Traipsing Through  (And Around) Turkey
 
While I'm teaching English in Adıyaman, I've been writing a series on my experiences for Today's Zaman, an English-language daily in Turkey. Feel free to check out my first three pieces--they're the newest things added under "Published Articles"

I should return to DC around August 23, just in time for classes.
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So, the Daily News Egypt redid its website (now it looks like the Guardian!) and all of the links under "Published Articles" made before mid-May stopped working. :-(

Luckily, I made PDFs of all my stories before the server switch. Some I've linked the non-working stories to my personal files. That way you can continue using this website as my clip file, if you're so inclined.

In other news, I'm currently couchsurfing amongst friends back in rainy İstanbul. My academic semester is up and I'm trying to figure out how to spend the summer. Several options present themselves, but I haven't managed to pick one yet. Basically, it's coming down to teaching English at a summer camp somewhere (and they'll cover my room, board, travel, etc.) or continuing to work at DNE for the summer, and covering my own way.

Any thoughts, dear readers?
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Remember when I went camping in Sinai? Well, I did a little reporting while I was out there--and here's the result.

Incidentally, my friend Tyler and I are putting together a larger story about the trip. But DNE doesn't seem especially interested, so if anyone knows a good place to pitch it, let me know.
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New articles listed. One of them is a theatre review, so that was a nice return to my old element. I got attacked for the other one (because it's apparently "bullshit" and I'm part of the media that's destroying Egypt). Like my mother always said:

"You haven't accomplished anything until you get hate mail about it."

Making progress, mom.
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اتيفدل:
Middle East opens eyes to unknown By William F. Zeman Eagle Staff Writer April 18, 2010 CAIRO Dear Reader,

This is my last abroad column.

I’ve been abroad since last June, and have been writing this column since August. I’ve submitted a lot of articles to be published — most of them terrible, but hopefully a passable one or two managed to slip in. I maintain no illusions about my readership. I’ve only ever received two comments — one when I misspelled “Frankfurt,” and a response from AU Abroad when I revealed some less than estimable actions taken by a study-abroad provider. (I apologize for misspelling Frankfurt. Not sure how I missed that.) I imagine that you, dear reader, have come across this column the same way I did - waiting for someone at the University Center, skimming the tattered remains of a Scene section, looking for some hilariously uninformed pseudo-intellectual posturing you can mock when your friend arrives.

That’s fine. I’ll take what I can get. But, if I can be horribly self-indulgent for a few more paragraphs, I want to pitch you something.

Since you’re reading this, you’re likely an AU student — one with a rare moment of free time. That means you’re probably planning to go abroad. It also means your ultimate destination is probably Europe or Australia.

I want you to reconsider. How about the Middle East?

Not that there’s anything wrong with England, Australia, France, Spain, spending a semester on a boat or the like. There isn’t. An essayist once wrote her time in England taught her “to appreciate the subtle nuances in difference so key to any form of cultural understanding.” I have friends who have done Europe and Australia programs. Based on their blogs — incidentally, every study abroad student seems obligated to have one these days — all of them are having a grand time. Their universities are top-notch. Their experiences are positive.

Truth be told, the same isn’t always true here. I’ve taken classes that wouldn’t have passed muster at a second-rate high school. Not everyone’s experience is positive. At the moment, I’m studying with a group of Americans. Most of the girls can’t wait to get back to a society where men don’t hiss and catcall on the street. One of my roommates hates it here. He says Cairo is “culturally dead” and wishes he were in Italy instead. 

That’s fine. No one says an abroad experience has to be all puppies, kittens and booze-soaked golden sunshine. Negative experiences can impact your growth just as much, if not more. Besides, time usually puts things in a better light. Ten years from now, my roommate may have a much different impression of his time in Cairo.

So, even though the reviews may not be great, and even though your parents may object, I think you should come here anyway.

The possibilities are vast. Since you’re reading this, I assume you’re fluent in English. In America, that means nothing. Over here, it means you’re automatically qualified for a wide range of positions. One friend of mine is helping lead a new political party in Ankara, her only previous experience being a degree in IR. I got an internship at The Daily News Egypt/International Herald Tribune with a smattering of nonsensical clips from The Eagle. I can’t tell you the number of ex-pats I met in Istanbul who showed up with no certificates, no experience, no work visa, no qualifications except their passport and were leading comfortable lives teaching English within a month. 

