Fréderike Geerdink - independent journalist

Unexpected power

01/11/2007/0 Comments/in Other /by fgeerdink

It’s chopping time. For months and months there has been a big pile of wood behind the house in which I live on the second floor. There are trees, there are the remains of walls of a former house, there’s rubbish, there are two dish antennas attached to the trees, and, as I mentioned, there’s wood. Pallets, boards, a broken door, things like that.

And now women come to chop the wood into pieces and take it home to heat the house. Now and then I sit on my balcony to watch it. Sometimes big, but also sometimes young, fragile looking women with their headscarves tied loosely around their heads, expertly and with unexpected power smash the wood to pieces with an axe. They don’t pause to rest, they just come, do the work and go again. I’m impressed. And sometimes even touched by the way these women just keep life going.

Railway crossing

28/10/2007/0 Comments/in Other /by fgeerdink

Driving a car, that’s no problem for my Turkish lover. Not that he ever had official lessons, but his father taught him everything when he was a teenager. So I feel perfectly safe when occasionally he is driving instead of me. Point was, he didn’t have a driving license, and that’s not so practical. Even less so now that daddy has bought a new car and the old one is just standing there doing nothing. It will be easier to borrow it if we both get our license.
This morning, it was time: driving exam. He had to be there at 8.30. Not in Istanbul, but in the village where he is registered, Ürgüp. How easy, I thought, doing a driving exam in Ürgüp (15,000 inhabitants) on an early Sunday morning. He came back at 10.30. Passed? He supposed so, he can call for the result later the same day. I asked if there was a lot of traffic on the road. No, there wasn’t: the exam was not on the public road, but on a circuit. Long circuit then, that it took so long? No, it took a long time because he had to wait in line. Wait in line? Yes, on both sides of the circuit there’s a line of candidates, you drive around the circuit, get out of the car at the end of it (about 3 to 5 minutes later), the next candidate takes over the wheel and makes the circuit in the opposite direction. Waiting in line, my friend was warned that when it was nearly his turn, he had to watch the approaching driver carefully: recently somewhere in Turkey something went wrong with the brakes, which resulted in two deaths among the waiting candidates. I asked: what sort of situations do you come up against at this circuit? At the start, he answered, there’s a sign saying ’30’. After that, they ask you to stop at a ”no-stopping” sign and check whether you obey the sign. And – and then I was definitely rolling on the floor laughing out loud – they built a fake railway crossing. There are hardly any trains in Turkey.
He just called. Baby, I passed.

Sacrificing your life

26/10/2007/0 Comments/in Other /by fgeerdink

I passed Yeni Valide Cami today at prayer time. The mosque was full of people, the imam was giving his sermon. I heard what state religion can do – they don’t call it state religion here, but in fact the ministry for religious affairs trains all the imams and tells them every week what to focus on in their Friday sermon. This time, someone decided that sacrificing your life for the motherland needed some attention. Very topical of course, now that the government has been threatening for weeks to attack PKKcamps across the boarder in northern Iraq. How beautiful it is, said the imam, to die for your country. Many men already have done so in Turkey’s rich and glorious history, and what an honour to follow in their footsteps.
Positive thinker that I am, I thought that maybe it was meant as a comfort for parents or wives who lost their sons or husbands in the army . But then again, there are other ways to comfort people who have lost a loved one. Especially in a mosque, I would say. Because somehow the sermon didn’t sound like a message from God…