I grew up in a (protestant) missionary family in Turkey, and a lot of friends have asked me what my childhood was like. It’s a common question, but I find it hard to give a good explanation off-the-cuff for a couple reasons:
- It’s secretly many questions — what’s it like being a missionary, what’s it like in Turkey, what’s it like growing up in-between cultures, what’s it like making a big move during formative years, etc, etc
- There are so many positive things about these experiences, and so many negative things. Some aspects of it make me really happy, and others can bring me to the edge of tears. This does not always fit the mood.
- Some people really want to see other cultures, and I worry about making them feel bad when that’s just a normal part of life for me. I also really don’t want my personality to be dominated by ‘I grew up in Turkey’; I find that annoying. So I often just avoid talking about it.
Anyways, I decided I should just write something about this, and people can read as much (or as little) as they want. Also, since it’s in writing, I can put all my disclaimers up front, and tell you, dear reader, to take whatever you want from this. I’m mostly not trying to convince you of anything, and I don’t think you need to feel sorry for me. You can judge me for my opinions, but note that this content is intentionally unfiltered — I’m sure there some hot takes in your unfiltered thoughts too.
Disclaimers
- We were missionaries. I expect people might not like that, it seems rude to go somewhere and try to convert people. But I’m no longer religious, and despite that I still think missionaries (of all religions!) get more hate than they deserve. They think you are going to suffer a horrible eternal fate, and they give up a normal comfortable life in the hope that they can save you. Street witnessing and going door-to-door makes them uncomfortable too, but they do it because that’s how much they care. I still know many missionaries, and they are my favorite people, I love when the jehovah’s witnesses come around, even if we don’t share beliefs.
- Travel is a privilege, and I don’t want to minimize the cool things we did while in Turkey. But the point of this post is to actually explain what it is like, and so I’ll mostly just say what we did.
General
I lived in Turkey from ages 5 to 15, the years 2000 to 2010. My family were missionaries mostly trying to serve middle eastern refugees that were running from conflict elsewhere (Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, etc), and had somehow ended up in Turkey, often illegally. They usually hoped to apply for asylum and eventually get accepted and settle in another country (Canada, European countries, the US, etc). The middle east was and still is going through a lot of unrest, so there were lots of refugees there.
On Being Missionaries
There are all different sorts of missionaries. On one end of the spectrum, some missionaries live like they’re still in their home country, and they just run a church in the new country. On the other end, some become totally localized, to the point that they never imagine returning “home”. We were more localized than average — we learned Turkish, we adopted middle eastern foods and holidays, we became friends with our neighbors, we played soccer instead of American Football, etc. This was easier for us than some other families because Dad was Persian, so we kindof had an excuse to practice many middle eastern traditions anyways.
The fact that there are different kinds of missionaries does add some tension. I always felt a bit uncomfortable with the more American missionary families, because they would have root beer, bacon, steak, and watch the Super Bowl, and I wouldn’t understand what to do. I felt more like a foreigner around them than with Turkish people.
There are also short term missionaries, who come for a couple weeks and then return home. Frankly, I view these more as tourists than missionaries. They come, they don’t speak the language, they usually want to go see some monuments or experience something uniquely Turkish, and then they go home two weeks later after doing nothing but distract their host family. This opinion could definitely lead to conflict if I said it out loud in a church. I’ve seen some short term missions that go back to the same location year after year, and I think those are more effective, but that pattern is very rare; most short term missions are not like that.
Missionaries often get money to continue their work via donations, which either come directly to the missionaries, or go through a mission agency. Because of this, the job can be somewhat political. My family would go back to America every two years, and do a roadtrip across the US stopping at every church which sent us donations, giving them life updates and staying relevant in their minds so they continue to donate to us. Mom and Dad also wrote a newsletter periodically (maybe every 3 months?) giving more frequent updates. Not all missionaries live off of donations, some of the very localized families get normal jobs in their target communities, and fund their mission work with their normal day job. I always looked up to those people, and I still do; to me they seem the most invested and committed to their goal.
Types of Christians
A lot of people in the US are ‘Christian’ more as an identity than as a real belief. Maybe they pray sometimes, and they go to church occasionally. Turkey does not have those kinds of Christians. In Turkey, Christians have been killed because of their faith. Somebody tried to burn our church down with a molotov cocktail, but used diesel by accident, and we caught it in time to stop too much destruction. But there definitely was some hostility towards Christians. It was directed towards the foreigners, and often even more strongly towards Turkish converts (there is a saying “to be Turkish is to be Muslim”). In places that are hostile towards a religion, all the believers of that religion are really fervent, it’s much more intense than the Christians you’ll find in the US.
