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“My problem is that I find it so hard to ask for help. I was used to being independent. It's hard to admit that I need people to do things for me now.” As I listened to a friend analyzing some of the difficulties of running her own business, boy, did her words resonate with me.
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I don't know if there are any statistics in existence, but certainly in the Cappadocian part of Turkey many of the expats are hardly in the first flush of youth, which means that, like me, they've already spent their formative years living in a very different cultural milieu. Like most of my peers, I left home when I was 18 and was completely at home with the concept of standing on my own two feet. Indeed, like my friend, I prided myself on my independence. Then I arrived in Göreme, and all of a sudden it felt as if I was about 5 years old all over again. The main difficulty, of course, was the language, which meant having to rely on interpreters for almost everything. That was clearly a foreseeable problem, but in reality it went much deeper than that, and to this day I must still depend on my neighbors in a way that I never did back in Bristol. Of course, the most demanding period was when I was restoring my house. The majority of Göreme's expats are female, but there are two men as well -- one Dutch and one German -- and at that time they, too, were hard at work making homes for themselves out of the caves. Both being men of a DIY-ish nature, they were busily laying the pipes and installing the wiring themselves. Not knowing my monkey wrench from my hand drill, I, however, would have been at a complete standstill without the help of friends. In the UK, if I'd wanted an electrician to do something for me, I'd simply have reached for the phonebook and arranged for someone to visit. Here I couldn't even make that phone call for myself, let alone deal with the ensuing conversation. “Hasan Hüseyin abi,” I well remember wailing on one particularly demoralizing occasion. “I don't understand about electricity in English, so how do you expect me to understand in Turkish?” No matter. I was lucky in the friends I'd made and their extraordinary readiness to help out. The house slowly took shape in parallel with the growth in my grasp on Turkish vocabulary. These days I can certainly call the electrician for myself and may even understand his diagnosis of the problem. But of course it doesn't end there, and there are still so many occasions on which I find myself having to make groveling “please help me” phone calls: when a letter phrased in official language arrives, for example, or when something more major is needed at the house such as organizing a new type of weatherproofing. “The good thing is that many people really like to help,” I reassured my friend. After all, these days I can even do my own share of assisting the newcomers, not to mention the tourists, and sometimes that really does feel pretty good.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
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| 24 September 2009, Thursday |
| PAT YALE |
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Müzeyyen Ciftci , Sep 27 2009 03:48, Sunday
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