felt they had a chance of passing tried to earn that half point every week.

An ultimate tool, albeit of little immediate help was that students failing a module three times were generally asked to leave.

I also recognized that I had contributed to the problem. During my first weeks I had been too nice, too easygoing with my students. Now, it was difficult to shift to a sterner persona. I should have brushed away my tendency to defer to the culture as the guest I was, and started off assertively.

Two students got under my skin. One was Yildiz, pretty and dripping with disdain, and the other was Can, who actually had pretty good English speaking skills because of visits to the U.K., but spent class periods goofing around.

One day, after watching Yildiz turn again and again to her neighbor with an apparent joke while I spoke, I got angry. I yelled at her—probably for close to a minute—in English. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it was something like, “Why can’t you listen? Why are you here if you’re not listening? (I already knew the answer to that.) As I went on, Can piped up with a rebuke, “She can’t understand you.”

My words silenced Yildiz, but what does the teacher do after she stops yelling? She turns toward the materials she was attempting to cover and tries to calm down enough to teach them, aware that she is now asking her students to focus and concentrate after she has done something unusual and upsetting.

The result? The miscreants could see that my rant had accomplished nothing; they could see that I had used up my arsenal, and so they paid even less attention . The others in class—the perhaps 2/3 who were not causing trouble? Well, this was an obedient and sociable society and these were nineteen-year-olds. They kept silent.

The only exception was an unusual young woman named Gül, rose. Tiny, with pale skin and relatively short dark hair, she never wore boots or up-to-date styles, but instead dressed in white Peter Pan blouses with print skirts, geeky white anklets and dainty old-fashioned tennis shoes. Every class period, she sneezed just once, but in an idiosyncratic squeak that quickly became humorous. She paid attention and didn’t hesitate to raise her hand when she had questions, which was often. Definitely her own person, Gül was liked by all. As the final exam neared and we began to review, she finally turned to the misbehavers and addressed them in her firmest voice, “Gerçekten!” Meaning, Really? You’re going to continue this kind of behavior even now?

In my first weeks, I had mentioned my talkative students to Turkish colleagues and they had nodded wearily. Yes, even experienced teachers admitted that their students were “chatty.” But I sensed it was worse for us foreigners, who couldn’t understand what the students were saying. In fact, there seemed to be a hierarchy of respect at ÖzU. The teachers who received the most deference were, not surprisingly, older, male, and Turkish. Those receiving the least were younger, female, and foreign. Caitlin fell into this category, and when several of us discussed this problem one day, she shared some half-serious advice. “Get the class to think you’re really cool, and then drop the ‘f’ bomb on them.”

The module continued relentlessly, the busy days blurring together. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, trusting that I’d eventually adjust to my role and surroundings. As the days and weeks wore on, lesson planning and answering diverse grammar questions became easier. I also learned something about Turkish culture, noticing that students who had colds constantly asked to be excused to the tuvalet. It turned out they wanted to blow their noses, something that Turks consider impolite in public. I now recalled Big Nergis’ unusual behavior with the tissue when she interviewed me.

I also conferred with Big Nergis. She told me that Turkish students were more likely to cooperate if they felt I had a personal interest in them. To help establish this, she told me, I should hold individual conferences early in the module. This was good advice, and I followed it in the subsequent modules I taught.

But for now, the constant noisy chatter continued. And, although the problem was often on my mind, I stopped mentioning it to my Turkish colleagues. It seemed an admission of my weak classroom management skills. I feared my students didn’t respect me; how could I invite disrespect among my colleagues as well? Thus I did the same thing the Turkish teachers did with their Achilles heel, English grammar. I buried it.

I had taken the job to feel better about myself, to grab hold of something that seemed, at least in my own country, increasingly scarce. To prove that I wasn’t old and washed up. I did feel a burst of pride whenever a new acquaintance asked me what I did, or when I told people back home that I’d managed to find a job in Turkey. And I felt satisfied when a day’s lesson went particularly well. But triumph and pride were nowhere to be found when I really needed them, hour after long hour in the classroom

By week five I had recovered enough self-possession to begin casting about for activities that might distract students from their socializing. Sometimes I succeeded. I played the song, “If I Had a Hammer” to illustrate the Second Conditional, and the students loved it, begging me to play it again and again. I put a series of grammar and vocabulary questions into a PowerPoint. Then, during our last period on Fridays, I divided the students into teams, gave them scratch paper for their answers, and got ready to keep score.

My male students were particularly thrilled. One team stood up, put their arms around each other in a huddle, and issued a fierce battle cry before I displayed the first sentence:

This is the car ______________ was in the accident.

1. who
2. that
3. it
4. he

As groups puzzled over the question, the guys kept busy yelling what they thought were wrong answers to other teams. The girls were quieter, content to provide much of the brainpower. The entire class fell silent–such bliss!—as I unfolded answer slips and delivered the verdict. When the game ended, such a roar came from the winning team that I was sure everyone on the floor heard us. From then on, last periods on Fridays were always reserved for games, and we all rallied together for at least one hour each week.

