Keeping It Local to Rebuild Shattered Lives

As you may know by now, I love to shout about expats who are doing great things in their host country. If you have missed it, check out my latest article to be published. Ode has run it and the thing I love most about Ode is that they only share positive news. It's an article about British expat Figen Cakir who is using her art and design skills to do her bit to help her community in the Turkish city of Golcuk. Nice news to start 2011 off with.

Christmas Gift Ideas for Expats (2): Giftware with a Conscience

Christmas gifts with a conscience? Yes, if you support British expat Figen Cakir's project. Figen, who lives in Turkey, has set up a project aimed at developing local skills and ultimately selling items that have been made by local women, artisans and craftspeople. All so that they can support their families and rebuild their lives after a disastrous earthquake hit her community over a decade ago.

Figen at London crafts show showing
Turkish wares

Figen is a great example of an expat helping their local community - making their 'host' country their home and contributing to it in a big way. Figen personally helps local women with the development of their crafts and arts and ensures that the products are sourced from local or natural materials. She wants to expand the support through this 'Giftware with a Conscience' project which will help set up a small shop to develop skills and turn unique skills into unique arts and crafts. Figen explains that it is not about giving the local people charity,

"The aim is to give them a sense of enterprise."

A website offering international shipping will accompany the shop. All donators will be added to the mailing list and will receive shop discounts, updates, special offers and details of monthly or bi-monthly initiatives to help the local community - things like helping a family with clothing for their children, school books, baby items or things to help get them through the winter.

Turkish oya

VIP perks for funders include hand knitted Turkish slippers for toasty feet on cold winter days, decorative plates, hand painted gift tags, Turkish tile ware and pure Turkish cotton towels.

Cini Tilework

*CHRISTMAS TIP* - I would like to share a great idea with you that I got from Jo Parfitt. Jo sends a Christmas newsletter out instead of sending Christmas cards. The money she would have spent on cards and stamps she donates to charity. A great idea! If this appeals to you, and you like the idea of Figen's project consider donating the money you save on cards and postage to 'Giftware with a Conscience'. 

Alternatively, put this project on your own Christmas wish list so that your friends and family donate on your behalf. 

So many ways to give gifts this year with a conscience.

I will leave the last word to Figen, who sums up what this means to her, and to her community.

"I would like to express my desire to see this project come to life in the new year and finally create a 'home' for the work of artisans and craftspeople. That would be my Christmas wish, I guess." 

Duality - Life as an Expat

"I am two different people for two different audiences," commented one reader of my recent guest post "How Do You Say.... Me?" on Expat Harem.

My post addressed the issue of being able to let the real you shine through when you are interacting with people in a second language. It is a difficulty that many expats face, and the comments from readers were overwhelming. So many of us endure the same struggles of showing our real personality when the words to express ourselves escape us.

"I can't express the totality of me in English," summed up another reader. 

Expat Sarah Turnbull, in her book Almost French, states after a dinner party,

"I’d said very little all night. When I did speak, it was to issue childlike statements or ask simple questions which made me cringe at my own dumbness.”

This rang a bell with one reader of the blog post,

"I had to laugh at the "cringe at my own dumbness" quote because I find myself constantly doing that here in Italy."

Whilst many of us know the problems associated with learning a new language, this blog post made me realise that there is an undercurrent of issues too when you need to operate in a new language. It is not just grammar, getting by in daily life and understanding the society you live in - it is also about being able to feel like you represent yourself accurately and that you can be true to yourself and your persona in another language.

So how else can you get your message across when you can't find the words?

"Because the Turks are so expressive with their body language I think that really helps me to be more demonstrative if the word escapes me," explains one expat in Turkey.

Another expat says,

"I'm a smiler so I do that a lot! And I try to speak with my hands.... and my hubby can translate but its not the same."

You can of course refuse to budge and speak only in your native language but remember that whilst you are doing that, you are addressing an audience in a language not their own. So do they really get what you are about when you speak in your mother tongue?

There is no easy answer but as Anastasia Ashman puts it,

"Passion is something that will push us to the next stage in trying to communicate." And if there is something that most of us expats have - it's passion!!


*This was first published in February 2010 in an Expats@Home newsletter. If you want to receive future editions of my newsletter you can sign up on this blog (see right column) or http://www.thewritingwell.eu/Newsletter.html.*

Tales from the Expat Harem - Book Review

A Must Read Expat Book

I believe that a book that transports you to another place is the most rewarding you can read. A book that allows you to experience a different culture or unknown feeling from the comfort of your easy chair, bed or garden, or even the less comfortable perch in the smallest room in the house, is one to rave about.

Reading "Tales from the Expat Harem" will make you feel like you have experienced a little of life in Turkey. It is nearly three hundred pages of expat women telling their tales about life in a country that bridges east and west, that even within its own borders joins the modern and the traditional.

Let me ask you this. How would you react if the community you loved living in insisted you sacrificed a sheep because you found the perfect house to live in? Hard to imagine for many, but Pat Yale tells us how she reconciled a Turkish custom with her own personal beliefs.

Then there's Amanda Coffin who shares her story of dealing with unwanted advances by Turkish men in the East of the country; a similar tale here in Holland would most likely end in a restraining order, but calm and mindful, Amanda tackles the problem directly herself.

Family tensions, princess weddings, cross country road trips, archaeological digs, religion, belly dancing, food, parties and shopping: "Tales from the Expat Harem" has it all.

