Refugee crisis and Turkey

For the last week, I have been reading myself into a fury so I hope you will forgive me a bit of a rant.  I usually avoid any controversial topics and I am still not planning to give my political views or my personal take on the problems; I just want to put some facts out there.

As of March 2016 there are 2.7 MILLION SYRIAN REFUGEES IN TURKEY.

To compare, up to December 2015, JUST UNDER 900,000 Syrians had applied for asylum in all 37 European countries reporting to UNHCR.

There are a further 300,000 refugees in Turkey from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

This makes Turkey THE BIGGEST REFUGEE-HOSTING COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.

About 280,000 refugees are housed in 25 camps, many in solid trailer accommodation though more recently it has been necessary to build tent camps.

I am quite aware that living in a refugee camp would not be anyone’s choice BUT…

…the camps in Turkey have paved roads, street lights, water (private bathrooms in the trailers, shared in the tent camps), electricity, schools and clinics, cleaning and maintenance staff and police and private security.  Laundry is done free-of-charge (residents volunteer in the laundry) and food is purchased at supermarkets with debit cards given to residents (80tl per person per week for food).  There are also hair salons, sewing rooms, playgrounds and other amenities.

The remaining refugees live outside the camps.  Once registered they have access to healthcare and education, though they are not currently able to work legally. Many are working in the informal sector – I have had dealings this winter with several Syrians working in construction.  I have heard some complaints about the refugees, especially in places like Istanbul and Ankara where the streets are full of families begging, but I would say the majority of the population are sympathetic and accepting.

And this acceptance, despite the fact that Turkey has so far spent an estimated $7 BILLION on the Syrian refugees, yes - $7,000,000,000.

By contrast, Turkey has so far received total international assistance of approximately $400 million, not even half a billion.

Turkey has actually received praise for its response to the crisis from official sources, including the UN refugee agency.

But the popular press, with its usual negative attitude to Turkey, makes it sound as though Turkey is both heartless – closing the Syrian border and allowing refugees to drown in the Med – and mercenary – “holding the EU to ransom” and demanding money before they will do anything.

There are certainly things that could be done better but it is wrong to ignore all the positive things. I just want to say...
…STOP talking about Turkey as though it is part of the problem; this time, it is part of the solution.

Sun and hailstorms

Mad weather – I think spring is here!  It has been really warm all this week – over 20 degrees, people out in shorts and t-shirts, doors and windows open all day sort of warm.  Then, early this morning, I heard thunder rumbling, followed by a huge storm with HAIL that is still sitting around on the ground now (9am).

We had our electric bill through from January – when we had the really cold weather – and it was more than it’s ever been – about £100 for one month.  We haven’t put up our wood-burning stove this winter (my decision because it’s smoky and dirty and I can’t light it!) so we were trying to keep the house warm with electric heaters.  The houses here are hard to heat because they don’t have cavity walls, are all tiles and marble and are basically designed to be cool in summer.  And as for the temperature in the bathroom – I think it was close to zero some mornings, not tempting when you want to take a shower!

Actually, in place of the stove, I wanted to put in an air conditioning unit, one large enough to heat our open-plan ground floor and fairly new as they are very energy efficient.  Some friends of ours who were moving house, offered us theirs (new when they moved into the old house 2 years ago) for free, so we have been hanging on for that.  Unfortunately, the house they are moving to has taken much longer to finish than expected so I finally got the a/c yesterday – now it’s too warm to use it!  Oh well – it’ll be summer soon and we can use it to cool!

somewhere between Nif and Gocek - almond trees in flower

Friends Grant and Dawn are out for a holiday.  We went for a drive the other day – up to Uzumlu, where all the almond trees are in blossom, then on to Nif and some of the mountain roads beyond.  I’d looked at the map and knew that it was fairly easy to get from there back down to Gocek so we meandered a long for a while, guessing which way to go at junctions.

Unfortunately, Turkish mountain roads have a habit of leading off merrily in one direction, only to twist and turn and take you in the complete opposite direction.  I had a similar experience last year trying to get back down on to the Kas road from Arycanda.  There was a short time when I thought we might have to turn back, but eventually we managed to find a road that took us down towards the sea and we came out at the top of the hill going into Gocek.  Had to stop and have lunch there to recover!

a glimpse of Gocek

Skiing in Sarikamis

The Cakir family has been away on holiday!  We had a few days in Ankara and from there we went to the north east of Turkey to ski.  It’s one of the few things that we all enjoy; even me who hates the cold and EVEN Cem who usually hates any form of exercise!