At the end of each day I walked outside to meet dear, familiar Ümit. He had complained about having little to do now that both Sankar and I were working, and I didn’t know how he occupied himself during the hours we were away. But he was prompt in picking me up at 4:30 each afternoon and had made friends with the ÖzU guards as well as a fruit and vegetable vendor across the street from the school.

When I emerged from the building, Ümit sprang out of the car, rounded the front to the right passenger side, opened the door with a flourish and stood smiling, waiting for me to get in. I had put up with that ever since I arrived in Turkey, but now I cringed. Several of my colleagues were coming out of the building a few paces behind me. Thankfully, they were busy talking to each other; I didn’t want them to see me getting into such a fancy car. Surely they would wonder why such a privileged person was working at all. I felt like a middle school student who is suddenly embarrassed at the existence of his parents.

I greeted Ümit and ducked quickly into the car, head down. Being “the rich American who rides around in a late-model BMW” was not the kind of relative clause I wanted to describe me.

Months later, however, I wondered whether it might possibly have garnered me more respect from my students.

The post Too Many Words appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.

A weekday afternoon in late October. I’d spent much of it sitting in the green armchair next to our east window, reading and watching ripples on the Bosphorus. The temperature was in the sixties, but the stiff breeze wafting in from the balcony seemed a portent of upcoming winter.

We had finished buying what we needed to furnish our apartment, our final purchase a couple of 6 x 9 kilims for the living and dining rooms. I had just started a new Turkish class, this time with helpful teacher Ferda. Monica was in my class again, along with four Japanese matrons and a young Polish woman. My book group had settled into its new reading list. My life here was still a thin broth, but it was gradually getting richer.

I put my book down and stood up. Then I began to tidy the apartment. I loaded the dishwasher and put some clothes in the wash. I emptied wastebaskets. Then, garbage bag in hand, I headed downstairs and outside to the metal dumpsters that sat across the street, Yalı Sokak (waterside street) from our building.

The door to our unit locked automatically. I usually left it ajar for brief trips downstairs, but a breeze could blow it shut. The door to the building also had an automatic lock, but it could be propped it open with the doormat. Still, whenever I left our apartment, I carried my house keys.

A tall chain link fence enclosed our complex. A black metal access door was built into it. For some reason this door was never locked. From the outside, you simply pushed it open. From inside, you pulled. Sema and Pinar, the longest residents of the building and the go-to folks for any concerns, obviously felt two layers of security were enough.

I pulled the black metal door open, crossed the road, lifted the lid of the dumpster, and tossed in my bag of garbage.

Then I walked back to enter the complex. I pushed on the metal door, but oddly, it resisted, so I pushed again. It wouldn’t open. To my surprise, it seemed to be locked.

How could this be? This gate had been unlocked every time we’d used it in our four and a half months here.

Perhaps one of my keys would work. I pulled them out of my pocket and tried one, and then the other, in the small unused-looking keyhole. No luck. I stood, dumbfounded. What should I do?

I tried my keys again. The door wouldn’t budge.

It was just before 3 pm. Sankar wouldn’t be home from work until 7 or so. I didn’t have my cell phone with me so I couldn’t call and let him know what had happened. Nor could I call and ask Ümit to come and help out. I was wearing flip flops and had no money on me, thus a walk down the steep hill to wait at Starbucks wasn’t a good option. The air was getting colder.

Could I climb over the door? Its smooth surface didn’t look like it would allow purchase. Furthermore, stretching either direction along the top of the surrounding fence were silver coils of razor wire.

I noticed some ivy growing just to the left of the metal door, and pushed it aside. Now I could see a twin black metal door, this one bolted in place. There were eight or ten buttons on it, lined up vertically. I’d never seen them before. Our apartment’s intercom system was located inside, next to the building door itself. For each tenant there was a nameplate and a button connecting to the appropriate apartment. These outside buttons looked like an older system.

I decided to try them anyway. I pushed every button on the console, moving from top to bottom and then back up again. I heard no sound, and couldn’t tell whether they were working or not.

Was anyone else at home? When Sankar traveled, I was sometimes the only one in the building. Aylin, on the first floor, was a divorcee with teenaged twin daughters in boarding school and a second home in Switzerland. Sema and Pinar were often traveling: to Bodrum, Turkey’s playground for the wealthy, to their second home in Florida, and even, recently, to Argentina. Their son, Can (John), lived on the first floor, but his apartment was undergoing renovation and I didn’t think he currently occupied it.

Nilufer and Erdi, a retired couple, lived in the third floor apartment opposite ours. They were often around, but I knew they had a son in the States who they visited. A carefully-groomed, well-dressed woman in her late sixties, Nilufer had stopped in one day to introduce herself, saying she and Erdi would like to invite us over for dinner. All of the residents spoke good English.

