A Turkish Adventure

by Steven

The sound of gunshots echoed through the cool night air, breaking the steady rhythm of pipes and drums resounding from the square below. Startled, I looked around at my companions, ten of us perched peacefully on the flat roof of a Turkish home. We wore the long baggy clothes that our host families had given us, and the girls wore headscarves that had been tied by more experienced hands. It was our second week in a rural village of less than a hundred families in southern Turkey. Nine other American students and I had each been assigned to live with a Turkish family for 16 days, learning to speak Turkish and helping to paint the local school. We had just left a wedding, for which the whole village had turned out in celebration, firearms in tow.

I arrived with my host family on the first day having undergone a 15 hour bus ride in almost unfathomable 110 degree heat to find that my host family, and indeed the entirety of Hocalli village, spoke no English. I walked up the crude concrete steps to the second level of their home, looking in shock at the cows living on the first level, seeing the lack of even a toilet in their home, and wondering how I had ever gotten myself into a situation where I would be living in a home thousands of miles from my own with people who spoke none of my own language and whose life was nothing like my own. I sat, trying to sleep, for an hour under my mosquito net contemplating how I could possibly survive the next day, let alone the next two weeks.

I did. I survived painting a school in blistering heat for eight hours with only a break for lunch. I survived meeting with a whole room full of my new Turkish relations and having nothing but a woefully inadequate phrasebook to connect me to them. I survived driving a tractor with absolutely no idea how a tractor works or where I was going. I survived drinking çay, Turkish tea, six times a day to be polite, although I did put in the maximum of two cubes of sugar. And I survived, more than survived, the people – conversations where we spoke perhaps ten words of each other’s language, conversations supplemented by oft repeated sign-language, but conversations where people were genuinely interested in me as the only American, the only foreigner that they had ever seen in their lives.

Their enthusiasm turned into my enthusiasm. My natural reserve turned into openness under the relentless barrage of questions and friendliness from the villagers – invitations to play cards from old men, rides to the farms of proud young men, and the constant gaggle of kids who followed me around, asking to play basketball or football. I felt invigorated by the sheer unpredictability of what I did here each day.

Now that I have returned home, life feels boring, predictable, tame, and almost too easy. I miss the friendly people, my Turkish family, and the lovingly made Adana kebabs. But I won’t miss the sense of adventure, of taking risks and throwing myself into a whole new situation, be it a Turkish wedding or the herding of goats. I’ll always keep that part of Turkey with me.