Terrorist Alert: Orange

Whenever I told people that I would be going to Turkey for the year their response was often the same: “That’s awesome… but…aren’t you afraid?”

The mysterious Turkish culture along with an exotic geographical location is partially responsible for the reaction, but I also suspect that those who mentioned fear were thinking about the type of people I date. So many things to be afraid of!

I forgot how jumpy, how worry-burdened our culture is until the orientation in Ankara. We sat in on 11 days of lectures –each day focused on preparing this group of 54 to become teachers in a foreign world. Most had never taught anything, never spoken a word of Turkish AND had just graduated from undergrad. There were the occasional teachers or more experienced in the group, but they were the minority. I can understand the anxiety of teaching a class for the first time. There is this, as some ETA (English Teaching Assistant) put it on our ETA Google Group, a feeling of “Teacher Imposter syndrome.”

The fear of teaching was trumped when one session with two men from the American embassy came in to talk about personal safety. These two –oh how to describe them, maybe think of your favorite evening CSI like show where there is always the big mean tough cop… the one who is not really in shape but his size and the way he talks is a little unnerving… that’s what these guys were like. It didn’t take long until they started talking about attacks on embassies and political figures. They were clearly there to elevate the Homeland Security threat level from ORANGE-“high risk of terrorist attacks” (which it has been on every time I have flown since the system started) to RED “severe risk of terrorist attacks.” I find the wording of these “warnings” to be just as alarming as the potential “threats” they advertise. Another application of pragmatics to keep us on our toes!

I think the one thing that everyone took from the highly offensive meeting with these two goons from the embassy was, “pepper spray won’t work.” The big guy started off this conversation by asking if there were any Latinos in the group and yet while there are a few, nobody said anything because we all knew what was coming. Yup, the next question was “How many peppers do you eat in a day?”

I beg your pardon?

He claimed that because the Turks eat peppers at every meal, and this is fairly accurate, pepper spray would have not effect on them. The big goofy embassy guy said he uses pepper spray as Binaca. I would have loved to see that demonstration.

Another piece of advice from them was to take a new route home everyday and that if we had seen the same person 3 times in one day, then we were being followed.

Their presentation, along with the presentation on medical safety left the crowd of young people with worst case scenarios in their heads while a feeling of reassurance could be measured thanks to the fact that we have low-flying medical evacuation insurance as provided by the Fulbright program.

To make a long story short, the days following those presentations had the ETAs asking all kinds of worst case scenario questions. They kept coming –one after the other, many of them the same question, but with different wording. I drifted off into facebook world.

While many of the concerns were legit and most will never be an issue, there was one thing that really is true. The traffic in Turkey is dangerous, very dangerous. In Ankara, it was a do or die kind of thing every time we crossed the street. Hesitation could get you killed- that doesn’t sound like something that should go along with the most harmless of things such as being a pedestrian, but it’s true –and I saw why.

I was in a taxi (a fairly cheap way to get around Ankara and literally the only way to measure distance: “it’s about 10 Lira away” or “Oh it’s really close, like maybe 6 Lira”) with a friend and we were actually discussing something the security goons had said, that gun ownership in Turkey is highly regulated. Ed asked me if I really believed that and just when I had developed something to say I heard squealing tires, looked up, saw smoke then heard a thud and watched as an elderly man went spinning in the air landing on his side on the 4 feet wide concrete medium. It wasn’t our taxi that hit him, but the taxi right in front of us, giving me a front row seat to what may have been someone’s death. That really shook me up and for the rest of the time in Ankara I had to play mother and watch as the kids crossed the streets. Look right then left then right again and HOLD MY HAND LET’S GO!

Riding in the buses is different. You can see the cars, inches away –feel the jerky movements of the bus fighting its way in line for the highway entrance ramp and then a sudden ridiculous acceleration as if the bus had actually just been taxing on the tarmac of Ankara Airport. While the bus rides are fairly safe, there are some sketchy things that happen, like overcrowding (watch your wallet) and the occasional forget-to-close-the-backdoor while driving. Being on the top of a semi mountain, I am at the will of the busses. Right now it is not so bad, but I am terrified of the idea of getting in one once the snow starts falling!