Coffee in Kadıköy

One well-connected person I came into contact with was a woman named Zeynep. The only things I knew about her before we met was that she worked with local associations, not international NGOs, and that she had some association with Koç University in Istanbul. We had agreed to meet and last week settled on Thursday at 1 p.m.
I woke up a little bit earlier than normal on Thursday so that I was sure to have finished breakfast and been ready to get out the door to meet with Zeynep on time. She had asked to meet at a café near the wharf in Kadıköy, one of the central neighborhoods on the Asian side of the city, full of 19th century architecture and a tangle of streets that are very easy to get lost in. Being on the other side of the Bosporus meant that it was going to take a little bit longer to find the café, so by 11:30, I had left my apartment and was walking toward the nearest bus stop.
To get from Beşiktaş to Kadıköy you can take a bus or a dolmuş over the southernmost bridge in Istanbul, the one metro line that dives beneath the water channel or one of the ferry boats that run back and forth between ports on both sides of the Bosporus. I got caught in a bit of midday traffic on the main road leading into Beşiktaş, partially caused by subway construction in front of the mall near my apartment but mostly due to the poor urban planning of the city. I barely made it to the last ferry that would bring me to Kadıköy in time for our 1 p.m. meeting, but I managed to find an open seat on a bench on the edge of the shady side of the boat. On the water, the heat-induced claustrophobia of the city dissipates, and for a few minutes the calmness of a sea breeze and gentle waves make for a relaxing commute.
I made it to Kadıköy at about 12:45 and easily found the café Zeynep had mentioned: a small coffee shop located above a phone repair store on a smaller square nestled in the neighborhood adjacent to the wharf. I sat down at a table by myself and waited for Zeynep to arrive.
A few minutes later she showed up, immediately recognized me as the only foreigner in the café and joined me at the table. Before I could get started on my prepared list of topics, she dove her own questions about who I was, what I was doing and what I wanted to do. Casual conversation about ourselves drifted into topics about her and what kind of work she was doing for refugees in Istanbul.
Zeynep is a middle-aged woman with two teenage boys. She works in the communications department of a major private school in Istanbul, and although she spoke about having a somewhat rich and comfortable life, she didn’t act like someone with a lot of wealth. She had an assertive, charismatic laugh and the gentle demeanor of a mother, though she often spoke with an air of fatigue. Balancing a family, work and this second job as a volunteer is incredibly taxing, but the way she spoke about her work with refugees and the struggles they faced suggested a hardened acclimation to their situation. She was a weathered veteran of the volunteer community in Istanbul, even though she had only been at it for a couple of years.
In late 2015, one catalytic event that brought much of the Western world’s focus to the worsening refugee crisis also brought Zeynep into her role as volunteer. It was the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy whose body washed up on the shores of southwestern Turkey. He had fallen off a boat while his family was trying to cross the Aegean Sea to get to Greece and further up into Europe. Zeynep recalled a brief encounter around the time photographs of the small boy’s body surfaced. “I remember going out on a boat just before the body was found,” she said. “And the captain of the boat said to me, ‘If you saw the bottom of the sea, you would never eat fish again.’” It took her a moment before she realized that the captain was talking about all the bodies of refugees who had drowned trying to cross into Europe.
One evening after seeing responses on Facebook, noting with discomfort the passive reactions of people sharing the photograph with “sad-face emojis,” she made a list of organizations, associations and charities, imploring people to look up from their phones and do something more to help. Although it took her less than an hour to compile, the list was shared thousands of times overnight, and shortly thereafter she got a call from CNN Turk to appear live on a news program. “If I wrote this list, I have to volunteer,” she said.
Zeynep works with five or six small, local aid organizations. Mahalle dernekleri, she called them — “neighborhood associations.” These are the only things that work, she said. Most of these centers were already established long before the Syrian refugee crisis began, and although they had to restructure themselves to help the almost a million Syrians living in Istanbul, they had been helping internally displaced Kurds and Afghan refugees for years. Claiming to cut out the administrative costs that come along with traditional NGOs, Zeynep spends her time going straight to refugee families’ homes, bringing them food, helping them get government identification cards and assisting them with any health-related issues. The simplest of tasks can become exponentially complicated with the language barrier, she said. “Even if they have access to healthcare, they go to the hospital and don’t know the language.”
