What Happened to the Refugee Students?

In one of my first postings, I mentioned volunteering at the Refugee School in Istanbul, a school staffed with volunteers who provide otherwise unavailable educational opportunities to refugee children in Istanbul.

The school is open to children ages 6-15, and this year students came from Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Ghana, Ukraine, Tanzania, Sudan, Somalia, and Sri Lanka. The school is a gift for these kids, who cannot attend Turkish school because they aren’t citizens. Twice a week, for 3 /12 hours, they receive lessons in English, Math, Music, Geography, Health, Art, PE and other subjects. Seven hours per week may not be much, but it makes a big difference. I spoke with one former student (one of my favorites) visiting from Ankara where he moved a few months ago and asked him how Ankara was. “It is bad,” he said. “We have nothing, no school.”














Attending and running a school under such uncertain circumstances is difficult at best. Each week brings a different group of children—attendance is often spotty. Furthermore, the school decided to close for a month in February and March following several attacks on clergy in Turkey. (The non-denominational school is located in a church.)

This is not a one-way education, as I have learned from these kids. We are currently working on a mural, with the original theme being “the future.” When brainstorming what they wanted in the future, the students gave answers that included satellite dishes, computers, big televisions, large houses and the like. At first this struck me as a rather materialistic theme for a mural. However, I learned that these children are often sleeping five to a bed under highly unstable circumstances. The big home with comforts familiar to many reading this blog represent both financial and psychological stability for these kids.
















With changes to U.S. immigration policy likely in the future, I feel that it is a good time to draw attention to illegal immigrant children. (For an interesting article, click here.) To those who say that allowing illegal immigrant children to attend school in the U.S. encourages leeching off tax-payers’ resources, I would argue that for children who have little else in their lives, school is a necessary place for stability and growth, regardless of official status.

Trabzon and Erzurum

Trabzon and Erzurum are in Turkey’s Northeast. The former city is lush with vegetation, perches on the Black Sea, and is only a few hours from the Georgian border. Because of this proximity, there are many immigrants from former Soviet countries, and some of the shop signs are in Russian. “Natashas,” the euphemistic name for prostitutes in Turkey, derives from the common female name in many former Soviet countries. Many natashas set up shop in Trabzon, becoming the catalysts for divorce, a source of sexually transmitted infections, and often the mothers of secret second-families for area men.














Over the mountains from Trabzon, Erzurum is isolated on a high, dry plateau. The university is the life-blood of the town; most of the town grew during the past 50 years, when the university was founded. It is a conservative city, but the student population provides contrast because many students come from other cities and towns in Turkey. While there is not a lot to do there, there is a fantastic hole-in-the-wall burger joint that was playing hip-hop videos while I enjoyed the closest thing to a cheeseburger I’ve tasted in awhile. It was a new kind of culture shock, leaving that restaurant and walking onto the dusty streets of Erzurum, where women walked, swathed in black robes.

The following are several points that caught my attention.

1) Over coffee with several female students at Trabzon’s university, one of my American Fulbright friends asked where a woman goes if she is raped or the victim of domestic violence. “She can go to Purple Roof,” an organization in Turkey that provides haven for women, they said. “Really?” replied my friend with curiosity; “there’s a Purple Roof in Trabzon?” “No,” answered the students, “there’s one in Istanbul.” Istanbul is at least a thousand miles from Trabzon. “Can she go to the police?” we asked. “She can go,” they said, “but the police will say ‘it is not my problem.’”














2) Apparently another problem in Turkey is that of other countries stirring up ethnic divisions in the unified Turkish identity. “Some of the people, other countries, they don’t want to see a very powerful Turkey,” said one student, so they stir up divisions between Left and Right, and between ethnic groups. “They want Turkish people to fight against each other. They want them to say ‘we are not brothers.’” This theme of foreign countries “mixing” in the politics of Turkey came up several times. Some of the allegedly guilty countries? Syria, Germany, the US, and Israel. Compounding the problem of divisions within the country is the lack of common identity that many students see. This was a new theme in these cities: the anxiety over maintaining a common Turkish identity.

3) While many students hope to one-day study abroad in Europe and the U.S., there is a strong strain of anti-American Policy-ism in several of the students that I interviewed. “America hasn’t signed the













Kyoto Agreement, it is America that causes war and famine in the world, also America that pollutes the world the most,” said one passionate student studying for his PhD in education. One student mentioned the “bullshit of George W. Bush” as a problem with democratic systems. In response to the question “what are you most concerned about for the future?” several students have said “the United States.”

