I left my full-time teaching job at
the end of January, 2012. It had been a relentless amount of work. Four hours every
day in the classroom and the same amount of time each day to prepare for
the next lesson. I loved my colleagues and felt my department was well-managed,
and I was understanding and working well with my students. Still, their
incessant talk while I tried to teach was disheartening. I never completely
figured out the reason for this disrespect in an otherwise polite culture. My tentative
conclusion was that Turkish students are pushed around a lot, reduced solely to
one test score as they compete to see who will go to university and who will not be accepted at all. I wondered if they weren't taking their anger out on their teachers.
At any rate, I had finished working
for pay in Turkey. Not surprisingly, I found myself with a lot of time on my
hands. Although I planned to do a great deal of sightseeing (and did) in my
last months in Turkey, I still had time to offer my services as a teacher. I
placed an announcement to this effect on the expatriate women’s listserv, and quickly
received some replies. One was from a friend and long-time Istanbul resident
who worked with Caritas, an organization that helps fulfill the social justice
mission of the Catholic Church. “My Iraqi refugees need an English teacher,”
she told me. “Are you interested?” I
was.
Before long I was traveling to
Elmadağ,
a working class section of Istanbul near Taksim Square. I would teach in a rundown
building on which hung a plaque that read “Vatican Embassy.” In addition
to Caritas, the building housed the Don Bosco School, run by and for Iraqi
refugees. (Don Bosco was a nineteenth
century Italian priest who
dedicated his life to teaching disadvantaged youth, and was later made a saint. Others
continued his work by establishing schools named after him in developing
countries. My husband attended Don Bosco high school
in Calcutta.)
The women I was to teach were Christians
who had fled Iraq due to persecution after Saddam Hussein’s
downfall.
Jian was a 23-year-old English
teacher from a town that bordered Turkey called Zakho. She was Kurdish in
ethnicity, and among the four languages she spoke was Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
“My whole life has been war,” Jian told me as
we chatted on the first day. “First, when I was born, the
Iran-Iraq war was going on. Then, the Gulf War. I was two then. After that
there were sanctions. And then when I was 15 years old, my country was invaded.”
Jian had fled Iraq with her family immediately after finishing college. She told me their business had been destroyed
and a cousin killed.
Another of my students was a 30-year-old
computer programmer from Baghdad, who had enjoyed working in her field for several
years. She told me that after the invasion, the majority Muslims in Baghdad had
become hostile toward the Christians. She put her hands over her face. “I have
seen bad things.”
At this point Jian told me, “Saddam
Hussein, he loved the Christians.”
“Really?” I said, astonished. “What
do you mean?”
“He give us days off for Christmas,
three days each year. And he was never bad to the Christians. We know he was bad
to others. But not to the Christians.”
A third student, Samira, vivacious
and trilingual, had also studied to be an English teacher. She loved her
profession and was eager to be resettled and continue her career. My other students were an engineer and a young mother.
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| Jian and Samira |
My image of refugees from newspaper
and television is of people wearing ragged clothing. But Jian, Samira and my
other students wore nice-looking jeans, attractive tops, and stylish shoes,
brought with them from their middle-class lives in Iraq, where as Jian told me,
“all of our clothing comes from Turkey.”
All of these young women were
waiting to be placed either in the U.S. or in Australia, a process that could
take several years. Jian and Samira were slated for Sydney, where they had
relatives. “Half of my town is already there,” Jian told me. “It’s Zakho II.”
Arriving in Istanbul, these women
had expected to spend most of their time at home. Their brothers had ordered
them to do so, forbidding them to go out at all in the evenings. (“We are like
Muslims in many ways,” Jian told me. “That is because we grew up with
Muslims.”) But as it turned out, the Don Bosco School needed teachers, and when
the church called, Jian’s and Samira’s families couldn’t refuse. Jian and
Samira were currently teaching elementary and high school students,
administering exams, and developing curriculum for the school. On Saturdays
they taught English to adult Iraqis, and Sundays were spent at church.
The experience had broadened them.
Their much-loved priest at Istanbul’s St. Esprit Catholic Church, was from
Haiti, and his assistant was West African. “I had never seen a black person
before,” Jian confided.
Recognizing that their English was
not perfect, they had signed up for classes with me. And so we started, working together each week on
specific grammar topics they requested, and reading about a variety of issues to
expand their vocabulary. Every week we watched an episode of the American
television show How I Met Your Mother
on my laptop. My Turkish students had loved that show, and they did, too. Indeed
they were familiar with American media. To my surprise they told me that had
watched dozens of episodes of Friends
in Iraq, and had seen the movie Titanic
multiple times.
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| Looking at American magazines |
Often as I watched my Iraqi
students working on a grammar sheet or doing a reading, I couldn’t help but
think about the upheaval in their lives, and I had to catch myself from
becoming emotional. How could I teach when I was trying not to cry?
Accustomed to being in the Turkish
culture and as someone who has had excellent experiences with other Muslims as
well, fondness for Islam came reflexively to me. But my students were eager to
leave the Muslim world behind. Here in Istanbul, they were on minuscule budgets
and didn’t have the transportation or means to visit Istanbul’s dazzling Christian
and Muslim sites. Being Arab but Christian kind of set them at odds with their
Muslim neighbors. I don’t think there was unpleasantness, just little overt
friendliness. The Turks I talked to thought the refugees in their midst were
getting resources unfairly without having to work. The Turkish government,
however, does not allow refugees to hold jobs.
Toward the end of my work with
Caritas, I was able to attend an Iraqi Christian wedding. Held at St. Esprit on
a humid June afternoon, the service, complete with bridesmaids, a flower girl
and a ring bearer, was conducted in English, but at one point the congregation
said the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic. Very memorable.
Deeply devout, optimistic, eager to
work and raise families in their new countries, these folks will be superb
assets to Australia and the United States. In fact, I told “my girls” nearly every week that I wished my country was getting all of them.