This intensity can be cultish, but also wonderful. You make some _extremely_ close connections with people, because it is so rare to find somebody who shares your deep beliefs, but once you find them you know that each of you are very strongly aligned on some aspects of life. The labels that seem big in the rest of the world really didn’t seem to matter when we were in Turkey. We didn’t have any bone to pick with Catholics, with pentecostal Christians, with prosperity-gospel types, really with anybody that shared the core beliefs. It was also fun to see all the different traditions. A pentecostal church we went to had a bunch of rams horns that people would blow on in the middle of service when they’re overcome by the spirit. To me and my brothers this seemed crazy, and very entertaining.
School
I went to Turkish school for one year (I think second grade?), then was homeschooled for a while, and eventually went to an English-speaking international school. The year in Turkish school was enough to make my Turkish very good, and people often thought I was half-Turkish. In Turkish school, you begin every day by marching out to the courtyard, standing at attention and reciting a pledge to a statue of Ataturk (the first president of Turkey). There definitely is a cult-of-personality around Ataturk, but at the same time he genuinely was a great guy (and that’s not just the propaganda talking!) I feel he really set Turkey in a good direction, modernizing it, and encouraging separation of church and state. Today, Turkish government is becoming more and more religious — maybe they need to walk out into their courtyard and renew their commitment to Ataturk.
The pledge you make goes like this “I’m Turkish. I tell the truth. I work hard. I protect my youngers, listen to my elders, and love my country more than myself…” It goes on, but this is all that I still remember. The propaganda definitely does get to you, even just thinking about it makes me feel strangely proud and emotional. I was probably a better Turk than I’ll ever be an American. I don’t remember much else about Turkish school, but I understand my older brother hated it. Our international school was odd; it was about 200 students total from K to 12th grade, and was extremely international, perhaps representing something like 90 countries when we were there. My class was about 7 people, and it was mostly the same 7 people all the way through. Middle school crushes were extremely awkward and painful.
Most of our classmates were other missionaries, or embassy staff. There were a ton of Koreans, because Korea sends out lots of missionaries. As a result, most of my friends growing up were Korean or Turkish. I developed an accent that sounded vaguely British, I think because of this combination of friends. I feel it’s mostly reverted to a California accent now, but in some recordings I think I still hear it.
‘Normal’ Life
The mosques do the call to prayer every day multiple times. I don’t remember all the times, but there is at least one early morning, midday, and again in the afternoon. Minarets (tall towers) around the mosques play the call to prayer loudly, and it often woke me up. It can be annoying to hear it many times in the day, but it also is somewhat musical, and I grew to like it. If I tried to do an impression of it people might think I’m being racist, but it legitimately just sounds like a middle eastern guy yodeling. I’m sure you can find videos on youtube.
My older brother usually woke up first, and went down to the bakkal (small corner store that sells snacks, cigarettes, and bread) to buy bread. The bread in Turkey is baked daily, and is AMAZING. There’s a decent selection in every bakkal, it changes for different holidays, and it is usually still warm from the ovens if you go to your bakkal in the morning. Turkish people usually do not eat bread once it’s a day old, they just buy new bread that’s freshly baked. Also, if you haven’t had bread most people would not consider that a meal. There are also simit (Turkish bagels), which are for sale on the side of the road. The simitci (the guy that sells them) stacks them on a flat board, and then balances the board on his head, and walks between stopping points like that, carrying his simit from one place to another.
What do people do with their day old bread? They put it outside their front door to feed the wild animals. There are a ton of wild dogs that roam the streets of Ankara in packs, and these packs sometimes chase and scare people. I don’t know of any serious injuries, but I’m sure they happen. Most of the middle east does not like house pets, and most people are scared of dogs. As a result, a lot of construction sites keep a dog chained up to keep people from looting the place. When the construction project is finished, the guard dog is often let go, and runs off into the city to join a pack.
When we were in Ankara, it was unusual to have a car (maybe it’s more normal now though). Most people walk a lot, or use the bus / metro system (which was quite good). In the countryside, you can also find people that still use mules / donkeys / horses and wooden wagons. Sometimes you don’t even have to leave the city to find this.
There is a lot of respect for elders in Turkey. You often address people respectfully as “older brother” or “older sister”. It was pretty common for an elderly stranger to ask (or command) me and my brothers to carry their groceries for them. This wasn’t as annoying as it may sound, because they really become the neighborhood grandmas and grandpas. They gave us candy on holidays, they’d come yell at us if we were being too loud, or check on us if it’s storming out, etc.
