A Combobulated Schedule

Week of October 4-11, 2015

This week felt like someone had slowed the time. It was painfully long. Because we still do not have our formal teaching schedules (we are promised we will have them on Monday the 12^th), everything felt like a mumble jumble this week.

On Monday, we arrived to school at our usual 10am start time, were told that there is nothing for us to teach that morning, and that we should check back in at 1:30p. The administrator had forgotten he scheduled a meeting with us, so when he arrived at 1:45p, he apologized and told us we were free for the rest of the day. We were disappointed and decided to make good use of our time anyway; we held a speaking club with our graduate students while drinking cay.

On Tuesday, we proctored a two-hour English placement exam and watched university students nervously bubble in answers on a scantron sheet. This experience reminded me of the time I took the SAT college entrance exam—if I must be honest, it is much better to be on the other side of the table.

On Wednesday, Alex and I co-taught level 1 English students for three consecutive hours. We taught them prepositions; allowed them to practice speaking English (“My favorite subject is ____ because____”); and played the adjective-name game while standing in a circle (marvelous Mariya, amazing Alex, hardworking Hamza, awesome Ayesha). We checked in with the administration that afternoon to ask if they had another task for us, and what we should expect for Thursday. “Also, do you know when we can start our Turkish lessons,” I asked. The assistant director made a phone call, and then turned to us and said: “Tomorrow, 8:30am. For five hours.” Ask and you shall receive!

Turkish 'alfabe' has 29 letters.

As such, on Thursday and Friday, we had Turkish lessons from 8:30am to 1:30pm, with 10-minute breaks every 50 minutes. We learned the alfabe and sayılar (numbers). There are 29 letters in the Turkish alphabet—instead of “Q,” “W,” or “X,” it has “Ç” (ch), Ğ (silent g, elongates the vowel preceding it), I (without the dot), Ö, Ş (sh), an Ü. We also learned how to introduce ourselves and how to turn singular nouns into plural tense.

One of the things that make Turkish a beautiful language is vowel harmony, the concept that front vowels (a, ı, o, u) and back vowels (e, i, ö, ü) must go with certain sounds, which in turn dictates spelling. What’s more, Turkish truly is a blend of many cultures—it has loanwords from French, English, Farsi, Arabic, and more. My ears perk up every time I hear a word that is the same in Urdu, such as ayna (mirror), kismat (fate), and nokta (dot, period). My list of “Turkish Words Same in Urdu” has already grown to 20.

One of the most important skills I am practicing here in Turkey is patience. I am trying to ask the school administration to end my Fulbright contract two weeks earlier than the slated date (June 15^th) so that I can come back to the States in time to start my internship with the U.S. State Department. While I have received verbal permission, I am still waiting for a written confirmation. It has been three weeks, and still no sight of the document I need. I am getting a bit anxious but like I said, I am staying patient.

Last but not least, on Friday, there were two bombings in Ankara at a Kurdish peace rally that killed nearly 100 people. I was overwhelmed by the text messages, Facebook messages, and emails I received from family and friends asking about my safety. Alhamdulillah Alex and I are safe, and so are our peers who are placed in Ankara. This incident was an important reminder that dangerous things can happen anywhere, and the advice from our State Department officials at Orientation rang true: avoid all public demonstrations and rallies. Personally, the incident gave me renewed perspective. In Boston, I used to read about these world events every morning on my 40-minute commute to work every morning. The headlines about bombings and people dying appeared to be “far away” and “over there in the Middle East.” Now that I am on the other side of the world, these events feel closer to me. And that is a scary thought. 

First Real Week of School

September 25 – October 2, 2015

Alex and I stayed home for the weekend after Bayram. I completed my domestic internship applications for the U.S. Department of State for summer 2016. This entailed updating my resume with the Fulbright experience and writing personal statements for why I am interested in two regional bureaus.

After a restorative week, Alex and I were looking forward to our first day of school of Monday, September 28^th. When we got to the School of Foreign Languages, however, we met the two assistant directors and learned that our schedules were not yet created. Throughout the week, we went to school every day at 10am and spent time at our desks preparing lessons and taking care of other logistics such as getting our school-issued laptops.

Thursday was our first “real” day of teaching, as we were asked to serve as substitute teachers for level 1 English students. We were asked to teach three hours in the morning, but due to English placement testing, we taught for only one hour and instead helped administer examinations. After lunch, we were asked to hold a “speaking club” for our graduate students—some of whom we had met during our settling-in period. We are told that our primary task at Akdeniz University will be to facilitate after-school speaking clubs to help graduate students improve their speaking abilities before they go the United States or United Kingdom for master’s programs funded by the Turkish government. Just as we finished the speaking club on Thursday, we got a call from our administrator once again with a new task: to teach for another three hours (3:30-6:30) to a new class of level 1 English students. This was both exciting and stressful. Exciting because we were finally interacting with students, and stressful because we had to come up with activities on the spot. We engaged the students by having them play a game in which they had to list as many English verbs as they knew, and conjugate them in present and past tenses within 10 minutes. Not surprisingly, common mistakes included irregular verbs such as eat, grow, and hurry – our students conjugated their past tenses as eated, growed, and hurryed and learned that the proper conjugations are ate, grew, and hurried. As with every classroom, there were some students serious about learning English while others created distractions. Teaching with Alex was a great experience because she entertained the dedicated students while I disciplined the class clowns.

Another highlight of our first week at school was Elizabeth Bear, who arrived from the United States on Tuesday and has been staying with us as a guest. She was placed at Akdeniz University through another State Department-sponsored program called the “English  Language Fellow (ELF)” program. She is a sweet young woman, a few years older than Alex and me. She taught in Korea for six years so she brings a unique international and comparative perspective to teaching.

Saving the worst for the last: my medical emergency, part two. I believe in sharing the good, bad, and ugly from my Fulbright experience to demonstrate that living abroad is not always rainbows and sunshine (actually, Antalya gets quite a bit of torrential rainfall, so that alone proves my point). Anyway, my skin infection returned and I went to the hospital designated for staff and faculty—which, by comparison to the public university hospital where I went the first time around, was much cleaner and less crowded. Despite the better facility, I had a dissatisfactory experience with the nurse who was assigned to draw my blood for a blood test. Disclaimer: I have always been afraid of needles (hence my dreams of becoming a doctor ended quite early in my childhood), but I am brave enough to handle blood tests. After the nurse cleaned my left arm with alcohol, I felt a sharp poke in my vein and I could tell something was wrong. I gave her the benefit of doubt and patiently waited for a few seconds. When no blood was being drawn into the syringe despite her efforts, I asked the lady nurse to take the needle out. Ouch! It hurt so much! Then, with the help of another nurse, they were able to properly draw blood from my right arm and it was not nearly as painful as my left arm. I walked away feeling sad because my left arm was in pain, upset because the nurse wouldn’t give me a band-aid, and worried in case the results came back with bad news. I now have a lovely, big, purple bruise on my left arm to remind me of the terrible needle-poking experience.

When I described this week’s events to my family, my Dad—who was an economics professor in Pakistan and Qatar for a good majority of his early career—wrote back to me the following words of encouragement. They cheered me up and reminded me to be patient and flexible. After all, those are some of the most important traits of a good diplomat. I love Baba.

“Mariya Baita,

Sorry to hear about your arm. Hopefully you will be better soon. Don’t overreact to the day-to-day issues. Such things happen in third world countries. University life is always be like that as you are facing. Don’t compare their system with US. Try your best to adjust in that environment. Here, everything is ok. You have to take care of yourself and be extra careful in conversation.

God bless you,

Baba.”