There are several ski centres in Turkey but the place we went is in the north east.  It’s a small town called Sarikamis and is supposedly the only place in Turkey that has the same type of snow as the Alps. It certainly has the best snow of anywhere we have skied in Turkey, but it is also the coldest place with temperatures generally -5 to -10 degrees in the day!  Sarikamis is famous in Turkey as the place where a large number (often quoted as 90,000) of Turkish soldiers froze to death whilst fighting the Russian army during World War I.

Unlike those poor soldiers, I was prepared with layers of thermals under my ski clothes, two pairs of socks and two pairs of gloves with hand warmers inside them and still my fingers – and sometimes toes – were frozen at the end of the day! But we had fun skiing.  Emre changed to snow-boarding, having a couple of lessons and learning quite well in a short time.  Kaan just wanted to be the fastest thing on skis – and with an app on his phone, he could check every day how fast he had gone (he stopped telling me when he passed 80kmh as he knew I would get cross!) as well as how far he had skied, gradients etc.

Kaan on ths slopes

We had been to Sarikamis before about 10 years ago (actually it’s where Cem’s parents grew up too).  There are now 4 more hotels at the ski centre (total 6, though the biggest was closed this year) but it was still very quiet.  It gets a bit busier at the weekend when some of the locals come to ski, but during the week you can usually get on the lift in 5 minutes at the most – and the boys were even complaining about this sometimes, I don’t know what they would think of the queues elsewhere!

There are several ski schools and the Turkish Ski Federation is always training children who might enter the national team.  We were chatting with a local boy on the lift whose brother is already in the national team and who hopes to get in it too.  He’s 14 and has been skiing since he was 5.  But he also wants to be an attorney.  It’s hard sometimes in these little places in the east of Turkey – the standard of schooling might not be so good and the children do not have the same opportunities.  We took his address to send him Kaan’s old school books and the boys were amazed that he doesn’t have a mobile phone.  In Fethiye, any child above the age of about 8 has a phone!

Emre boarding

We flew to Kars, which is the nearest town – and the regional centre – though it is much smaller than Fethiye!  Close to the Russian border (now the Georgian and Armenian borders), Kars was occupied by the Russian Empire for a time in the nineteenth century and many of the older buildings were built by the Russians.

Old Governors Residence built in 1883

It is famous for several types of cheese including a hard yellow cheese called ‘kashar’ that is like cheddar and a stringy, fibrous cheese that is best eaten when blue (with mould).  Unlike the UK where you can generally find everything everywhere, most areas still have their specialities and people like to buy it from the source.  Apart from anything else, though you can buy Kars Kashar in Fethiye, it is more expensive, so several people had asked us to get them some.  We went to a little shop, tried lots of cheese and bought three whole wheels of kashar (39kg) which were supposed to arrive yesterday by cargo; hopefully they will turn up today!

That part of Turkey is also known for having tasty meat – and particularly ‘Cag kebab’, which is marinated lamb cooked on a horizontal spit (with tail fat – ugghh!)  As a veggie, I obviously can’t comment on it, but the boys and Cem enjoyed it.

more on the weather...

Well, I know it’s very British to go on about the weather but really at the moment it is putting on a display of all it’s got. One day it’s 15 degrees and the next it’s 5 and it’s impossible to know what to wear until you open the door: for a week I didn’t wear a coat (and I am usually pretty weedy and have been known to feel cold in August!), then yesterday I had 4 layers, plus a coat, 2 pairs of socks, a hat and gloves!

We’ve also had quite a lot of rain since the weekend and the mountains, which had very little snow compared to normal, now have a very pretty covering – including Babadag (where the paragliders jump from) and Mendos (the one next to it).

Babadag from the sea front

On Sunday and Monday there was a Lodos wind which is notoriously dangerous for sailors and also caused all flights to Istanbul to be cancelled–over 100 flights over 3 days.

There is snow forecast over most of central Anatolia for Wednesday when we are supposed to be driving up to Ankara.  The road to Ankara goes through Afyon where it once took Cem 11 hours to do 5km as a result of a heavy snowfall.  There were other causes: it was Ramazan and everyone stopped to break fast at sundown, then set off again at the same time and as most of the busy routes in Turkey seem to go through Afyon that was a lot of traffic!  There were 5 or 6 of them in the car–he was bringing his cousins down to Fethiye for Christmas/New Year/end of Ramazan, but Cem was the only driver.  All the small shops ran out of snacks and drinks and Cem knocked on the door of one of the long-distance buses and lied that his pregnant wife in the car was dying for a coffee – to get himself a cup (the intercity buses give drinks and snacks to passengers).  Eventually, after being stationary for a while they all dozed off and woke to find that the traffic jam had cleared and they were parked in the middle of a dual carriageway! 

check out the snow in the distance!

I do NOT want to end up stuck in a jam like that.  These days the police can actually refuse to allow you to proceed when the road is bad if you don’t have either chains or snow tyres.  We have chains but they are a pain as someone has to get out of the car and fiddle around to get them on.

