New Family

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while. This article will be about why.

The basic story: I changed my host family.

One afternoon a month or so ago, I got a call from my counselor that I would be switching families. This was a bit of a surprise even though I had met with my other counselor the day before and told her about my problems with my current family. I was given instructions to start packing because I was to move out the next day at 4 p.m. So, that is what I did. The next day, I got out of school early and went straight to home, and finished packing from where I left off the night before. I didn’t tell my family I would be leaving because I was told that AFS would do that themselves, and I felt a bit odd leaving the house with only one person there and not saying goodbye to anyone, but I figured that they just didn’t know I was leaving (I found out later that they did in fact know this). I had to bring all of my belongings (which is a lot, by the way) to the bus stop without help, which was a fifteen minute walk uphill (not fun).

I met up in Kadıköy with some AFS volunteers and they brought me to my temporary family. My temporary family was nice, and they all spoke English quite well, which was a nice relief from my last family. I had two host parents and a brother, whose age I never found out. One of my favorite things was that they lived only 20 minutes from my school, and they made breakfast for me in the mornings :) When the time came to move out, which was after about two weeks, they were more than happy to help me. After this, I lived with a volunteer for one week, which I felt was a bit unnecessary. He lived in Europe, and quite a distance from the closest harbor, which I needed to take to school. It took me about one and a half hours to get to school and I was late every day of the week but one.

I moved to my new family after that, one week ago. My new family lives back in Asia, which is very nice, and they also live only 20 minutes or so from my school. I have two host parents, Muzeyyen (mom) and Alaattin (dad), and a host brother one year younger than me that goes to the same school as my friends Sophias (yes, there are too, both German, in the same school) and his name is Deniz (which means sea in Turkish). They are all very nice, and my host father and brother speak English fairly well, while my host mother speaks about as much English as I do Turkish, which I find nice. On Sunday, they took me out, something that my first family never did. We went shopping for a bit at a German Home-Depo-esque store and then to the gym, where I exercised for a bit and then played Squash with my host father. I don’t know how to play it, and it was increasingly difficult learning it in a different language. Last night my host mother made brownies using a recipe that my American mother emailed me, and they were good :)

In school, not much has been happening. This past week has been very odd, with some of my friends talking to me less and also I met a lot of new people. It seems that just now word of an American about has finally reached everyone and people have started seeking me out. Four people have come up to me in the hall this week, introducing themselves by saying, “Hey, you’re the American, right?”

Also, if anyone wants to see pictures of my time here so far, let me know. If you have a FaceBook, many of my photos are on there, but if not, I can email you some or maybe make a blog post with a lot of pictures. Let me know! :)