Day 16: Who Killed Gülçe? (Gümüshane)

Every day I hate waking up because I know the first thing I’m going to do at school is start my day off with the basic beginner class. All of us dread having them. But we’ve discovered one of the ways to really motivate them to work together properly (instead of just cheating) is to break them up into groups and give them the same worksheet to complete. Whichever team completes it first doesn’t have to do homework. You’ve never seen people with such dedication and zeal to complete a task!

We have such horrible problems with cheating in that class. It’s getting out of control. Their homework generally consists of writing sentences that cover the materials we learned about in class, such as articles or prepositions. I guess they think that Gülçe and me are so stupid that we’ll never catch on to their brilliant game of changing the subject of the sentence but leaving everything else the same. Sometimes they just outright turn in a carbon copy of one student’s work. So everyone that cheats receives an F on their homework. If they keep doing it then I’m going to start assigning those people more homework, which probably won’t work since we have a couple of students who have just refused to do their homework since the beginning of school. According to Gülçe, “Turkish people are just like that.”

I generally teach the same lesson with the basic beginners and basic advanced. The difference is that since the basic advanced are such good kids they actually do their work and want to learn. I can go more in-depth with the lesson and we can practice more, which means their command of English increases. There are really only two problem kids in the class: the boy is a know-it-all and there’s a 30 year old student in there who argues with you about every correction you make to her work.

Today for the intermediate class I found a really fun game called “Guilty.” It’s like a murder mystery. You give them a scenario (I said that someone strangled my co-teacher, Gülçe, in the middle of the night) and they split up into pairs. Each pair has to come up with an alibi and then you write the alibi on the board. Then each group comes up with a set number of questions to ask the pair. You call each pair up and then dismiss one of them into the hall. The students ask their questions to that person and then they go out into the hall and the students ask the same questions to the other person who comes in. Whichever team had the most discrepancies in their answers to the questions is the “guilty” pair. The students really took to it much faster than I thought they would, and by the end of class they were really into it.

The food at the school is starting to wear me down despite the fact that it’s free. It's always the same: some variation on meat and eggplant; some variation on lentil soup; some variation on a yogurt-based desert; and some variation on rice or French fries. The quality is low, which I think is the real problem. We generally ate the same sort of Persian food in Africa and I never got tired of that, so I’m guessing quality is the problem here.

Anyway, the food is wearing down Gülçe, too, so we agreed to go eat lahmacun for lunch. We stood out in the sun so long trying to convince one of the other volunteers to come with us and then talking to Dr. B that we lost our appetites. The sun here is really starting to get brutal! So instead of going to eat, we went to one of the plethora of silver shops in the city to browse around. I bought two silver necklaces and a ring for much less than $100; it’s so cheap because silver is mined right here in Gümüshane so you get it for bargain-basement prices.

A couple of days ago I wrote a 500-word essay on gender equality, women’s empowerment and the Millennium Development Goals in order to apply for the Ford Global Scholars program that’s run in tandem with the internship program I’m attending in the fall. It comes with a $3,000 scholarship that I could really use, so I’m hopeful about the outcome. I think the essay was decent enough!

Since I didn’t get to go out for lunch, I decided to have dinner out at this restaurant called Sevenin Yeri. They sell lahmacun, really flat and really crispy pizza type things; pide, oval shaped calzones stuffed with cheese or meat and with an open slit running along the top of it; as well as “pizza” and a few other things. I usually eat lahmacun here but this time I decided to go with the cheese pide. One of the other volunteers warned me that it comes “with a stick of butter on it,” but I thought I don’t mind a little butter. However, it turns out he was being literal. The thing comes out with an actual stick of butter on top of it. The butter quickly melts into the cheese and bread to make it nice and delicious, but I couldn’t help laughing when it first came out. I think the Turkish Paula Deen runs this restaurant.

This weekend is a little busy. On Saturday we’re visiting the ruins of Old Gümüshane, which was the first attempt to build the town in the mountains until an earthquake destroyed it. Like an idiot, I asked Dr. B when we would be leaving to hike up there. At first he said he didn’t know. Then he said, “What time did the announcement say?” even though there was no announcement. And finally he consulted with someone and delivered the most precise of answers: “In the afternoon.” I took this to mean simply, “You can sleep in a bit.”

On Sunday, which we were told would always be a free day, we’re going to the Santa Ruins. I had assumed this was the remnant’s of Santa Claus’s ill-fated attempt at establishing a base south of the North Pole, but it turns out it was a settlement built by Greeks fleeing sea pirates in the 1600’s. We have the option of hiking to the ruins with Dr. B or taking the bus with the students. Since I’m not trying to die of heat stroke, I think I’ll be taking the bus.

One of the other volunteers revolted at the mention of the Sunday expedition. I think he might be handling this place worse than even me, and he had his heart set on going to Trabzon. Apparently there’s a huge mall there that has American food, like Popeye’s Chicken & Sbarro, as well as some people that speak English. He calls it “International Day,” and I feel pretty bad that he might have to miss it. He told Dr. B flat out that he was going to Trabzon, but we’ll have to see how that pans out.

Some guy just walked into the restaurant arm-in-arm with his friend wearing a shirt that says, “Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a Prince.” This is a good demonstration of why I don’t wear shirts that have something in a foreign language written on them that I don’t understand.