ISTANBUL, TURKEY — Erin McGrath wants her passport back.
“My old passport had so many cool visas,” she tells me in her Ankara apartment, a pot of mercimek çorbas? simmering on the stove. (Mercimek çorbas? translates as “lentil soup.” But, like the name, it’s much better in Turkish.)
“That passport had my two Hungarian educational visas. It had the one from Cambodia — they have really cool script.”
“This one?” She rolls her eyes. “This one doesn’t even have the picture on the right page. And it’s got some weird chip thing in it.”
McGrath, a doctoral candidate from the University of Pittsburgh, has quite the travel record. At only 29 years old, she has studied in Hungary, worked in Thailand and traveled to the Czech Republic, Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Oh, and all of Western Europe, but she doesn’t count those.
“They’re boring,” she said. “They’re inert.”
Now she lives in Turkey, working as a research fellow at Bilkent University as she writes her dissertation. While she stirs red pepper oil into her soup, I ask the question inevitable to Americans here: What are you doing in Turkey?
She laughs. She needed a foreign language as part of her doctoral requirements, she says. As for Turkey specifically, “I think the Turkish language is an interesting language to learn... it will be an advantage if I go back to D.C.,” she says. She also finds Turkey’s cultures fascinating.
“It’s not developed; it’s not underdeveloped. It’s not completely Mediterranean... not completely European,” she said.
McGrath’s answer is common among students asked why they’re in Turkey. As Jon Withers, a student from the University of Pittsburgh who studied at Bilkent University puts it: “Everything I heard about the culture drew me... I heard that ‘Turkey is the bridge of East and West’ in every travel book.”
This answer is common, but most students quickly admit it’s insufficient. After all, every city has a foreign culture — even England, said Jenna Mulliken, a Hollywood youth counselor who spent a semester at Regent’s College in London. So is an explanation possible without resorting to “it’s different?”
McGrath is about to try. Once the preliminary “crossroads of East and West” answer is out of the way, she lights a cigarette, takes a breath and begins to explain in depth.
By the cigarette’s end, she’s crafted a long answer — one including economics, geopolitical strategy, the feasibility of an academic career, social dynamics, her own social network, conspiracy theories, beauty and egalitarianism. And she’s still not satisfied.
“Did that make sense?” she asked, putting her cigarette out in an ashtray from the caves of Cappadocia. Sort of. Not really.
When students discount the generic “East/West” answer, reasons for studying in Turkey diversify. Consider responses from students studying at Koç University in Istanbul. Some of the responses include:
“I’m a Byzantine historian. Where else would I go?”
“I wanted to go to London. But my adviser said it would be better if I went to two places and not just one. This program was open.”
“I love the Bosphorus.”
“Because I love Turkey!”
“It was the only program we both got into and we wanted to study abroad together, because we’re in love.”
“I got arrested for drunk driving and my license got suspended... Since Ontario’s boring without a car, I thought I’d leave for a bit.”
Some of these sound ridiculous. But are they?
Withers said he thinks so, questioning if study abroad is useful for students whose rationale is “I got arrested for drunk driving.”
It’s certainly different for someone like Abdul. Abdul is 18 years old. Two months ago he fled to Istanbul from his native Sudan because, as he put it, “Turkey has newspapers, hospitals, buildings and cold water in bottles.”
As we chat in broken Turkish and devastating English while waiting for a dolmu, he asks me why I’m in Turkey.
I get ready to go into my explanation with references to Turkey’s strategic importance, unique history and battle between secularism and Islam. Then I stop myself.
To this Sudanese refugee, who’s gone abroad to live in a land with working hospitals, any answer I give, no matter how intelligent, isn’t going to make sense. Why would I leave America, he asked, a land paved with gold and bread?
I can’t answer. Any answer I give would sound ridiculous.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
