51 Days in Turkey

In 2008 while facilitating English in Bursa, Turkey he worked with Azra, a personal tutor. She told him about Trabzon on the Black Sea near Georgia. “I was born there and it’s beautiful.”

In the summer of 2012 while meditating in Asia he applied for a Teaching English Foreign Language (TEFL) job in Trabzon.

They needed native barbarians with clear pronunciation.

Let’s see the terrain, said Omar, a Touareg Berber ghostwriter friend. Reconnect with Z, the author of The Language Company, meet diverse people, do street photography, write about it and analyze the situation with diamond mind wisdom.

Go on an adventure.

He arrived in September.

Satire and curiosity witnessed the deterioration of educational quality. Rampant commercialism and artificial empowerment. Dystopian reality. Greed is a hungry animal. So it goes.

51 Days in Turkey

Many clowns are not in the circus.

The Garden #6

Before & After, from The Language Company.

John, a Chinese teacher is removed from his class at a middle school in Sichuan.

If his students fail to pass a test it is his fault.

The Garden #6.

Thanks for listening.

Heavy Duty in China

Lucky walked to Ankara, Turkey from China in a convoluted adventure.

After Ankara he walked to Bursa.

Another invisible citiy in a schizophrenic totalitarian country trapped between East & West, between past and future being petrified ossified present on the Phosphorus.

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Preparing for strenuous escapades he performed a Tibetan tantric sitting meditation for three centuries, three decades, three years, three months, three weeks, three days, three moments and three breaths.

In-out. Spiritual awareness. Mindfulness.

My body. My breath. My practice.

Tibetans survived with a profound sense of humor and resilience considering 60+ years of Chinese oppression, genocide and nomadic exile from the Land of Snows.

Lhasa, Tibet

After walking meditations in Lhasa he wandered south of Chengdu to Shuangliu in Sichuan.

He facilitated English, meditation, chess tactics/strategy and how to be more human with eighth graders for a year.

One afternoon John, a smart, kind Chinese teacher passed him.

“Where are you going?” said Lucky.

“The Office of Morals and Re-Education. I have to copy tracts and texts.”

“Why?” - the dreaded question word.

“I’ve been removed from my class responsibilities. Not enough students passed their semester exam. It’s my duty to teach them. If they fail it’s my fault.”

“You’re a fine teacher. Duty is a heavy systematic responsibility in a dystopian Communist country. How long will you copy texts and tracts?”

“Who knows? Could be weeks or months. Maybe I will die in The Office of Morals and Re-Education writing an incomplete sentence. This is my life sentence. Tragic. The Teacher Performance Evaluation Committee will decide my destiny.”

“Good luck John. Welcome to the system.”

“Thanks. It’s my fate. I need some luck. See you around.”

The Language Company

Cambodia

Blend In

“You have a criteria for beauty,” said an austere Chinese business university teacher-mother in an apartment elevator going to ground zero. “You should just blend in.”

She was petrified like 1.7 billion of being singled out, purged, tried and executed or sent to the countryside and re-educational brainwashing for expressing bourgeoisie ideology in a harmonious Marxist society.

Her paranoia meant no one dared talk about June 4, 1989. No one whispered about freedom, human rights or democracy. Their collective hardwired brains were wiped clean by Big Brother.

“I’ve learned,” she said, “to keep my mouth shut unless I’m eating fast before starving thieves steal my food or laughing to myself at the stupid laconic narrow-minded ways of our leaders. They are old despotic men. They sit behind blood stained teak desks imported from Burmese dictators. They chop seals and devour dolphins and whales with malice. They swallow tiger bone extract for sexual potency and wash it down with bear bile. Silence is our golden mean. My husband works in a distant province. He has a mistress named Orgasm. No money, no honey.”

Pouring restaurant slop in Mandalay Burma market

She cried silent tears, raised her son and wrote life lesson plans. “By the book,” she screamed in silence facing eighty comatose students scrambling for a pass. It fell incomplete.

“Sixty is heaven and fifty-nine is hell,” said a thin girl in a freshman speaking class of 80. “My parents will kill me if I fail.”

“What is your dream?” said Lucky.

“I want to be a waif when I grow up.”

Her naive honesty surprised him. “What is a waif?”

“You know, a homeless person existing on the street. Living on their wits with silence and cunning, like a mercenary, assassin or literary outlaw. Authentic experience. A free person has courage. They take risks. Not taking a risk is a risk. They don’t live off state handouts in a broken down system filled with graft, corruption and nepotism. They overcome suffering and hardship and deprivation. I mean a real person with dignity, self-respect and courage.”

Seventy-nine others failed to grasp her awareness and honesty.

“You are wiser than your years.”  

 

The Language Company

Dance the Paperwork Shuffle in Turkey

Editor's note: Dancing in Turkey became more chaotic in July 2016.

Fill us in on the exciting and rousing conclusion from October 26-31, 2012 to be exact, said Zeynep.

Here we go. The alert went out on Saturday 27 October before Halloween when Sit Down, a native with a degree in Business Management from Tupperware College living at home with mom and dad and working as admin guy at the TEOL school in Trabzon, tried to reach Lucky in Giresun - cherry in Latin - 2.5 hours away.

Sit Down needed his documents to apply for a residency permit.

The all knowing, all seeing, all powerful and all believing Turkish government of bored drones, wanting to force everyone in the food chain to be accountable so they could maintain their power and authority game had told TEOL:

You, Profit Before People running an educational business intent on brainwashing and dumbing down children, young adults, old adults and diseased heart-mind dead humans in quest of an English certificate from your institution have, according to the grand and glorious proclamation from our dead fearless and forever glorified leader Ata Boy, ten calendar days - yes only ten  - act now before its too late - to file the required paperwork requesting work permits for your native speakers born, raised and reared outside our glorious land of sea, sky and succulent tomatoes with their clear pronunciation, these specific barbarians,after filing for their residency permits.

Failure to do so said Authority, Means 1) they cannot be employed by the state of Confusion & Sorrow & High Anxiety 2) they cannot order Allah cart in Kofte diners featuring grilled shit burgers slathered with yogurt 3) they will be decapitated at dawn tomorrow by a sad warrior hero on a white stallion waving a diamond mind blade.

Failure to comply with our Ten-Day Decree means you will need to start the complete bureaucratic sham process all over again. You will lose face. You will suffer personal + national humiliation + our brutal revenge.

You will become a hunted dog in Armenian forests and massacred like 1.5 million. We do not acknowledge this genocide in 1914. We erased the Armenians. We deny their existence.

Prove it.

Denial kills you. Anger is expensive.

Failure to comply and lie with intentional cunning means you will have to haul more word shit and process tedious official documents. You will spend years seeking a stamp from a performing seal of approval. You will raise your greasy baksheesh palms to heaven imploring Ali Baba the leader of forty thieves for redemption and solace.

Tell me you love me. Love and passion create suffering.

WE, Authority do our best to make the paperwork process cumbersome, illogical, frustrating, idiotic, mind numbing, depressing, sushi ideal and heavy real deep shit for brains.

We love paper. It’s why, as you've seen in Bay (male) or Bayan (female) toilets absence of paper products. We use holy water imported from the Vatican via Soapy Arabia to blast orifices. Water is sweeter than pleasure principles smothered with honey.

Everything here needs a permit: breathing, laughing, dreaming, dancing, drawing, writing and meditating. A government issued signed stamped official document.

No paper no chance.

Please note this text message to Lucky from Sit Down.

The Language Company