It’s Sunday morning in Fethiye, and I’m stopped at a red light. Or so I think.
In truth, the light changed to green some 0.3 seconds ago, a fact about which I am unaware until someone behind me honks. Loudly, and with abandon. To the point where I wonder if there’s an ambulance coming.
But no.
I catch the drier’s gaze in my rearview mirror. I wave my hand around, like, “WTF, dude?”. I hate admitting this, but since I started driving in this country, I have developed a chronic case road rage. At the roundabout near my house, which most locals use in exactly the opposite way a roundabout is intended—i.e. by getting onto it and then stopping for incoming traffic—I yell. When I don’t gun my engine as the light turns green and someone honks, I gesture. Sometimes I honk back, and if I’m really feeling my teenage self, I drive ultra slowly until they’re able to pass me.
This morning, I stick to a bit of gesturing and good yell—the kind that always startles Django, but he isn’t with me, so I give a few extra shouts in French and Arabic, for good measure.
I am really not proud of this at all.
I’m headed to meet my friend Jasmine. We’re going to buy school uniforms (using money we raised right here!) for the kids of our friend Amina, who, like Jasmine, came here from Syria.
I’m already late, because I got sucked into reading the news this morning about the bombing in southern Lebanon. Like many of us, I can’t turn away, even when I know it’s going to fill me with rage. By the time I get to the shop, Jasmine and the kids are already there. We buy the uniforms, a hijab for the older girl, and shoes for everyone. I’ve never been inside this shop before. It’s the kind of non-foreigner-oriented place I feel like I should avoid and let people who are actually from here shop in peace at prices they can (maybe) afford. But now I get to see that, in addition to school uniforms, they also sell regular clothes, and bags, and also every imaginable other thing you’d need in your bathroom or to charge your phone or live your life. The guy in front of us pays cash for 5 envelopes.
Like I always do when I’m with Jasmine, I watch the salespeople like a hawk, gauging for any warning signs of racist dickism. Not that I know how I’d react. Probably yell in English, which would be super helpful.
But the salespeople here seem nice. The ones at the shoe shop we go to next are maybe not as nice, but the kids already look so uncomfortable picking out shoes that someone else is paying for that I let it slide.
On the way back to the car, Jasmine tells me that Amine’s most recent employers have not been paying her full salary.
They keep promising to pay her, and not actually doing it. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and there’s nothing that can be done, because she is working there without permission, and they don’t have permission to be hiring her, either. It’s a complicated story that is, unfortunately, very common here. She would be out of pocket for the bus fare to get to this job but some other friends who have stepped in to help.
My blood is boiling again.
“Then there are her windows,” Jasmine adds.
I take a deep breath.
“What windows?”
Turns out, during the recent rise of violence against Syrians here, someone smashed all the windows in Amina’s rental house. And her landlord is blaming her for it.
Yeah.
Jasmine has to go meet someone else, so I head back home. A driver behind me at another light honks, and I let loose a stream of pottymouth-ness that would make Megan Thee Stallion blush. I am this close to giving a rude hand gesture until I recall that a friend of mine here did this recently, and the man she gestured at stopped his motorbike, came over to her car, opened the door, and punched her in the face.
All of these this whirls around and congeal into a series of thoughts I often have on replay. Excluding the swear words, they can be summarized like so:
This country is broken.
Sometimes I hate it here so much.
I need to get out of here or I’m going to lose my mind.
Are things really that much better anywhere else?
I watch village women in headscarves pass by on the sidewalk. Elderly men stop to shake hands, carrying bags of vegetables from the Sunday market. People talk on phones; search through wallets; rally their children.
Surviving.
A tiny, different thought creeps into my mind.
If people are suffering so much here that they aren’t paying people…
If people are so angry about having to wait 0.03 seconds at a stoplight…
Maybe, instead of being rageful, you could be, like… kind.
I hate it when my flow gets interrupted.
But it’s too late. I think of all the people who donated money for Amina and her kids, and all the people who would donate if they could, which I know is every single person reading this. I think about the woman who’s paying for her bus fare, and supporting her family and some other Syrians with grocery cards and fans in the summer. I think about the millions who are marching, protesting, organizing for peace.
What’s that thing about how love is stronger than… fear? Hate? 40-degree-heat-perimenopausal-road-rage?
Stronger, but not easier.
It’s easier for me to get road rage than to stand back and take in the monumentalness of the destroyed system that is allowing this all to happen.
To resent Kamala Harris fandom instead of considering how some people in this world get their windows smashed in and don’t get paid for their jobs and have to let their 13-year old kids go to refugee camps in other countries, and a lot of us are just, like, okay with that.
Instead of feeling the grief and rage that humans who have done nothing wrong are being incinerated, tortured, displaced and destroyed, I’d rather shout at the moustachioed man in the van next to me, or curse out the person who complains that protesters are causing traffic jams.
Capitalism makes having tunnel vision a survival mechanism for many.
I don’t want to get tunnel vision about that tunnel vision.
Later that night, Jasmine video calls me. She’s in her pyjamas, in bed.
“We didn’t have a chance to catch up today,” she says. “How are you?”
I know. WTF, dude?
We talk about what’s happening in Lebanon. She tells me that she, who survived hearing her neighbours screaming in the streets in Syria, knowing there was nothing she could do to help, sometimes has to detach from what’s going on, because it’s too painful.
She tells me that Amina called her today, crying with gratitude.
“She told me, ‘Thank you so much for making these kids so happy. Thank you for making them feel like they’re not any different than any other children.’”
My remaining rage evaporates.
I know it’ll be back tomorrow, or the day after. But just for today, no different from any other women, Jasmine and I talk about our favourite TV shows. We laugh a little bit. We tell each other we love each other.
And we say goodnight.
If you’d like to learn more about the situation for many Syrians living in Turkey, abroad, and still in Syria, I suggest: