You can see all the words to this, as well as the credits, here.I made this CD cover for a teaching CD put out by the ministry:
Everything is made by me or scanned in by Josh :) Fonts: Daniel; Americana
And a tidbit from Jasmine: She colored a picture this morning (actually, most of the time was spent munching on the crayons, but that's beside the point). It's two mice from Cinderella and two birds. She showed me the picture and said: "Mickeys! Two, three, four, six, birds, FOUR!" :) She can count from 2 to 9, skipping 5 for some reason, and yesterday she added 12 to the end. The amazing thing is that the numbers are in order (though she usually goes back to 4 for the grand total) :)
I was thinking more this morning about my memories from Turkey. I had hoped my monthly newsletters would be a good way to relive some of my time there, but they were much briefer and less in-depth than they could have been. It's been almost 6 years since I moved back to the states, so my memories are starting to blur, but hopefully I can put together enough pieces that I can tell some of my stories before I don't remember any specifics at all!
Okay. I lost the first post I wrote, when Jasmine started playing with the mouse as I was finishing. So I'll write something different, since I hate re-writing things.
Turkish Memoire Installment 1
Language was something that brought us much joy and frustration. Before I had learned any Turkish (other than “deprem” for earthquake, since the big earthquake in 1999 was 2 weeks after I moved there), my friend Amy and I saw something that said “cok satan.” We knew “cok” meant “very or a lot,” but didn’t know “satan,” so for awhile, anything we didn’t like was “cok satan” (very Satan)! Eventually we learned it meant that it was something that sold very well, but we liked our definition better.
The reason I decided it was important to learn to speak Turkish was that one day on my way home from school, a 3- or 4-year old girl came up to me and started talking a mile a minute. I couldn’t understand a single word! I knew right then, that if I was going to live there for 2 years, I was going to have to learn how to understand the people there!
I went to a church made up primarily of foreigners. Because most of us learned Turkish at least to some extent (some far more than others), we adopted some of their words into our speech and it got to the point that I forgot what words I had used before I got there. One such word: Cep. It literally means “pocket,” but the Turkish word for cell phone is ‘cep telefonu.’ We didn’t bother with the telefonu part, but just talked about “calling my cep.” I’m sure the Turks who heard us were amused (and maybe slightly confused).
Turkish has a bunch of words adopted from other languages, mostly of things that they were introduced to by foreigners, like ham (the only ham you could get there was made of beef and made to taste similar to ham) and french fries. So the word for ham is “jambon” (from the French), and french fries are “cips” (pronounced chips) from the British word for them. I had many students who were either British or had gone to the British International School before coming to our school, so they called them “chips” when they got there, so I started thinking of them as chips. One student, who was also a dear friend (she’s age-wise halfway between Amy and Vivian and was my next door neighbor, so I adopted her as my baby sister and went shopping with her and helped her when she took piano lessons), was an American, and she knew I was going to keep calling french fries “chips” when I went back to the states. So she took it upon herself to help me re-learn their proper name. (the funny thing: I don’t like french fries, or potato chips unless there’s dip around, so it really didn’t matter what I called them, because I likely wouldn’t eat them!) She would correct me and make me call them by their American name any time I said the wrong word! I appreciated it, though I’m sure the other kids thought it was funny.
Next installment: Taxi stories!
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