One program she was especially proud of was an initiative to get refugee children enrolled in school. The Turkish government has spent its share of time trying to establish educational programs specifically for the massive Arabic-speaking refugee population, but oftentimes, these programs are insufficient. Zeynep talked about families choosing to pull their children out of school to send them to work in factories, making 400 Turkish liras a month (about $120) to help support their family. Using donations, she goes to a family and agrees to pay them whatever amount a child would make at a factory job if they can prove that the child is going to school.
Her iPhone is always at her side, and she pulled it out to show me what kind of efforts it takes to coordinate with the mahalle dernekleri and individual volunteers. In a maps application, she has hundreds of addresses saved across several different shared pages. On one map, she showed me the locations of families she helps, color-coded by ethnicity and arranged so that she can send off other volunteers to deliver food and supplies as needed. In another shared spreadsheet were hundreds of rows of names, grouped into coordinated sections and accompanied by detailed information about the needs of each family. Several times throughout our meeting she defiantly picked up her phone and aggressively turned it over so that she couldn’t see its screen. The notifications from various social media and messaging applications were incessant. “I have to turn off my phone at night,” she said. “Otherwise I can’t sleep.”
In May 2016, Zeynep spent time in Greece, joining the humanitarian efforts in the refugee camps established there. But when she finally came back to Istanbul, she didn’t speak a word to anyone for a week. She said the conditions in the camps in Greece were so atrocious that she was traumatized by what she had seen. “Istanbul is not that bad. We go from house to house, you’ll see poverty and poor conditions, but it is not that bad.” Anymore she tries to convince as many families as possible not to make the journey across the sea. It isn’t worth the risk, she said.
And many refugee families don’t even have plans to migrate beyond Istanbul, preferring the proximity to their home country and the religious culture they share with the Turks, even if it means barely scraping by. The refugee communities in some neighborhoods have established their own cohorts, opening shops and restaurants and doing their best with what they have. “Some people say, ‘The moment this war ends, that day or even if it’s at night, I’ll pack my bags and go back to Syria,’” Zeynep told me. “They say they don’t want bags of clothes and food, they want their old lives back.”
Flipping through the thousands of pictures on her phone, she came across a photograph of one boy whose story affected with me. “This is Abdullatif,” she said, showing me a picture of a 12-year-old boy with bright blue eyes and mischievous smirk. “He has aplastic anemia,” she explained, a disease that causes both internal and external hemorrhaging. About a year ago, each member of his family paid 700 euro to get on a boat to cross the Aegean Sea in hopes of reaching Germany to claim asylum. But from the stress of being on the boat, Abdullatif began to bleed. Other refugees, knowing that one frantic individual can capsize the overly crowded boats, threw the boy out into the sea. His parents jumped after him, leaving his older brother alone on the boat. The family made it back to Turkey’s shore, and after 37 abysmal days, a relative who had already received asylum in Germany sent the family a text message to let them know their older son had arrived safely. But Abdullatif, his father and his mother are still in Istanbul, unable to migrate to Germany and unwilling to risk the journey across the sea again.
“I think I can make it for another 10 years, but at the rate that Turkey is going down the drain…” Zeynep trailed off. “Every night I go to bed, and I am breathless. I think of all the things going on and how we are just watching them happen.”
We spoke for almost an hour and a half before she got up. It was her oldest son’s birthday, and she still needed to get him a gift. Insisting I buy her coffee, so she gathered her purse and left the café. I stayed in my spot, opened my computer and ordered another glass of tea.
Originally published 06/13/2017 on my personal blog: https://danielsmetz.wordpress.com/2017/06/13/coffee-in-kadikoy/