Our neighborhood, referred to as Kortel Korusu, Kortel’s grove, was full of three- to five-story apartment buildings, but we didn’t know a soul in any of them besides ours, not even by sight. Down the hill from us, facing the Bosphorus, were a series of lavish houses, some with front offices staffed by guards. Only the wealthiest İstanbulus lived in private homes. Asking residents—or employees—of these homes for help didn’t seem like a good option.

More pushing buttons. More silence. I looked around. What a stupid dilemma. And here I had been feeling so good today. Only this morning I had congratulated myself for reaching a new comfort level here, for feeling calmer and less anxious than usual.

I had come a long way from my early, error-filled days. Since arriving in June I had: walked smack into a plate glass window at a mall entrance; held up the line at the butcher’s while I struggled to ask for “ground” meat; memorized the first two letters of our car’s license plate so I’d recognize it when Ümit picked me up, only to find that every Istanbul license plate started with the same two letters; and inadvertently used a vulgar Turkish word with Ümit inside a tiny store, and then repeated it louder when, ashen-faced, he asked me what I was trying to say. But in the last month, things had started to settle down. Much of what had been unfamiliar was finally becoming familiar, and that gave me a feeling of great accomplishment.

But now this. If nobody was in the building, I’d have to wait here, shivering in the fall air.

No one walking down our quiet narrow street would fail to notice an ill-dressed, middle-aged foreigner alongside a locked gate and ask what was wrong. How I hated sticking out, especially now, when I wasn’t in control of the situation. And I didn’t even have the words to explain what had happened. Funny, back in Yemen there had been an incident of a locked door—I couldn’t remember the details—but it had caused me to learn the Arabic words for open, closed, and locked. I could still remember them. But I didn’t know these words in Turkish.

I loathed the thought of standing here all afternoon looking like a fool. It was an assault on my pride, my dignity.

How quickly a day here could turn from cozy and comfortable to helpless—and even, given the cold air, a little desperate.

Wait. What was that clanging noise? Was someone at home after all? I peeked through a gap between the metal door and the chain link fence. A stout, diminutive woman wearing an apron over a light blue dress was coming toward the gate. I didn’t know who she was, but I was elated to see her. The buttons had worked! I gasped with thanks as she pulled the door open for me, and tried to explain in Turkish that it had been locked from the outside. She smiled, half-comprehending, and I stepped inside.

The woman accompanied me up to third floor and I realized she was Nilufer’s cleaning lady. She and I were the only ones in the building. Thank goodness she’d been here.

Back in our apartment, I sat, shaken, for some time. Then I called Sankar and told him what had happened. We theorized that someone, most likely one of the other tenants, had decided that the outside gate now needed to be locked, but had failed to inform the rest of us. Sankar said he thought we’d initially been given keys for that gate, but had never put them on our key rings. “I’ll look for them when I get home tonight,” he promised.

Once I’d calmed down I wrote an email to our apartment’s listserv, briefly describing what had happened and telling everyone to make sure to have a key for the gate from now on.

Just after 6:45 pm, Sankar phoned from the outside gate, and I walked downstairs to let him in. Nilufer was arriving in her car. Sankar and I waited for her and the three of us walked through the garden and into the building. I mentioned that I’d been locked out and asked her if she knew anything about the new lock on the gate. She said she did not.

At that moment, I recalled something that had happened that morning. I’d seen some workers coming out of Nilufer’s  apartment, and had later walked past the same guys doing some work near the gate. It was suddenly clear that these workers had had something to do with the new lock.

“Were those your workers here this morning?” I asked Nilufer.

“Yes.”

“Did you tell them to lock the gate?”

“No,” with a kind of half smile on her face.

“Well, do you know how the gate got locked?”

“No,” still smiling. “I had nothing to do with it.”

“Could your workers have accidentally done something?”

“I didn’t do anything,” finality in her voice.

I didn’t believe her. And—I don’t know whether it was Nilufer’s odd smile or her failure to acknowledge what had happened to me, or both—but I felt anger rising. I wanted an admission of error; I wanted someone to take responsibility for what had happened.

“It was your workers, Nilufer. Your workers locked the door.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

We had reached the landing between our two apartments. I had left our door open, and now I stepped inside. Somehow I had my Turkish notebook in my hand, with loose papers sticking out of it. I wasn’t sure how it had gotten there. My anger was making me feel hyper-aware, but I was actually in a kind of fugue state.

With the apartment door open and Nilufer facing Sankar and me from the landing, I raised my notebook high over my head and then slammed it down on the floor. It made a wonderfully loud smack, perfectly punctuating my words, “It’s your fault!”

Sankar closed the door behind us without a word as I hissed, “She’s a liar!” He said nothing, but headed upstairs to change his clothes. I picked up my notebook and scattered papers, and went into the kitchen to make supper. He made scant conversation at dinner and then disappeared into the upstairs TV room until bedtime. I couldn’t recall him ever being so silent.

Regrets came quickly. I was a guest here in Turkey, and I’d insulted a Turk.  I had embarrassed myself—and Sankar. Was there ever an instance when being an angry foreigner was acceptable?