On Sundays, we would go to three church services: The English service first (to get some deep religious teaching), the Turkish service next (to practice Turkish and remain connected to the community), and the Farsi service in evening (because most of the refugees we served spoke Farsi). The Farsi service particularly was very long, and the whole day was something like 10 hours from start to finish. My brothers and I usually could skip the Farsi service, and we’d go run around exploring the neighborhood instead.
There was so much to explore, so we were rarely bored. There was a junkyard across the street from the church, and often we’d play in that junkyard, looking for lightbulbs that we could throw against rocks to watch explode. We also dug massive tunnels to climb through, until they’d of course collapse. Sometimes we’d walk around and buy a Gazoz (like sprite), and mix jello into it for a treat. This cost something like $1, and was enough soda to last us all day. In winter it would snow, and we’d make snow forts or snowmen. We’d play soccer when we felt like it. There were lots of wild or semi-cultivated fruit trees throughout the city, and I liked to see if I could walk to friends houses while eating fruit nonstop. It was pretty easy to find cherries, sour plums, mulberries, honeysuckle, crabapples, etc. There was also a forest behind our house, that had some sort of abandoned village inside it. There were fields of fruit trees, a spring with fresh water, and some buildings on the edge of collapsing. The forest was super fun, we spent a lot of time in there. We did have to be careful not to get chased by the wild dogs, and not to get lost, because it really was a big forest.
Traditions
There are lots of small things that I miss. Of course food and snacks, but also walking by somebody working on a construction project, and yelling “I hope the work comes easy”, and them yelling back “be healthy”. Old Turkish grandpas would dress up in vests, for some reason completely overflowing with style, and sit down to play a chess game. Old people would have really interesting accents, and even Turks would have trouble understanding some of the people from villages. People buy most of their groceries at the pazar (open air market), and they’d buy tables / dishes / houseware in a similar format, with many small shops next to each other. Kids in high school would work as tea runners, balancing a swinging table full of small tea cups and running through the markets, selling tea for 50 cents. It is kind of like something from Aladdin, just more modern. Nobody really went to a mall or a big box store to buy anything — these hardly even existed. I don’t remember if it was possible to even get canned beans at the time, although I suspect it probably is now.
My favorite holiday was charshanbe suri, a Persian holiday where you get everybody together, light a big fire, and try to jump over it. I believe it’s related to Zoroastrian beliefs. I also really like Yalda, the shortest night of the year, when you light candles and stay up telling stories and eating fruit and nuts. Ramazan is also exciting, it’s a full month where observant muslims are not supposed to eat solid food between sunrise and sunset. I remember the taxis and buses were always incredibly dangerous during this time, perhaps because of the lack of food, or perhaps because people were also skipping their cigarettes. At the end of Ramazan we’d celebrate Şeker Bayramı (“sugar holiday”), where we’d walk around knocking on doors, and getting candy from everybody. This is kindof like halloween with fewer thematic decorations, and much more involvement from the elderly. My poor memory is that Kurban Bayramı (“sacrifice holiday”) happens immediately after Ramazan ends, but looking it up now it actually happens much later. People get together to kill an animal, and cook it for a feast. We’d often see the blood from the sacrifice running through fences and into the street. It wasn’t frightening because it was normal, but in retrospect it sounds insane. I don’t suppose American HOAs would like that.
Travelling
We did travel a lot while we were in Turkey. We saw Kapadokya, which is filled with sandstone, and lots of people have carved houses out of the rocks for centuries. It’s a beautiful landscape, and there’s lots of hot air balloons. We would frequently go to Antalya on the southern coast, which was beautiful, warm, and pretty cheap in the off season. We went to Izmir a couple times to see hot springs. We saw many many ancient churches, and some of the places that the epistles are addressed to (Ephesus, etc). We’d see tons of ancient roman ruins in completely random places. There were never any fences or barriers, and my brothers and I climbed all over them, surely contributing to their deterioration. My favorite was the black sea area, which has richer food, colder weather, is more quaint, and generally has less tourists than the southern coast.
We’d also travel outside of Turkey periodically, usually to renew our tourist visas. As a result, these were often short trips, just long enough to qualify for a re-stamp so we’d get another visa to last the next year or so. We saw coastal Greece, usually the islands that were closest to Turkey. This didn’t feel very different from Turkey itself, but it was fun to be on a boat. Likewise for Cyprus. Bulgaria was definitely my favorite non-Turkey place that we went. It had very brutalist appearance, and clearly still had the impact of communism. The fact that it was different in a visceral way was fascinating, I felt I got to actually see something new, and that made the travel worth it. And of course they had pork products which we couldn’t get in Turkey.
