Being called by my friend Nina a "Poland lover" the least thing one can expect is a guest post written by a Polish traveler! So here it is, an awesome post by Ewelina from her Road less traveled stories.
Makes want to go straight to Turkey after when I leave Estonia. The two weeks I've spent in Turkey two years ago were not even close to be enough for that beautiful and huge country. Too early to know for sure but one thing is, Turkey is high on my list. Perhaps it will be my next "recharge batteries station"?
Wish you were here
Last week I decided to visit Luís, a friend I met one month ago on an EVS on-arrival training in Şile. Monique was supposed to join me, but the day before decided to party in Ankara instead. On my facebook wall I posted a link to the page of the association I was going to. To my luck, that attracted the attention of Solmaz, an Iranian girl who stayed in our place in Ankara some time ago. She'd just quit her job in Istanbul and wanted to get out of the city for some time. I honestly didn't expect that she would make up her mind in such a short time, but to my big surprise she announced to me "I booked my bus tickets to Ankara, I'll be there Sunday morning so we can hitchhike together." I haven't spoken with her a lot when she stayed with us, but she turnes out to be a great travel mate and I admire how much she treats this trip as a challenge and wants to experience something different than her almost 24/7 job that she quit.
We arrive in the village quite late and even though the only thing Solmaz and I feel like doing is collapsing into the beds, Bob, Luís's very friendly coordinator keeps us awake with a discussion, telling about the village and the project. I don't know how Solmaz and I, being dead tired, could focus so much on the conversation After a long session of music-playing we finally get our deserved sleep.
In the morning we can see how beautiful the surrounding is. The village is bigger than I expected it to be, and is surrounded by green hills. Only the gloomy sky doesn't really let us appreciate the charm of the place. Despite the terrible weather, none of us feels like staying at home. Solmaz and I want to met the villagers, so together with Luís we go to look for some people. When we pass a local café, two kids rush out to greet us. They're Samet, Semih and Sıla, the kids Luís plays with every evening. They were doing their Maths homework inside, but as soon as we come in, they push their multiplications aside and bring the board for playing tavla. Solmaz and I would like to teach Luís how to play this game we both enjoy, but as soon as we realize the kids are making up their own rules and adding their own twist to the existing ones, we pass this idea and just try to follow new rules of the children. While Luís is trying to teach Samet how to play checkers, Sıla, Sami, Solmaz and I play football outside. The kids not only feel comfortable with just met strangers, but are also very polite and respectful. When they address us, we can see they know the difference between speaking with a friend and speaking with a person who's older than them. I was surprised to be addressed "Ewelina abla" for the first time in my life by a Turkish child. So far the only kids I've interacted more with in Turkey were the kids I work with. I love them, but something strikes me about their behavior when I realize how much they behave like spoiled brats, demanding attention here and now, often taking things for granted and rarely saying "please" or "thank you," unless told so.
Samet, Semih and Sıla invite us to their family house. Their mother, Gülten, is milking the cows. We feed the calves and visit their sheep barn in a distant part of the village. The kids introduce us to their the grandfather - very friendly, elderly man with a permanent smile on his face, who invites us for çay in the café. He's happy to see new visitors and, upon hearing us communicate in English, asks us: "do you all speak the same language in your countries?" "No, we all speak different languages, Farsi, Portuguese and Polish."
In the evening we eat together. The food prepared by Gülten is so delicious that barely anyone speaks binging on home-made, pilaf, yoghurt with biber, ceci beans, cheese and black olives. After the feast, our discussion can barely end. Despite our Turkish being far from perfection, we manage to understand quite a lot. Gülten is curious about everything. She inquires about marriages, funerals, families, jobs, schooling systems in our countries... She recalls her mutinous past - she got married when she was 17 years old and before that she eloped with her boyfriend when her family wanted her to marry a man of their preference. "How did your relatives react?" we are curious. I'm expecting an answer involving something about her parents renouncing her - but none of that. Surprisingly, they were very tolerant and both her and her husband, Sefer, had to bear no consequences. For such a closed community, somehow also their lack of knowledge of outer world, their attitudes seem very progressive and liberal to me.
In the evening we go to the café owned by Sefer. As I expected, only men are sitting inside, but the arrival of Solmaz and me goes down well among them. We receive no hostile glances sizing us up and down. Instead, they become very curious upon the arrival of three new yababncı. They want to know where we come from, which currency we're using there, which work we do. Where have you been in Turkey? We study the map together. They can't believe when I point to Silopi, tiny spot just on the Iraqi border, almost 1800 km from their dwelling place. They show us how to start fire with stones and awash with çay, which here costs only 25 kuruş for a small glass.
