Month three has been a learning curve of what love looks like even with limited to no words. Since arriving in Turkey my team and I have been blessed to have made connections fairly quickly with English speakers. Even so, often times we have to pull out our phones to use translation apps. We are in a small city where we stay as a group in a small complex outside of the city noises and where it is not unusual to see herds of cows walking in our backyard and in the street. It has been a beautiful and refreshing change to walk in our backyard with fields of yellow flowers and mountains.
We most definitely stick out as the foreigners in our complex. Even in the outskirts of the city in our somewhat remote part there are plenty indoor soccer fields for the men to go and play with the locals. Every day and night we hear the call to prayer over the speaker of the local mosque right outside of our window. The kids swarm us with smiles and ‘merhaba ‘-Hello’s every time we step outside. Or pointing at us as they yell the question, ‘tourists, tourists?!’ The boys cling to the men on our team always waiting and wanting to play some futbol outside.
We have arrived this month just as Ramadan has been taking place. Which means the locals being Muslim fast from sunrise to sundown. The other day we were generously invited over to a friend’s family’s farm to join them for a home cooked Iftar meal. Iftar is the meal where Muslims break their fast at sundown. We have made friends with a group of university students who happened to be studying English literature. They invited us over for tea where we learned some Turkish dancing and we shared some what interesting dancing to American music…a lot of laughter took place as you can imagine.
The first day we arrived Alexis and I took a walk to our local grocery shop. As we were walking we walked past two young girls. We smiled and said hello. We kept walking and one of girls, Lane, 12 years old turned back around introduced herself and asked if she could join us. Since then she hasn’t left our side. Coming with us every time to the local store, taking walks with us in our backyard, and coming over to play Dutch blitz with Alexis and Amanda.
We have communicated mostly with Lane through a translation app. As you can imagine at times the translation isn’t very clear and can be quite the challenge. Then there are days like last afternoon. Lane popped by our house as Jordan and I were going to take a walk to the fields in our backyard.
After our walk Lane and I went to our community room to draw a bit. This time neither of us had our translation apps. I could feel that place of tension of wishing I could communicate more clearly with Lane. I started to realize the kind of little sister love I felt for Lane. As we sat there in silence Lane leaned over and put her head on my shoulder and her arm around my arm. When it becomes hard and at times even discouraging to not be able to always fully communicate the things I would like to say through words I am seeing first hand that maybe the seeds being planted by acts of love are more clearly translated both ways then I would be led to believe.
