Hey friend,
This Mektup is a personal one.
You must have heard what happened in my home country, Turkey. Two earthquakes took the lives of thousands of people (40k+) and impacted millions. (just yesterday, two additional earthquakes took another set of lives) Although my family and friends are physically healthy, nobody in Turkey feels good these days. Everybody tries to help in one way or another. We ended the search and rescue operations in most cities and saved thousands of people but also caused thousands of lives due to organizational failure in AFAD (Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency of Turkey), which couldn’t reach the disaster area in the first 48 hours. Yet, we heard survivors coming out of the debris after 296 hours (that’s ~12 days). We had hoped for weeks that we could save many, many more.
We also hoped things changed after the 1999 Gölcük earthquake that killed ~18k people in Turkey. Some things are changed; new legislations and taxes are introduced to take precautious steps. Earthquake insurance became mandatory if you want water and electricity at your home. Yet, we didn’t consider the quality of monitoring of the legislation applied in practice. Corruption, nepotism, favoritism, and a one-man country were the reasons why these natural events became disasters/catastrophes.
Now, I do not want to talk about problems that test our nerves and make us hopeless. Thousands of people lost their lives, and millions won’t be able to live in the same way anymore, and I can’t change anything about it. 😔 That’s why, instead, I want to focus on how it feels to be an ex-pat while one part of you is still in another place dealing with many struggles. I want to talk about how it feels being here, in Germany, far away from all of the impacts, how shameful we feel for our warm apartments, and—more specifically—why we feel this way. Not in a selfish way that moves focus to my problems in warm apartments but to think more about what we can do from here.
When I first moved to Germany, I moved here to have a better future and support my family better in turbulent times. All these hopes and excitement of living abroad caused hiding all the challenges of starting a new life in a place where I know nobody and have no connections. Over the years, I got used to a new life, but one part was always missing.
You can’t just take your luggage and say, “I’m out of here,” when you move out of a place you had spent your whole childhood and youth and still have people you love living. You always leave behind one part of your soul; you know that you will never become one again, especially when the culture you grew up in is not individualistic but a community-driven culture.
In community-driven cultures, you feel the urge to help each other out. If someone else is in trouble, you rush to help them. When you need money, you first ask the closest people instead of going to a bank for a loan. When you want to do something on weekends, you don’t do it alone. Alone activities are like sins. You do things with others. These behaviors are shaped by the tribal ancestors and organizational structures we had in history. Harmony precedes individualistic behaviors as it helped our ancestors to survive in harsh environments. Unlike individualistic cultures (many Western cultures), nobody promotes individualistic decisions. Everyone is urged to be part of a group and follow that group’s decisions. And that’s how I grew up in the middle of Anatolia.
When moving to Germany, one of the fundamental problems I faced was tied to this cultural difference; having nobody to support me and trying to do everything alone. When I tried building friendships with locals, they all stopped at some point. It was extremely difficult to have a colleague moving from a working relationship to a friendship. Feeling alone within a crowd and not belonging is the story of the lives of many who move to Western countries. However, recent events showed that we, actually, are not that alone.
Seeing all the support from the country I immigrated to feels great. All the efforts in Germany to help Turkey and Syria are just extraordinary: teams were sent immediately, minutes of silence in the parliament and schools, lowering flags to half-staff, commemoration ceremonies, all the support campaigns by NGOs and companies (e.g., we have a donation-matching campaign in SumUp), airlifts from Germany to Turkey full of donations, and many, many more. I’m simply proud and feel so much supported by the people of Germany. Thanks to all these efforts, I could participate in helping my country in one way.
Not only Germany but seeing other countries that I least expected (due to decades-long conflicts) to send help, such as Israel, Armenia, and Greece, makes me feel not alone. Also, many countries rushed to help, such as Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Austria, the UK, the US, and more. Albeit any support probably won’t help with the long-term change we expect (learning how to live with earthquakes and building necessary infrastructure correctly), we at least don’t feel alone and can bind up our wounds quicker. So, thank you.
Thank you to all my friends, colleagues, companies, organizations, governments, and people who shared our feelings with us, who gave us a hand, a hug, or a shoulder, and support.
You taught me one thing. As much as we often feel otherwise, we’re not alone. Nobody is alone. There is still hope; there will always be hope.
Until next time,
Candost
P.S. If you want to donate some money, you can use the Ahbap organization—a trustworthy one.
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