4) “Global climate change.” “Finding renewable energy sources.” “The environment.” All of these answers were in response to “what are you concerned about for the future?” No one in the previous three-dozen interviews mentioned the environment as a concern, but thousands of miles from Euro-centered Istanbul, many students are giving serious thought to the causes and consequences of climate change. I have yet to learn why I stumbled across the anomaly, as the students giving these answers were in different departments at different universities. I find it both intriguing and encouraging.

Eclipse

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, neither pictures nor words can capture how spectacular a full eclipse is, especially over the equally stunning backdrop of Turkey's Cappadocia region. Here are a few photos from March 29. The eclipse occured a little past 2pm, during a hot and sunny day. People from around the world and in the village scrambled to the top of the Üçhisar Castle, an old castle cut out of the naturally soft volcanic rock in the region....

The stunning Cappadocia landscape















A view of the rock-cut castle in Üçhisar from where I viewed the eclipse













A view from the top of Üçhisar Castle
















People looking funny with their special eclipse glasses-- on sale for $1.50!
































The partially eclipsed sun, as seen on the rudimentary, but safe (!) white cardboard pinhole "projecter"













It's getting darker... and colder...










Checking out the eclipse. Notice the change in the light.














The light on nearby Mt. Erciyes during the total eclipse.









The full eclipse. It lasted for 3 minutes.

A Tale of Two Countries

Kayseri is almost exactly in the middle of Turkey—roughly 5 hours by bus Southeast of Ankara. It is notable for the snow-capped Mt. Erciyes towering in the background and its Seljuk architecture (the Seljuk Turks, migrants from Central Asia, based their short-lived empire from Persia and slowly captured Byzantine territory). Despite its proximity to tourist-ridden Cappadocia, Kayseri remains a conservative Turkish city of approximately 500,000 people.

This was the first place in Turkey where I felt outnumbered by the women wearing headscarves. While I didn’t find this a problem, I did take offense with the numerous “aile salons,” or family areas, dotting the city’s restaurants and Internet cafes. One evening, with much work to do, I found an Internet café that boasted top-of-the-line computers replete with headphones and cameras for chatting. The large room that housed the majority of computers also had a tiny corner blocked off with a half-dozen computers—for the women. I’ve tried to keep an open attitude about the role of women in Turkey, but being stuck in an overcrowded room made no sense to me. Contrasted with familiar scenes in Istanbul of independent women working, socializing, drinking, and dressing in ways that many Americans know, one realizes that Turkey does have a couple of faces.

Erciyes University, the university in Kayseri, occupies a dusty campus spread out over many acres. Negotiating the campus involves a lot of walking, and without the entertaining profusion of signs, posters, and advertisements that hang on many U.S. campuses. For the most part, the students described themselves as politically right of center, meaning that they support more conservative politics. When I asked whether they consider themselves to be a religious person, most said “yes, Islamic,” where in the past I usually heard “yes, a bit” or “no, not so much.”
The school and city struck me as being a vacuum devoid of information. Indeed, while the students struck me as eager to learn and earnest thinking, their professors, particularly within the Foreign Languages Department, exemplified one of the roadblocks to a more active and critically thinking student population. After my first interview, the teacher who had introduced me to the student and who had also overheard the interview brought me to the Director of the Department who informed me that the questions were too political in nature and that I needed to get permission from the higher-ups. So, armed with a letter from the Fulbright office, I visited several offices, including the General Secretary of the school, in the quest for the golden permission, which I obtained the next morning.

Triumphantly I returned to the Director of the Foreign Language Department, permission in hand, hoping for him to introduce me to several more students. At this point, 20 hours after I first left because of lack of permission, he told me that I could only interview students if I omitted the political questions. He explained that because his department was technically a preparatory department for students before they began their four-year university career, they were too young to think about or be influenced by politics. I found it remarkable that they would keep students politically in the dark given that the students that I had met thus far were of voting age, and I told him so. He replied that because Kayseri is a conservative town, they’ve had problems in the past with groups talking to and influencing students.

My whole experience in Kayseri is, in my opinion, indicative of what is holding Turkey back—conservative ideals coupled with a desire by those in power—wherever that may be—to keep complete control over their domain, be it family, university, or city. This attitude squelches the access to information that is necessary for Turkey to move beyond its current position. By keeping students in the dark and women in small corners, the people in this region are limiting their potential.