You also learn languages — Arabic being the prime example. Also, we’re not talking the stilted, formal Arabic you learn at AU. Nobody speaks that. I’m referring to Colloquial — the language of the people, the language you can joke and laugh and make friends with. Also, since AU has decided to stick a kebab knife through the Turkish program, I know you haven’t studied the language spoken by the most powerful economy in the whole Middle East. Where better to learn Turkish than Turkey?

There are other perks too. People are surprisingly friendly, especially if you like Obama. Food is cheap and plentiful, and your stomach problems should subside in a month or so. Cultural values are vastly different, both in enlightening and frightening ways. You’ll learn patience — the kind that only comes with a three-hour traffic jam or your sixth visit to the foreigner’s police to get a stamp. You’ll become comfortable seeing heavily-armed police on a daily basis.

I’ve done homesteads, programs with Americans and direct enrollment in foreign universities. I’d recommend homesteads above the other two, but anything is fine. 

I’m too out of the AU loop to know if AU Abroad’s deadline already passed, but there’s no reason you have to go through them. (Though I did, and it’s worked out fine.) In fact, there’s no reason you need a program or plan at all. You just need a plane ticket and a couch to crash on. (CouchSurfers.com is good for this.) Pick up a copy of Lonely Planet if it makes you feel better. Buy a return ticket if it will make your parents more comfortable. 

But make sure you can change the return flight’s date. Once you get here, there’s no telling what will happen.

I hope you’ll consider it. Thanks for reading.

With best wishes,

Will Zeman

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Under "Published Articles." Two in one day--look, Dad, I'm a real man now. (Also, it was recently my birthday, so that's actually true.)

Also, one of them is 800 words on a paper bag, so I'm pretty proud of that one.
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It's on the "Published Articles" page. One about Dahshour, one about that dust cloud.
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Internships in Middle East: no knotted neckties needed By William F. Zeman CAIRO — Students studying in D.C. live to find internships. It’s ingrained into our very consciousness as D.C. college folk — everyone complains about their internship, or complains about how they don’t have one to complain about. The entire D.C. college community assumes this strange, pre-professional attitude. Work experience even comes before education on college resumes.

How strange it is, therefore, that my best internships came once I left the nation’s beltway.

It’s simply supply and demand. The sheer number of DC students competing for the honor of fetching coffee for free has made the process of becoming an intern akin to a job application process anywhere else. There are online applications and deadlines by which they must be submitted. There are interviews and offers of water. Suits are donned, ties are nervously knotted, and interviews are conducted — complete with nervous jokes and potboiler small talk. Everything — the dress, the demeanor, the job profiles, the resumes, the questionnaires, the applications — is very professional.

The Middle East is the opposite of professional. I don’t mean that disparagingly; I’ve done my best work here. But consider how I got my internships:

In Turkey, I called a friend of a friend who ran the Istanbul office of a non-profit called The Hollings Center. We met, chatted over some tea (nothing business-related; I think we talked about students at Bryn Mawr), and made plans to meet again. Two weeks later I was in her office, setting up my desk to be her “Intern and Executive Assistant to the Istanbul Office Director” or some equally presumptuous and nonsensical title.

While working there, I planned a conference attended by dignitaries from all over the region. I wrote strategy memos and assigned readings. I only made coffee when I wanted some.

Egypt offers an even more extreme example. I’ve always enjoyed journalism and have wanted to work for an actual daily paper before they all die out. One day, while sitting in AMIDEAST’s Cairo library, I glanced at The Daily News Egypt and noticed its editorial headquarters was two blocks from where I was sitting.

Why not? I thought. I have an hour.

Ten minutes later I stood at the Daily News Egypt/International Herald Tribune’s entrance, a copy of my resume still warm in my hand. I rang the bell, and an Egyptian man opened the door, clearly wondering who I was. I mangled the little Arabic I knew, managing to get out the word “internship.”  The man nodded and walked away.

Just as I prepared to make a hasty exit, a woman in a very modern hijab walked out to the hall. Shaking my hand, she introduced herself as Rania Al Malky — editor-in-chief. No formal interview, just a repeat of the question “who are you?”

I tried to explain my presence — where I went to school (she had never heard of AMIDEAST and tried to correct me by saying “AUC”), what I studied, and where I was from. I mumbled my answers. She finally stopped me.

“Do you have clips?” she asked.

Yes, I said — from my college newspaper days and some free-lancing in Turkey.

“Send them to me,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.”