Photo: Sinan Acar 

"Tales from the Expat Harem" is a cultural adventure that takes readers on a journey of emotions through the voices of 29 women who have lived through experiences in Turkey, women who moved there for love, adventure, work, religion or to study. Together they share the colours of a village wedding, the sounds of a bazaar, the taboos of gender interaction, the culture of a religion, the tradition of evil eye charms, the richness of the Turkish landscapes and the intimacies of Turkish bath houses.

Abandoning stereotypes. Learning a language. Embracing a culture. Accepting a tradition. Adapting to new customs. These are the keys for foreign women in modern Turkey. These are the keys to being an expat just about anywhere.

This is expat lit that captures the imagination of readers, that educates, shares and enlightens. If you really want to know what expat life is about, read "Tales from the Expat Harem".

For more info about the "Tales from the Expat Harem" book and contributors visithttp://www.expatharem.com/tales-from-the-expat-harem/contents-contributors/

Guest Post Series: Expat Images: Unrecognisable vs. Iconic by Anastasia Ashman

On my first serious expat stint, Southeast Asia in the ‘90s, I achieved a state of photographic oblivion.

When I set out from Los Angeles I was already solidly unemployed, unproductive, and unmotivated. I had a capricious romance to see me through. In Asia, life losses piled up: heirlooms ransacked at the container yard, the cruel theft of a puppy, the unfathomable demise of my best friend.

I did not write about any of these things. Too much shock, no support. Turns out capricious romance isn’t the best fallback in a crisis.

Language and cultural barriers shielded me from bonding with the Chinese and Malays and Tamils and Thais around me. My reactions were miscalibrated: I laughed when introduced to a person with the name of a celebrated American boxer -- a common moniker in Malaysia -- and took offense at the quickly-retracted handshake of a traditional Malay greeting. I also mistakenly expected dinner party banter at gatherings that focused on the scarfing of food in silence.

Soon enough I was as unrecognisable as my new world. My own body was erasing me. A spongy, knee-less Southern Italian genetic inheritance asserted itself with the help of a greasy local diet while my hair frizzed mercilessly in the tropical air.

Friends who knew me during cosmopolitan past lives in New York, California, and Italy wouldn’t identify me as the 30-pounds heavier creature with the ill-fitting clothes and unschooled haircut photographed in jungles and palaces. Uprooted from my milieu, in a harsh climate and surrounded by perpetual strangers, I was desperate to locate comfort whatever the cost. My Asia photographs are stowed, an expat adventure distressing to recall, impossible to frame.

Scraping bottom (especially on the far side of the world) has a benefit. It’s easy to see which way is up. My 12-time zone couch surf back to New York was like a Phoenix’s ascent from the ashes.

Recently I’ve been monstrous abroad again. Breathe easy: happily married, in possession of a hard won sense of self.

This particular snapshot of expat life is a mantle piece pride. There I am in 2005 commandeering the lens, the microphone, the printing press in Istanbul as Turkish newspapers and television discuss my expat literature collection by foreign women about their lives in modern Turkey. Tales not universally known, many writers never before published. All of them minority voices in a Muslim nation with a reputation for censorship.

The celebrity-studded book launch is a blur, except for my unauthorly leather pants and shiny rock star coiffure -- those are in fine focus in my mind’s eye! I haven’t often been so polished before or since, nor managed to squeeze into the lambskin trousers, but no matter. As a coiner of the concept of the Expat Harem virtual community -- feminine storytellers making sense of life’s evolutions through the filter of another culture -- in a flash I became iconic.

A positive image of an expat to others, and to myself.

The fleeting, picturesque moment captures an enduring truth about my expatriatism. In a wide world of strangers I’ve finally found my perpetual peers, and a theoretical home for both my literary career and my life abroad. Now I have a way to nurture and sustain my most valuable expatriate possession -- my sense of self -- no matter where I am, or what heights or depths I face.

California-native Anastasia Ashman is a writer/producer of cultural entertainment in Istanbul and the founder of expat+HAREM, the global niche.

Guest Post Series: Lost & Found by Tara Lutman Agacayak

The first time I heard the term "expat" I thought it meant ex-patriot as in, someone who was a former patriot. I could never figure out why someone would deliberately forsake their homeland.

Silly, naive me ... After living in Turkey for eight years, I understand from first hand experience what it means to be an expatriate.

If you had asked me before I met my Turkish husband, I would never have chosen this path; never have chosen to leave my sunny, liberal California upbringing to fly half-way around the world and settle in Turkey.

But how does that song go? You can't choose who you love, love chooses you.

The first several years of my life in Turkey were the most miserable I'd ever suffered. When I say miserable, I mean unbearable. Adjusting to marriage, learning a new language, developing new relationships in a very foreign culture, missing my family, leaving my career - in short, it was a complete identity crisis.

During such crises, you have two choices, to bury yourself in your misery or to dig yourself out. In a moment of clarity I decided I wanted to live a happy and fulfilling life, regardless of my location and that's when I started digging.

By digging I discovered what I'm really passionate about in life and who I am at my core irrespective of where I live or what my nationality happens to be. And I think this process of self-discovery forced on me by an expat-induced identity crisis has been the greatest gift of my expatriatism.

By nearly losing myself, I ended up finding who I am.

Tara Lutman Agacayak is a micro-business adviser who believes that people can change the world by doing what they love.

Photo by Nakşidil by Reyyan Somuncuoğlu

used with permission