Another thing that the police are hotter on is driving licences.  When you arrive from the UK you are allowed to drive on your UK licence for 6 months, after which you are supposed to apply for a Turkish licence.  This makes me about 22 years out of date!  I have been asked a couple of times when I have been stopped for other things and I always say that I come and go a lot but now they are actually checking and fining people.  I have been meaning to get it done for a few years, what actually put me off was that I thought it would make sense to change my UK licence to the ‘new’ style (old new – the small one as opposed to the folded-up sheet I still have), then apply for a Turkish one.  However I kept being put off from doing that by the bit at the bottom of the form that says “It is illegal to apply for a UK driving licence if you are resident abroad – and punishable by prison sentence, fine blahblah”!

Also, being honest, I hate anything official in Turkey as it always involves running round to numerous offices, getting 10 different stamps and signatures and providing 8 photographs, so imagine my delight that Cem’s partner Mustafa – retired police chief – is sorting out licences as well as visa applications (and any other official business – and who better to do it than a man who used to be involved! Check him, and his good reviews, out on Calis Beach Forum as the Inspector)

I have handed him a copy of my licence, 3 photos and my ID card and though I will probably have to turn up at the doctors so he can sign the medical paper, I am hopeful that I might soon, FINALLY, have a Turkish licence!

Teaching Turkish

I’ve had a fairly easy couple of weeks as some of my students have been away for Christmas.  This week almost all are back, plus I have a couple of extra lessons so I am ‘full’ again!

The material I use in lessons is mostly things I have prepared myself.  I have many books for learning and teaching Turkish but I rarely use any of them.  Some are much too grammar-based – one has sections with headings like ‘verbal voice, compound tenses, substantive verb verbalia and auxiliary verb’–yes really! Some are too repetitive, drilling a piece like ‘I have got…’ with twenty different things in the gap, including nonsense like ‘I have got two bridges’–again, yes really!  One set of books and CDs uses dialogues and paragraphs about UFOs, an extra-terrestrial and an invisible men‒hard for anyone to take seriously.

So I started writing my own worksheets and now I have a collection that do everything from explaining structures, to giving practice of reading and translating. I also have a preferred order I teach them in, though I am flexible and quite often go back to revise things again. Several years ago, I even got as far as putting some of these together to form a book, with lots of practice exercises, vocabulary and reading sections.  I planned it as 6 books, each with 12 units or lessons, so that students could easily take a break between books and practise what they had learned.

I prepared the first two books but have never done any more.  I always meant to see if I could get it published, or sell it on the internet, but I have never quite got that far. Recently, though, one of my students told me about Smashwords which is a system to simplify self-publishing and distributing an e-book.  It means I could publish my set of books and have them listed on all the major e-book retailers (except Amazon which currently doesn’t have a deal with Smashwords) so people can buy and download them. As the Smashwords publishing system costs nothing (though they do recommend paying for things like a well-designed cover), I have nothing to lose.  I just need to find the time….!

Kaan at about 2 months - and 2 kilos!

It was Kaan's birthday on Saturday.  16 years old - hardly seems possible.  He is a bit snappy sometimes but isn't committed enough for the full teenager attitude!  He had THREE cakes - one I made, one his girlfriend made and one that our friends got for him - all chocolate!  We went to dinner at Karnaval Restaurant - on the sea-front in Fethiye.  It was, surprisingly, very quiet, but the food was still good and the bill very reasonable. What more can you ask for?!

Kaan at 16

Christmas and New Year at Poppy

Serves me right for shouting about the gorgeous weather… it’s now so cold that there was ice on the dogs’ water bowl this morning and half the plants in the garden are wilting.  There was snow in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve and Sarikamis–where we are going skiing at the end of this month– is currently minus 30°C with the wind chill factor IN THE DAYTIME! I hope it warms up before we go or all the thermals in the world are not going to get me out on the slopes.

The boys got new ski clothes for Christmas, those being one of the things that made my suitcase overweight coming back from Canada.  I had thought they were bulky but not heavy, but actually they are quite heavy too.  They were still a bargain compared to what I would have paid over here and should last them a long time.  Kaan is so excited about skiing that he keeps walking round the house with all his gear on.

After opening our presents on Christmas Day, we went to the hotel and were joined by almost 20 family and friends (and a small dog– see picture).  Most of these were Turkish and some were very excited to be celebrating Christmas for the first time!  Even the crackers–which last year we forgot to pull–were a source of amazement.