When Umit arrived the following day, he showed me the tiny lever on the edge of the gate that had to be pushed intentionally and with some effort into a new position in order for the gate to lock. I still didn’t know whether Nilufer, perhaps with some concern about crime, had directed her workers to move the lever, or whether they had done it on their own. I would run into her from time to time during the next two years, and we would nod to each other, but we never discussed the incident again.

It seemed I had reached some kind of emotional limit that day, a culmination of all the stresses of the last five months. I was beginning to recognize the unpredictable, combustible emotions inside of me. They had even provoked me to physical action, something I had never taken before.

But I had only been outside for ten minutes. Why had I become so angry?

It didn’t take long for the answer to become clear. It related to my personal competence, much valued, but shattered when I moved to Istanbul. Costa Rica and Yemen had been simpler places, but Turkey, Istanbul in particular, was far more complex than what I was used to. Every day since I arrived, I’d been slowly and patiently trying to put this important piece of myself back together again. Practicing Turkish, pumping other expatriates and Ümit for information, poring over guidebooks, studying maps to become familiar with the landscape. And progress had come. Slowly and sometimes almost imperceptibly, it had come: patience and persistence were paying off.

Until today, until this afternoon. Just hours ago, I’d seen all those months of effort disappear. In front of my home, in front of the place where I relaxed and let my guard down, I’d seen myself turn into a helpless, tongue-tied, middle-aged foreigner. Disturbing. Pitiful.

And even though I hadn’t ended up standing outside in the cold for hours, the fear of it happening had been enough to unhinge me.

I recalled that, in the cultural training we’d had before we left Minnesota, we had talked at some length with a long-term American resident of Istanbul. He told us that Turks, though warm and generous, are often hesitant to admit responsibility for errors. I asked Sankar if he was finding this true at work and he said yes, Turkish colleagues often denied saying or doing things even when it was clear they had. Fear of harsh consequences, Sankar felt was the reason.

There was that “f” word again. Fear. It certainly had a lot of power.

I wish I could say I underwent some serious self-examination after this incident. I didn’t, however. I simply hoped this kind of provocation would be rare here.

I did vow to be more self-aware the next time a situation made me stand out as stupid, and inevitably other incidents occurred. One took place on a bus I was boarding to go from Beşiktaş back home to Arnavutkoy. I swiped my IstanbulKart as payment, but the bus’ scanner wouldn’t accept it. I tried several more times, people crowding behind me to board (Turks, like Americans, show their impatience with sighs and the shuffling of feet). Finally I had to push my way back off the bus and take a cab home.

The next day I asked Ümit to take me to get my card replaced, but the clerk at the office replied there was nothing wrong with it. I insisted—it hadn’t worked, after all—but he refused and looked dismissively beyond me to the next customer. Frustrated, I got back into the car and started expounding to Ümit. But then I caught myself and calmed down. I couldn’t let my fear of looking stupid control me. I’d just have to accept that things would happen, that over and over again here I was going to wear the dunce cap. And the clerk was right: my card worked fine thereafter.

Later I realized that, if I stopped and thought, I could probably turn just about any mistake here into something positive. I knew this because we were experiencing graciousness from Turks over and over again. Turks got up from their tables at sidewalk cafes to direct us into tight parking spots. Turks walked up to us in provincial towns to ask if we needed directions. They stopped alongside our car at highway tollbooths to offer us the use of their prepaid cards. Once, when I inadvertently drove past an open electronic arm into an apartment complex only to have the arm lower and prevent me from exiting, the owners of a florist shop on the premises invited me in and plied me with tea while I waited for help.

Being locked out of my apartment complex, though inconvenient and embarrassing, would not have been catastrophic. Had I stood outside for any period of time, Turks would have stopped and helped me. Not my rich neighbors in their cars, busy and oblivious, but the more ordinary Turks making their way on foot down the hill. They would have asked what was the matter and then offered assistance, at the very least the use of a cell phone.

Even the IstanbulKart situation had a heartwarming solution. “If you ever have another problem with your card, just look around the bus. Someone will offer you theirs to swipe. You can then pay them back in Turkish Lira,” a friend advised me. I only had to put aside my own fear of foolishness.

I was going to be in this complex, baffling country for only three years. I would have to count on confusion—unexpected, random bewilderment—as part of life here. Regardless of my efforts, being in control and comprehending what was going on were going to be the exception here, not the rule. I would have to put aside my fear and deal constructively with uncertainty whenever it made its arrival. I would have to learn grace and patience—and also humility. The latter an important “getting older” skill.

I was always going to be on the other side of a fence here. Fences are not easy to embrace, but I would have to try.

The post Meltdown! appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.

As if on cue, when September arrived, the humidity dropped. The days remained sunny, but the sky turned a deeper blue. Cool breezes ruffled the Bosphorus. I turned our living room air conditioner off, stowed the controls in a closet, and kept the doors to our balcony open all day long.

Now my walks down through the forested path to the sea were a treat. On the shore of the Bosphorus, I jogged between water and rows of pastel-colored Ottoman houses. Then, breathing the scent of pines, I climbed back up to our apartment.

