EVS in BAŞAK Culture and Art Foundation

Çağla Aydın  

Within the Youth program ‘European Volunteer Service’ (EVS) I’m the Başak Culture and Art Foundation as a volunteer. The period of my project amounts 6 months - So I’m here since September 2008 and my project will finish at the end of February.  

Normally I’m from Germany. My parents are Turkish and I was grown up there bilingual and after finishing the High school I decided to do the EVS in Turkey. In the internet I found Başak and the description attracted a great deal of attention to me. After applying and a lot of bureaucracy stuff I came to Turkey/Istanbul and learned in a slow way what Başak is, with whom and for whom it works. After this phase I also started to do some workshops.

Once a week five women are coming to the foundation to join to the English course which I’m doing. Before I did the course, I expected that it will be very hard and complicated for me because I never taught a language in my life to a group of people. Especially I’m explaining them the English language in Turkish. That was also not easy for me because I never went to a Turkish school in my life, just to German schools. I learned the Turkish language just from my parents, from the newspaper and television and so I had no idea about the Turkish grammar. But slowly I learned the Turkish grammar definitions and thanks to the High school in Germany, which I visited and which taught me the Latin language, I’m very good in grammar. So it was a bit complicated for me but not impossible and finally I also learned a lot by giving the English lessons to the five women. It is a giving and taking: I’m giving the knowledge which I have but at the same time I’m taking their knowledge. I feel quite comfortable with this exchange.

  Apart from these workshops and their preparations I’m doing a lot of translations for my foundations magazines and other scripts - English, Turkish, German – from one language to the other. Also I’m helping people to connect with eachother because my other volunteer friends here, who weren’t grown up bilingual like me, are doing not so easy because of the ‘language-problem’. To one of the vounteers, Adri from Hungary, I gave also once a week Turkish lessons. It is quite hard sometimes because doing translations needs a lot of concentration and energy. Especially the case that I have two mother tongues and that I can even think fluently  in these both languages makes it sometimes hard for me – it is a process of learning and learning is not everytime easy. To be a volunteer in Başak was, is and will be an important experience for me.I got to know different people, cultures and languages. Also my lifestyle and my view of life changed. I feel that I became more adult. On the one hand it is positive but on the other it is strange for me. Since now I had great times, full of luck and happiness, but it was not everytime easy. For example I tasted the loneliness – it was a hard process to learn how to handle with loneliness and it was an invaluable experience. I think the best experience I made was Turkey and especially the city Istanbul itself, a fascinating city and so big that it needs two continents. I can’t find words in my dialect vocabulary to describe this city. To be born and grown up in south Germany in the ‘Schwabenländle’ and then to come to Istanbul, as a German-Turk, to have an allday-life here and to taste the clash of cultures was for my own process of creating my individual character very important.    

I thank Başak, Şahhanım and all the other people around me.

  Çağla Aydın