So I did. Apparently she liked them. Two days later I was invited back to the office. By the next week I was filing a story on Nubian Cultural Day.

Since then, I’ve been published by The Daily News Egypt/International Herald Tribune almost a dozen times — twice on the front page. I’ve gotten a feel for the life of a newsroom. I’ve started to figure out my career path. I’ve never made tea for any employee but myself.

And I never had to knot a necktie.

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[A version of this was also picked up by The Eagle.]

CAIRO, EGYPT — My international relations professor is a smart man. He is head of Cairo University’s Faculty of Political Science and a member of Egypt’s senate. He’s spoken at lots of conferences with very prestigious-sounding titles. He is well-steeped in almost every aspect of Middle Eastern politics. He wears very nice suits.

His teaching assistant is quite something as well. She’s finishing her dissertation at the moment — some long-titled thing about religion in Iranian politics versus religion in American politics. I can barely understand the title in English, let alone Arabic. She can hold forth, without preparation, on subjects as diverse as Iranian politics and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.

However, neither one knows exactly where Cyprus is.

In Turkey, this would have been impossible. It’s rare to find a map of Turkey that doesn’t also prominently display Cyprus, an island located to the south, just west of Syria’s coast. Turkish maps even include a line demarcating the Republic of Northern Cyprus, a country no one else recognizes. Cyprus is part and parcel of the Middle East, despite its presence in the EU. Selim II brought it under the control of the Ottoman Empire. Besides, just look at its location on a map — what other region could we call that?

A debate for another time, perhaps. Still, my professors’ lack of knowledge in this area is troubling. Cyprus, especially the island’s division, is an issue every Turkish schoolchild knows about. That neither of my IR teachers have studied it is an interesting distinction.

Disparities can become even more blunt. In Turkish, there are two g’s: one silent, the other not. The silent one is actually a “ğ,” but foreign printers omit this. My professors will frequently refer to comments made by Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, or by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister.

Neither one seems to realize the g’s in “Davutoglu” and “Erdogan” are silent ones.

This is excusable — Turkish is a tricky language. Even so, it is very off-putting for my professor to read aloud a statement about Turkey’s role in the Middle East, and then attribute it to “Minister Da-vut-o-glue.” It denotes a lack of familiarity with the topic, especially considering how excellent his pronunciation of “Khomeini” is.

In short, my professors, while extremely knowledgeable on almost every aspect of Middle Eastern affairs, seem to know Turkey only from newspaper articles, short news clips and cultural stereotypes. My professor even spelled the name of Kemal Ataturk, the Republic of Turkey’s founder, incorrectly in one of his PowerPoint presentations.

This gap goes the other way, too. The Turkish students I mentioned, the ones taught about Cyprus’ importance since childhood, know little to nothing about the rest of the Middle East except that Ottomans used to rule it. University friends of mine in Istanbul warningly informed me that in Egypt I would have to learn to ride a camel (for the record, I didn’t — last time I went into the desert, I rode shotgun in a jeep). Well-educated friends in Turkey can say little more about Egypt’s politics than to call it a “series of dictators” — not even differentiating between the Kingdom of Egypt and the Arab Republic of Egypt, let alone distinguishing between individual rulers.

This divide is very much institutionalized. Turkish university students don’t plan their study abroad experiences for Syria or Egypt, despite the close proximity (a flight from Cairo to Istanbul is only two hours). They want to go to Italy, Australia or the United States. Likewise, university students I meet here in Egypt seem to have never considered Turkey as an abroad destination, except for a weekend fling along the Bosporus. Turkish universities don’t seem to make it into Egyptian discussions of the Middle East’s higher education apparatus — not even Ankara’s own Middle Eastern Technical University.

If the Economist and other journals like it are correct when they declare Turkey to be moving “to the East and South,” then this divide is especially troublesome. Turks will not react kindly when Egyptian leaders are unfamiliar with the career of Kemal Ataturk. Egyptian leaders will not respond well when a Turkish professor claims there is no point of distinction between Nasser and Sadat. Syrians will understandably get upset when someone refers to Syria as a kingdom instead of a republic, as a Turkish classmate of mine did once. These kinds of mistakes don’t just cause awkward press conferences — they can escalate into diplomatic incidents and even real problems.

When I was in Turkey, I only ever met one student studying Arabic. Koç University didn’t think to offer it. Here in Egypt, I’ve only met two students, both upper-class, who know any Turkish — and they didn’t learn it in school.
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There's a cool picture too. Enjoy.
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