It wasn’t just the drier air that felt invigorating. So did the thought of new fall activities. First priority: enrolling in a Turkish class.

Speaking Turkish would be my entry to the culture; it would help me start to develop my own pathway here. The Turkish language, neither Indo-European nor Semitic, is related faintly to both Finnish and Hungarian, and is spoken by many people to the east, in Azerbaijan and many of the “stan” countries. I already knew it was difficult: it has few English cognates, and requires to speaker to place verbs at the ends of sentences. On the plus side, Turkish is pronounced exactly the way it is written, and its rules have few exceptions.

As soon as language schools reopened for the school year, Umit and I set out to investigate. I had seen advertisements for schools named Tomer and Dilmer, and we headed to their somewhat shabby offices, one on Barbaros Street in Beşiktaş, and the other near Taksim Square.

I had cherished language classes in both of “my” previous countries. In Yemen, my employer, Catholic Relief Services, had granted me two months off work so that I could participate in Peace Corps language classes. The training had been scheduled for late fall, 1979, but after American hostages were seized in Iran, the American government had held its Middle-East-bound volunteers back.

“Yemen 13,” the country’s thirteenth group of American volunteers, didn’t end up arriving until January, after I was nearly six months into my job. I’d already completed an introductory Arabic course, taught by a Swiss priest, but relished the chance to review words and structures. Often, language classes move too fast and end up building on unsteady foundations. The repetition helped fix Arabic in my mind.

I had loved studying Arabic. In fact, some of my best days in Yemen had been spent reclining in the cushioned top floor mufraj of our mud-brick training building, listening to our teachers spool out Arabic lessons. And the results were rewarding: when I could finally comprehend what people were saying and begin to converse, my stress declined dramatically. And Arabs forever ceased to appear threatening.

Alas, I didn’t recognize what was clearly in front of me: I was far more interested in language than in my health education job. It was a sign that should have put me on a path toward working with words. Doing so would have eased a great deal of angst in the upcoming years. But the sign went unnoticed.

I arrived in Costa Rica a decade and a half later with adequate Spanish, but augmented it with much-anticipated weekly conversations and forays into Latin American literature with a wonderful tutor. And finally, after returning from that country at age 41, I realized that my professional work needed to focus on words.

I was so glad to have had experiences conversing in foreign tongues. Although nearly all of my friends had studied German, French, or Spanish in high school, most had never had a chance to use what they’d learned. That was a pity. Being able to understand another person’s words—even if one is not able to replicate that level of speech—was, I thought, a kind of magical phenomenon. It was like breaking through dense clouds into bright light, a seemingly dramatic emergence that actually required months of plodding study which, like the pain of childbirth, was forgotten once the breakthrough occurs. Rarely in my life had there been such a straight path between mundane effort and exhilarating reward. To me, this sense of exhilaration was even better than sex, and there was no question I was going to pursue fluency here in Turkey.

It was typical of the newcomer fog I went around in here that I hadn’t given much thought to what might happen when I visited a language school. At both Tomer and Dilmer, I was immediately guided to a small, empty classroom and handed a written test to complete: ten or so pages of multiple choice questions photocopied so many times that the lettering appeared blurry.

I had never taken a written Turkish exam before; heretofore my “tests” had simply come in the form of verbal communication. And I wasn’t particularly interested in reading and writing Turkish, only in being able to speak and understand it. Perhaps, I thought, there would be another phase of the test, one in which someone would converse with me.

Impatient, I turned in my papers before trying to complete all the questions. But apparently that was the end of the assessment. At Tomer, a stern-looking middle-aged man glanced at my test paper, but not at me, and told me I would be placed with students who had absolutely no knowledge of Turkish. At Dilmer, the situation was similar.

My Turkish was better than that of a rank beginner! I had taken an online course for three months, had amassed several hundred flashcards, and had a firm grasp of the present tense. True, that hadn’t made me very conversant, but at least I was able to communicate my needs to shopkeepers. Miffed by the impersonal treatment I’d received (and now with considerably more pride than my younger, more flexible Yemen self), I didn’t stop to consider that perhaps my Turkish underlayment was also weak, and thus taking a repeat course might be a good idea.

Back home, I expressed my frustration to Sankar. He listened and then, to my surprise, took my complaints to his secretary, Didem, whose job description included helping me get settled in Turkey. The next day, Didem called and offered to accompany me to the final school on my list. Its full name was unclear, but it went by the acronym EFINST.

EFINST was just off the main road that ran through the upscale suburb of Etiler, not far from our apartment. Inside its offices Didem and I sat down with the director, a heavily made-up woman of about forty named Ciğdem (CHEE dem) and, formalities first, sipped tulip glasses of tea. The two chatted in Turkish, referring to the organization as “EF,” and I noticed that Didem was poised and self-assured beyond her clerical job title.

After a few minutes, I went off to a classroom and took yet another written test. It was not much different from the others, but this time I was expecting it and applied myself more diligently, making educated guesses when possible. The result? I wasn’t told my numerical score, but Ciğdem told me I could join an intermediate class if I was willing to take two weeks of private lessons to bring me up to that level.