We did take some longer trips to parts of “classic” Europe: France, England, Germany, Switzerland. I disliked all these places, and frankly they might just be ruined for me. They were expensive, smelly, and everybody acted like they were better than us. I strongly preferred Turkey, which was affordable, smelled good, had better food, and nicer people. The highlights I remember about these places were (1) our bananas were stolen, and we ate nothing but quiche for a week and (2) we found a Turkish immigrant who was now living in Europe, and he gave us tea and snacks for free.
Refugees
Hanging out with the refugees was extremely fun. Because of their legal status in the country, they often couldn’t work or go to school (we’ll come back to this later), which means they were often down for activities. We played soccer games, went to public parks, grilled, had them over for dinner, went to their house for dinner, went camping with them, pirated movies, played in internet cafes till midnight, sang songs and danced, and generally had a great time.
I have particularly fond memories of Sahand and Araz, Amir Ali, Bagher, Uncle Pooya and Aidin. I think most of these people have ended up in the US or in Canada now. Sahand and Araz were two brothers about our age, who had learned English from rap songs and mob movies. When they were being friendly they sounded like they were about to break your kneecaps. We would have sleepovers at their house, watch horror films, and play first person shooters. Amir Ali was a boy about my age, and he had a rabbit named Fifi. Once Fifi grew up, he insisted that we call her “FIFI” with a faux deep voice, because she was now big. Bagher was a great musician, and would sing with Uncle Pooya while we were driving to the park, making up songs along the way. I think he is now a teacher in San Jose. Aidin was a bit older than us, and extremely excited about limewire (a torrent client) and taught us all how to torrent the games we wanted to play. I wonder if he now works in software, or if his interests changed. I remember babysitting Danica and Dareli, and they didn’t understand _how_ we couldn’t speak Farsi. All we could do was ask if they wanted to play, ask them to stop, and say “no way!”, as if we understood what they were telling us. Of course there were many others as well, and frankly I’ve forgotten a lot of names since then.
Psyche Damage
There are some parts of our upbringing that I think have left a negative impact on me. First, because we lived off of donations, I always felt somewhat guilty spending money on anything. It’s very difficult to have a fancy meal, have a party, etc, without feeling a bit guilty, when you know this money is meant to help refugees. To this day I’m still very cheap, and I don’t mind being cheap but I wonder how much of it is because of our upbringing.
Also, working with the refugees was wonderful, but it is hard to watch your friends be treated so poorly. Sahand and Araz were not allowed to go to school, because they were refugees. This still makes me sad. They were just kids, why couldn’t they go to school? It was also illegal for most refugees to have jobs, so they often worked manual labor under-the-table, for low pay. Many of these people ran businesses or were engineers and doctors before they came to Turkey, there’s no reason for them to do manual labor and still not make ends meet. Nonetheless, they often couldn’t afford good food, or to heat their houses in the winter. They’d often rent in the worse parts of town, and would burn coal and wood to keep their houses warm. Some of the refugees we grew up with are _still in Turkey_. This is certainly the exception, not the rule, but this makes me sad. I’m not sure if they’ve chosen to make a life there, or if they just got stuck and settled down where they could. I hope it’s going ok for them, but I worry that it is not. I can’t fix all of these problems, so until I’m filthy rich I try not to think about it too much.
It was also hard to see friends come and go so frequently. Missionaries often stay in a place for 4-5 years at a time, and refugees usually would move after 6-7 years. I don’t think I had any friendships that lasted more than 5 years while we lived there, and we were always saying goodbye to somebody. I often would think that this is what it must feel like when somebody dies, since I knew I was practically never going to see most of them again. Even today I sometimes imagine a big field full of grave markings, with the names of all my friends from this time. I’m sure that’s a totally normal and healthy thought to have.
When we lived in Turkey, I felt very Turkish. I spoke the language, I knew the customs, I could not imagine living anywhere else. However, I’ve now been gone for 15 years. My Turkish is rusty, and I’d be a foreigner there. I don’t feel like I fit in there, but I also don’t feel like I fit in the way America wants me to. The most American pride I ever felt was when watching Hamilton, a story about immigrants banding together to accomplish something. I feel like there is a version of America that focuses on combining immigrants into something new, and I like that version. This is the schoolhouse rock “melting pot” version, or the version the statue of liberty speaks about. But I feel this has now become quite rare in the US. Where is the Turkish man who will give me tea and snacks while I complain about my stolen bananas, and make me feel like I belong? I want more of that.