Dinner and International Monopoly

It is an appropriate parallel that my second entry on this blog, like my first, should revolve around an invitation to dinner. Last Friday, July 29^th, was one of the better days of the camp. The lesson my team taught was about peace, and we did a little activity wherein we passed out index cards to each student, asking them to illustrate the first idea that came to their head with the word “peace.” Responses varied from the 1960s peace sign (often humorously missketched as the Mercedes Benz logo!) to people of different races holding hands. It was a very productive and probing exercise each time we did it with a class, asking why they considered peace a reasonable goal and why they drew what they did.

Dinner that evening was with a family whose two teenagers, twins, were both students at the camp, and the guests were myself and three fellow interns, one each from Tajikistan, the Czech Republic, and Sudan. After a forty-minute bus ride to the other side of the bay that Izmit wraps around – the destination being the town of Gölcük – we arrived, and dinner began. After I had lost my debit card to an ATM in Cappadocia the week before, I with my limited cash had spent very little on food and this dinner seemed even more of a feast for my inadvertent fasting; however, even without my persistent hunger it would have been a remarkably filling and delectable meal. A vegetable soup was first, followed by a sort of cracked-grain stew; there was salad – tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions – as well as several dishes I could not recognize save for the presence of meat, a sort of dough, and a smothering layer of sour Turkish yogurt. The yogurt here is a puzzle to my America taste buds, accustomed to yogurt coming primarily in sweet variations with the occasional plain serving; in Turkey, they only have sour yogurt, thicker than whipped cream and eaten with a fork, or salty (maybe even garlicky) yogurt, including a salted, diluted yogurt drink named ayran of which I only ever could finish one glass but which the Turks imbibe with a hardy vigor. Another foodstuff that they did better in Turkey than the United States: fruit juice. There was an enormous variety, but I loved how some of the most common flavors were peach, apricot and sour cherry – and the former two delightfully thick and pulpy, and all three on this magnificently spread dinner table.

After dinner, we moved into the other room and broke out a game of Monopoly – in Turkish. Instead of the ever-so-familiar Mediterranean Avenue, Park Place and Broadway, however, all the slots were places in Istanbul! Not to mention the fact that two of the railroad stations were (appropriately) replaced by ferry docks and that all the cards were in Turkish, or that the currency was based on the old Turkish Lira, long before 2005 when they lopped six zeroes off the end in order to bring it into some semblance of normalcy. The funnest part, however, was attributing the actions of the players to their home countries: at no other time would Tajikistan have enough money to buy out half the world, or the Czech Republic and the US be under international probation (“In Jail”)! Though we didn’t even buy out all the available properties, it was still a thoroughly enjoyable evening. I was glad to have the opportunity to associate with such a nice family, and to be in the company of my fellow interns outside the confines of the classroom. It was definitely another highlight of my internship!

A birthday in the land of the undotted i's

To set the stage somewhat: I'm currently in Izmit, Turkey, a town of around a million inhabitants about an hour's fast drive east of Istanbul, a place where you see the lights peppering the mountains across the Sea of Marmara at night and the location of Turkey's devastating 1999 earthquake. My project is Myself My World, a sort of summer camp with the objective of giving Turkish high schools students, all of whom have studied English for around five years but none of whom have opportunities to practice it outside their classroom, exposure to English and a chance to speak it, as well as present diverse world cultures to them.

The first Myself My World camp of the summer is nearly done, and I was blessed with the chance to have my birthday fall during this time - and it turned out to be one of my more memorable birthdays in recent years, and a great confluence of a great variety of interesting activities.

My team of fellow interns met, as usual, at 10am so as to plan the one-and-one-half hour class for the morning, this time about entrepreneurship; also, as usual, everyone seemed to remember what I tended to forget - that it was my birthday. One student, smiling gleefully, informed me that the class had a surprise for me (I loved the irony in her informing me of that), and my fellows corroborated with their observations that the students had been twittering in Turkish the previous day. Only after the opening meeting was the extent of the surprise revealed: while I was preparing for an average, if perhaps dry, lesson about entrepreneurship (I'm no enthusiast for business), they came in with a cake bedecked with sparklers and candles singing Happy Birthday, followed at their heels by a veritable parade of other foods, which we spread out on some desks in the center of the room. There was börek, a baked pastry stuffed with meat and sauce; potato with onions; a pasta salad; stuffed grape leaves; a powdery sweet called irmek helva; and there was a local speciality, pişmaniye, which is closest to cotton candy - but American cotton candy is coarse and sickly compared to the delicious fineness and smoothness that is the traditional sweet of Izmit. All together, there was far, far too much food even for the twenty of us, and we were all oversatiated by the end.

The post-lunch torpor did not prevent us, though, from adapting K'naan's song "Waving Flag" - which you make recognize from its having been the anthem of last year's World Cup - into a declaration of team unity, which we later presented as the camp got together for the afternoon's country presentations (I had done mine about the US two days earlier - coincidentally, July Fourth!). It was good to finally have a cheer to call our own.

After the activities of the camp were through, one student took me to his home, as he had invited me to dinner with his family the day before. While we awaited his parents' arrival, he showed me photos from his family's trip to Mecca when he was twelve - a place that I'll never get to see save through photographs of those who visit. By happy chance, when dinner did roll around, I could speak with everyone in the family except the mother: the two sons knew passable English, and the father, a Qur'an teacher at the mosque and hafidh (person who has memorized the entirety of the Qur'an), spoke Modern Standard Arabic, and actually complimented me on my Arabic skill. After the dinner, a few of the family's relatives came over, and I was witness to a private Muslim prayer service: the first time I had witnessed the entirety of the ritual of Islamic prayer. It was a very interesting experience, and the little bit after that we discussed the unique bits of Islam and Christianity and I explained that, even though I don't drink tea as a part of my faith, they shouldn't feel obliged to not drink it in my presence.

The family then retreated to the top-floor terrace for the mandatory post-meal watermelon. It was there that the student asked me about the song "Cotton-Eye Joe", which was played at camp and to which no one really knew a dance but me. And so it was that I demonstrated the dance I knew to "Cotton-Eye Joe" to a Turkish family.

All in all, it was a great day. I'm glad I had the chance to be here.