Ten full days of tutoring paid for by the company? What could be better? I thanked Didem for her role in securing this.

I had approached EFINST different from the first two schools, and in a manner I was unaccustomed to, bringing in reinforcements and throwing the weight of the company around. That went against my usual modus operandi—I disliked the feeling of getting something I didn’t deserve. But having recently capitulated to having a driver, I decided there was no use complaining about this new prerogative. I brushed any negative thoughts away: the school was probably pleased to have a new student and I was determined to work my very hardest.

I have always been the language person in our marriage. In our first years together, Sankar and I made several visits to Spain, and, not knowing a word of the language, he took my lead. In the mid-1990s we moved to Costa Rica, and he started Spanish lessons. He did well, thanks in part to his willingness to speak even when he didn’t quite know the right words. But I’d had a head start, and throughout our time there had enjoyed being the family translator.

With Turkish, Sankar and I had both started out at zero, but from the beginning I’d had more time to study the language. And Sankar’s job here involved traveling outside of Turkey a great deal, making any kind of mastery both more difficult and less useful.

I’ve always been a competitive person, and I enjoyed having this advantage. But my language skills didn’t always prevail. Perhaps because Sankar was raised in multi-lingual, multi-cultural India (and had spent his childhood moving from state to state in India, each time learning a new language and writing system), he used a kind of full-context approach, taking in body language, eyebrows, gestures, and tones of voice in addition to words, to suss out meaning.

From the opposite kind of background, in which everyone I knew had been essentially the same (this, I was beginning to realize, was a real handicap, and not just in the realm of language), I tended to focus solely on words themselves. When stumped, I’d find myself reaching for my pocket dictionary while Sankar focused on capturing an approximation of meaning and then acting on it. In those cases I ended up feeling both chastened (it galled me that imprecision, approximation, could save the day) and envious.

Umit dropped me off at EF for my first day of lessons. On a large, shaded terrace in front of the building, I sat down with Ferda, EF’s director of language studies and my Turkish tutor for the next two weeks.

Ferda didn’t look the way I expected. To my inexperienced eye, Turkish women fell into just two categories: stylishly Italian (slim physique, shoulder-length brown hair, careful makeup, stylish clothing) and Russian peasant (filmy headscarf with a point halfway down the back; baggy, often floor-length coat; little or no makeup). But Ferda didn’t fit either of these. Tall and forty-something, she had black hair that she wore twisted into a braid, and little makeup. She was wearing a woven peasant top and a wrap skirt that almost looked Guatemalan. She would definitely fit into my more nuanced American categories: crunchy, earth mother.

Ferda greeted me in Turkish and always spoke it thereafter (I didn’t know if she spoke any English.) Her voice was light and almost singsong-y, a pitch that could have been annoying, but wasn’t. I found her words unusually easy to understand—and have never figured out quite why that was so. Even more amazing, she understood all of the broken Turkish that came from my mouth. She talked, I listened and understood. I tried to talk, and she affirmed. Our two weeks flew past. I wished I could continue private study with Ferda, but knew that wouldn’t be practical.

On the first day of intermediate class, I arrived early and was directed upstairs, where I waited outside a locked classroom. A portrait of Atatürk hung on the wall and I stood in front of it, gazing at this fierce, handsome Turkish demi-god. His pale blue eyes were the key, I decided: both arresting and exotic. I tried to read the lengthy quotation under the picture, but quickly gave up.

Soon another student arrived, a compact, athletic-looking blonde. She introduced herself in British-accented English as Annika, from Sweden, and we began to chat. She told me she’d been living in Turkey for a year, having moved here with her husband, who managed a subsidiary of a German machine tool company. Their 11-year-old son was with them, and they had four grown children back in Sweden.

A staff person came and unlocked the classroom door for us, and other students drifted in. Two Germans, one named Karl, who said he was spending his two week vacation here studying Turkish, and the other, Adrian, a Gallic–looking young Berliner. And finally Anete, a striking, chestnut-haired young woman from the Czech Republic.

Ten minutes late, the teacher, a thirty-something woman with dark, curly hair, named Gülcan (GOOL jahn; Gül = rose and Can = dear) sauntered in in no particular hurry. She seemed to know both women from previous classes and greeted them. Then we went around and introduced ourselves. When it was Monica’s turn, to my surprise, Gülcan broke in with, “This is Annika. She is very karamsar.” Gülcan explained in Turkish that karamsar meant positif değil (degil negates the word in front of it), not positive. Annika looked surprised, and her face reddened, but she gave a shrug of admittance.

Then we got started. First, Gülcan spoke to us in Turkish—about the weather, about what she’d done the past weekend, about the previous night’s television programs. This was difficult and, as she was going too fast for me to use my dictionary, I found myself leaning forward and staring intently at her, desperate to try and pick up any and all cues. After that we got to work on a Turkish verb tense. A printed reading followed. The class would continue in this pattern.