***
One day we meet Zeynep and İsa, a couple that Agrida usually gets their eggs and milk from. Zeynep takes us to the pastures where her herd of goats are feeding. The last days were blasted with pouring rain and the way to the fields is a never-ending knee-deep puddle. That's one of the situations that our rain boots were really made for. Brooding in the deep mud, we realize we haven't seen anyone else in Cazgirler wearing similar footwear. The villagers, who spend a lot of time outside in a surrounding full of mud and shit and thus would actually need them the most, manage with regular walking shoes. When our rain boots get sucked into the mud, Zeynep walks 200 meters ahead of us in flimsy sandals. She takes us to her goat barn, there's a separate one for the adult goats and one for the babies. When she lets both of them out for the feeding, the small goats hurry to their mothers and the entire yard looks like a scene of an orgy; with the little ones greedily drinking milk. We also get some milk and eggs from Zeynep. Bob gave Luís some money, although he was sure Zeynep and İsa wouldn't accept it. They take it, but instead of 12 eggs they give us 20 and say "bir zaman para veriyorsunuz, bir zaman para yok. Arkadaşlarımsınız (one time you give us money, one time no money. You're our friends!)!"
***
"Do you like Cazgirler?" Gülten asks us during another dinner at hers. "Yes, I'm very used to nature and there's not so much of it in Ankara," I answer for myself. The opinions of Solmaz and Luís are the same. But Gülten doesn't share our admiration for the village. Most of the population is elderly, she can't make friends among people her age. Her kids are also the only ones living in Cazgirler and commute with a school bus to school in a different village 10 km away. Sometimes boredom bothers her. She'd rather move to a bigger settlement. In Turkish there's a saying "taş yerinde ağırdır" - stone is heavy at its place - and it perfectly describes the situation of Gülten and Sefer. In the countryside the land makes their money; they can plant vegetables, breed animals, sell their products. In a city, because of lack of education, she and her husband are useless.
***
I want to spend more time in this village. Our initial plan was to stay in Cazgirler for two days and then hitchhike to Mersin to meet another volunteer, Silvia from Italy, at a nomadic event. Already in the first evening Bob convinced us to stay for Wednesday too, so that we can go to Bayramiç for the pazar together. On Wednesday Solmaz and I decide to stay for the whole week. The cold days took a toll on my health and I don't feel like doing a hitch that would most likely take more than one day, sleeping in strange places and amusing the drivers sneezing and coughing all over. Part of me feels I've quite quickly sunk my roots here and don't want to leave, having learned so much and made connections with local people. I also think my short time in the village is spent in more meaningful way than my weeks in my organization in Ankara, where only once in a blue moon I'm able to do something with the kids and where I usually come just to have a free meal and speak about gibberish in the office for three hours.
***
We visit Gülten's house almost every day and stay there from early afternoon until late night. The kids are also very eager to spend time with us, entreat us to come with them anywhere they're going. Café, cows, goats. Sometimes we have to make up excuses like "we have to discuss our EVS and work on some other things" just to politely get rid of them for a while. And even if we hide somewhere in the woods, the following day we hear "you went to the forest? We saw you going there." We also laugh that after spending so much time with the kids, we start pronouncing English words adopted to Turkish with a Turkish pronunciation. Café, camera, coca-cola. One day we make yoghurt and cheese together. Bob asked us for the recipe and photos, so Gülten answers our questions and writes down instructions that are too complicated for us, non-native-speakers, to translate. She learned how to make milk after getting married - her marriage gifts were mainly jewelery, which she and her husband didn't need and sold to buy cows and goats that served more useful purpose than adornments. After hours spent in the kitchen, she teaches me how to crochet and shows some of the patterns that she made. Together with Sıla, Samet and Luís we sneak into a mosque; Luís and Samet even manage to climb to the top of the minaret. Samet disappears for a while and comes back, saying "hoca çok kızıyor (the teacher is very angry)". Later, we learn from Gülten that only men can pray in the main part of the mosque.
***
The local people won me over with her honesty and openness. I was surprised how curious about our lives they were and how much they treated us like people who are equal to them, even though our social backgrounds are miles away. Everyone we met welcomed us with a smile and no prejudgments. How many times I cursed my first trip during my EVS in December (Konya, Afyon, Denizli) and every day of it swore I was coming back to Ankara mainly because local people too often considered my pale skin and foreign accent as a certainty of the fact I must be filthy rich or assumed without even getting to know me that I'm going to big-note myself because of coming from (in their opinion) much wealthier country than their own. Here any differences seemed to disappear. Can you imagine that in this village, where we definitely stood out as non-locals, I haven't heard the word "yabancı" even a single time? The local people are very curious of foreigners; we bring some change into their everyday life; we aren't a source of money, but new friends approached with smile and curiosity. They crave for people from outside and yearn for our companionship in whatever they do. Tomorrow we're milking the goats, are you coming? They appreciated our efforts to speak Turkish and also tried to say something in English, even if it was just single words. It was also wonderful to learn about their lives, as they're very outspoken and opinionable. If they shared something, I could feel it was honest and coming from their heart; done just for the sake of being with another person. And also - the arrival of two girls in Luís's place didn't bring about any gossiping among the villagers. Funny, especially when you think that for our neighbors in Ankara the girls living there already prostitutes only because sometimes our male friends come home at night.
***
This post is dedicated to the memory of Taylor Booth, the creator of the Rural Couchsurfing project, my friend and inspiration, who died in the beginning of March, hit by truck while hitchhiking at night in Chad. Taylor, I'm happy I could see you in Ankara at the end of the last year. I miss you and I think to myself, if only I could revive you, Cazgirler is the kind of place where I'd like to meet you next time...