The food was, as usual, an eclectic mix of British Christmas dinner and Turkish side dishes–Russian salad and haydari (minty yogurt) among the turkey and roast potatoes. The turkey was a little too free-range for my liking, as in it was actually free-ranging round a neighbour’s garden until a few days before Christmas.  Still, it was plucked and prepared by the time it came to me (though I did have to get Kaan to take the neck off) and it cooked alright though maybe a little tougher than usual.

Everyone ate plenty and later I cut and dished out Christmas cake which also has a mixed reception, being so unlike any cake or dessert here.  And after that, the music was cranked up and the assembled company started dancing, as Turkish people love to do at any excuse!

Emre went back to Ankara on Monday (28^th) and I didn’t think he would be down for New Year but Cem called his friend Fikret who lives in Ankara and persuaded him to drive down and bring Emre with him.  They arrived on Thursday morning, having driven through the night (a bit over 600km–a distance people think nothing of driving at the drop of a hat over here) and it was a nice surprise to see them.  We were back in the hotel for New Year’s Eve, but with less running up and down stairs to check on food for me as Cem’s mum and one of our friends had prepared most of the food.

So here is January–Ocak in Turkish which means stove or hearth and boy do we need one now!  I miss my wood-burning stove which I have refused to put up this year because it smokes a lot and makes the walls sooty.  I think the weather is warming up a bit tomorrow and rain is also due.  Emre and Fikret left at midday today to drive back to Ankara; Emre has 3 days more of exams and then starts the mid-term holiday and Kaan has 3 weeks of school beofe.

I hope you are all flood-free and have not been suffering too much from Storm Frank – and all the other inclement weather over there.  HAPPY NEW YEAR and let’s all hope that the news this year contains fewer horrors and more joy!

Breakfast on New Year's Day

A time to slap

Here comes Christmas, sneaking up on us again.  I thought I was so well-prepared this year.  I bought some new Christmas decorations last January when we went to Budapest – the capital of Christmas decorations.  I bought the main presents for the boys in Canada, as well as lots of little stocking fillers, and advent calendars in London on the way back.  I even had crackers and things left from last year.  But suddenly there are only 2 days left and I have to do wrapping, marzipan and ice two cakes, make stock for gravy (Jamie Oliver has a lot to answer for)…..and I just had a message from Kaan’s school to say they have picked tomorrow for a parents meeting.  They always do this – tell you the day before, as though none of the mothers have jobs or anything else to do – and then they really shame you if you don’t go to them.

I do notice that most of this running round, stressing and icing cakes at 3am is done by mums.  Most of the men I know look very smug and say they are nearly ready – when all they’ve actually done is buy three presents, helped fix the Christmas tree lights and got through the firm’s Christmas drinks!

baubles from Budapest - the one on the left is a blown egg-shell

The other evening, for the first time EVER, I watched ‘It’s a wonderful life’.  It is always listed as the best Christmas film ever – and though it’s pretty corny I did like the discussion going on in heaven and Clarence the (rather bumbling) angel, and I love those wobbly old movie sets!  The boys just couldn’t believe I wanted to watch a film that was SO old.

Here is another story that amused me when I read it this week.  It is quite seasonal as it concerns St Nicholas, aka Santa Claus, who was born at Patara and became Bishop of Myra, not very far from here.  By the way, Cem once rued the fact that while Finland makes a lot of money from the Santa business, his real home was virtually unknown.  Since then, Myra has become a popular place for ‘pilgrimages’, mainly with Russians (St Nicholas is apparently ‘big’ in the Orthodox church); last summer when I drove through Demre (the modern town on the site) I hardly recognized it.

Holly getting ready for Christmas

Anyway, this story concerns Nicholas’ supposed attendance at the First Nicean Ecumenical Council in 325AD.  This was a sort of conference, organized by the Emperor Constantine in Iznik near Constantinople.  Over 300 bishops attended from all over the Christian world to discuss some of the finer points of Christian belief, particularly whether Jesus was equal in status to God.  Nicholas, who believed he was, got so angry with Arius, who believed he wasn’t, that he is said to have slapped him!

For this very unbishoply behaviour, Nicholas had his bishop’s clothes taken from him and was put in jail pending a decision as to his fate.  However, in the night Jesus and Mary came and gave him a copy of the Gospel and a stole so that in the morning he was found to be dressed once more as a bishop.  When Constantine heard, he was so impressed by the miracle that Nicholas was released.

By the way, though his bones were taken from the church in Myra to Italy, his FIRST tomb is thought to have been on Gemiler Island – the small island between Fethiye and Oludeniz.  There was a monastery on this island so maybe he died while visiting there?  Not sure of the details (Japanese archaeologists were excavating there for a few years but I haven’t seen much sign recently) but that is why it is often called St Nicholas Island.

Hope he brings you what you want – and not a slap – this Christmas!

Two very cute Santas - who will kill me for putting this on!