At noon (the class met from 9 am until 2 pm three days each week), we students walked several blocks to a tiny Turkish restaurant run by a family from Anatolia. This was my first exposure to Turkish neighborhood food and it was positif. The place offered a buffet of rice and barley dishes, meat and vegetable stews, bread, and usually a sütlü tatlı, milky dessert (Turks are hopelessly addicted to pudding). It made me smile to think of the provincial staff having, simply by dint of their café’s location, to accustom themselves to tongue-tied students stumbling in, pointing dumbly at foods they wanted to eat, and then fumbling to count out Turkish lira.

After lunch, if the weather was sunny, the five of us would walk to a tiny park nearby and sit and chat (in English) about life in our countries.  

It was quickly clear that I was the weakest student in the class. First, I had to tune out the others in a kind of trance just to understand what Gülcan was saying. Self-consciousness forgotten, I raised my hand for help whenever I was stumped, which was often. But then, when asked to come out with spoken Turkish, I became tongue-tied.

I remember a conversation about “what we did over the weekend,” in which I wanted to tell Gülcan about a delicious orange-colored tabbouli-like salad I’d encountered. I thought the salad was called kisir, which would have been pronounced keeSEER, but it was actually kısır, using the undotted Turkish i, which pronounced “uh.” As I struggled to say kuhSUHR, Gülcan looked at me, first with puzzlement and then with annoyed exasperation. The class fell silent, embarrassed. Finally, she rolled her eyes and gave up, turning back to the board.

Speaking out in a foreign language opens a person to ridicule, and I hated being in this position. These excruciating moments would occur again and again in class—and would come back to me every time I ran into the now-hateful salad.

I had always been an eager, sit-in-the-front-of-the-class kind of student. Smiling, keeping my homework up to date, always turning in assignments on time. But here my effort and interest seemed to draw the teacher’s ire. I began to feel anxious about asking Gülcan questions, and was even less able to produce Turkish. One day she even singled me out, much as she had done to Annika on the first day, with, “Susan, siz duygusal, bence,” Susan, I think you are emotional.

One morning in pouring rain—the dry, fall weather had given way to frequent thunderstorms—Umit dropped me off at EF and then headed back to Asia to take Sankar on a customer visit. I went upstairs and waited by our classroom as usual, but nobody turned up. After ten, then fifteen minutes, I went down to the administrative offices and asked what was going on. The secretary informed me that Gülcan had cancelled class that day. I hadn’t been informed; clearly, the others had.

If it had been nice day, I would have simply left, making the half hour walk back home, but with rain coming down, I didn’t quite know what to do.

“I don’t have a ride home, and I wasn’t told about the cancellation,” I informed the secretary. I was angry, and becoming more so as I thought about what had happened. But I was also aware of being a guest here—and acculturated enough to be embarrassed at having fallen out of favor with my teacher.

One of EF’s drivers (all organizations had them) finally took me home that day. I called Annika and learned that Gülcan had emailed her, and presumably all the other students, about the cancellation. The next day Gülcan told me she hadn’t had any contact information for me.

If this incident had taken place back in the States, I would have headed back to the administrative office, insisted on seeing my files and contact info, and then taken that information to Gülcan to show her. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t want her to treat me even worse.

Gülcan was one of only two hostile Turks I would meet in my years in Turkey, and I spent time trying to figure out the reasons for her behavior. The first thing that came to my mind was that perhaps she disliked Americans. Surely our war in Iraq had given her and her countrymen reason. During our several days of language and culture training back in St. Paul, a Turkish trainer had confided that she had been furious with the U.S. back in 2003 and afterward because our war had nearly destroyed Turkish tourism. But the woman had gone on to say that most Turks had gotten over those sentiments.

I was Gülcan’s oldest student, the weakest in Turkish, and probably the most intense. My face took on a confused expression whenever I didn’t understand something, and then my hand would shoot up. Maybe my eagerness irritated her. Maybe my constant curiosity seemed like a challenge to her teaching. Or perhaps she simply realized that she was the gatekeeper for my ambitions, and decided to lord that power over me.

I disliked going to class each day. But I didn’t think seriously of quitting. Staying home would be worse than putting up with Gülcan: it would put a roadblock in my way here. At least I was meeting people and making a few friends. I appreciated having something to do three days a week—and having homework to do in the evenings. Besides, after failing to pursue my interest in language for so many years, how could I step off the path now?

I remember sitting in class frustrated almost to the point of tears, but I don’t recall many conversations about the situation with Sankar. I recently asked Sankar about this, and he said he doesn’t remember me being overly upset. Apparently I hadn’t made a big issue of it at home, hadn’t asked him for advice on whether I should continue. This strikes me as an inadvertently healthy move: I was making my own way, not tying this problem to his bringing me to Turkey. I had insisted on a higher-level class, he had helped me get it, and now it was my own business.

At this point, it simply became a matter of waiting the class out. It was only eight weeks long; perhaps we would get a different teacher for the next session.

The class did have one non-language positive: my interesting classmates. Karl, from Neuss—oddly, the only place in Germany I had ever visited—was quiet, but he apparently worked as a salesman. I suspected interest in a Turkish girl was his impetus for studying the language, but I never found out.

Anete, 27, was from a village of less than 200 people in The Czech Republic. She had been discovered as a model at the opera house in Prague, and had come to Turkey on location. Here, she had fallen in love with and married a Turk.

Adrian worked as a German teacher back in Berlin. Most days he arrived in class carrying a bright yellow duck umbrella (the weather was becoming more and more rainy), and he told us he taught German simply by walking his students around his city. Ever since, I’ve always pictured Adrian leading a group of student-ducklings along Berlin sidewalks with his umbrella unfurled, rain or shine. Adrian had forgotten to bring his passport to Turkey, but had managed to talk the normally ultra-serious Turkish authorities into letting him in—an amazing feat. He had a genuine interest in learning Turkish because, as he said, “I want to get to know the Turks in my city.” That sentiment would have melted the immigration officials.

And then there was Annika. I had experienced First Overseas Friendships before, and knew they didn’t always last, but Annnika and I were getting along well. To be sure, she was negative; I would always associate the word maalesef, (MA luh sef), meaning, “unfortunately,” with her. She used it all the time. Maalesef, she didn’t see her other children enough. Maalesef, Turkey was not at all like Sweden. Maalesef, there wasn’t much to do here.

Hearing Annika criticize Turkey made me want to defend it. I pointed out interesting places Sankar and I had visited, urging her to appreciate the bountiful treasures in Istanbul and outside the city. I offered to lend her a guidebook, and asked her if she was interested in coming with me to the upcoming International Women of Istanbul meeting, but she shook her head. These kinds of conversations ended up buoying my own mood, if not hers, reminding me of the positives here in Turkey.

I understood how Annika was feeling and behaving because I had felt and acted the same way in Costa Rica. Being with Annika was like revisiting my past, like taking a look at Expatriate Wife 1.0. while I was busy working to build version 2.0.

Annika did have some habits I admired. She told me that every morning, she went to her apartment complex’s gym and ran several miles on the treadmill, all the while composing Turkish sentences in her head. Simultaneous exercising and language learning: what a boost to the entire body!

And so I continued, attending a class I often dreaded. I was gaining the kind of perspective adversity often provides: I had never bothered to consider the “bad” students who had been my classmates in my school days—the ones that sat in the back or off to the side, fooling around unhappily and silent when called upon, but now I had ample insights into how they must have felt.

Was my Turkish improving? Probably. My flash card pile was growing, and every day I felt just a little more confident.

Stone by stone, step by step. Building a path that would lead me out of isolation. And before long I got some good news. Our next eight-week class would be taught by Ferda!

The post Old Dog New Tricks: Trying to Learn Turkish at Age 55 appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.

Here I was, pleased to be back in Istanbul after a brief trip to the States. When I walked outside one morning and noticed that my shoulder and neck muscles no longer tensed up, I realized that I was finally at ease here. That at-home feeling, fought hard for during these past months, had finally arrived. But as I continued down the hill without the jolt of elation the picturesque old houses and sea views usually bring, I realized, a little sadly, that my comfort had come at a price.

It turns out that the cost of my calm, the wages of my new serenity, can be measured in wonder. Now that I am relaxed and feeling content, I am less likely to experience that transcendent “wow,” that feeling of amazement and disbelief that I, Susan Black from Falcon Heights, am living in one of the world’s greatest, most glamorous cities. Yes, the peaks and valleys of the expatriate experience are bound together; one is a necessary condition for the other.

I hated last year’s loneliness, disorientation, and most of all, its cluelessness. But I think those troublesome emotional states served a purpose. I am pretty sure that it took long days cooped up in a stuffy apartment, the weather outside so humid it made me dizzy, to appreciate standing in the breeze at the mouth of the Black Sea, Europe on my left and Asia on my right. And a solitary Sunday trek to the—surprise!—tightly locked Grand Bazaar led to a foot-dragging detour — and a discovery that standing in a mosque created by Turkey’s genius architect, Sinan, is like floating inside a sirius cloud on a sunny day. All those weeks of not knowing my way around? Well, when I was finally able to guide friends successfully through this magnificent city, I felt like a conqueror.

Yes, both frustration and exhilaration were regular companions during my early months here, but it turns out that both are like the bubbles that dance madly on top of a fizzy drink. They quickly exhaust themselves on the placid surface.

So what do I have now? A list of places to visit around Turkey: some will surely dazzle. Plans to return some of the Turkish hospitality we have received: we must, finally, be grownups here. Ideas for much-anticipated visitors: with them I’ll grab some vicarious thrills.

We have built the sober structure of a normal life.

I can’t go back to those days last summer and fall, and I guess I don’t want to. The incompetence alone was excruciating. All that wonder is simply too expensive to invite back.

But it was great while it lasted.

The post Days of Pain and Passion appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.