Why Turkey? (or, "Finding My Zone of Proximal Development")

“Why Turkey?”

This is the question I’ve gotten most often over the past few months. My favorite answer is, “Why not?” but that gets pretty annoying fast. So I'll go through the story that got us to Turkey instead, and then try to backwards-rationalize the why:

Years ago, I resolved (via a Life OKR; more on this later) to live abroad at some point for at least 3 months. When Earle and I started thinking a year and some ago about what might be next for us, we tossed around the idea of moving abroad. Earle’s a pretty good person to move abroad with, having done it twice for various advanced degrees (#earlelyfe). I, on the other hand, have never spent more than 3 weeks in another country (shoutout to choir tour 2008 to China), and probably not more than a week or so in a single city outside the US.

Thus a plan began to take shape. That fall, we started looking at places we could move based on who would be interested in having Earle teach there, figuring I could so some sort of tech work or something from a lot of places (more on this later, too). Some advice if you’re starting to feel restless in your own life: just start looking abroad for possible jobs you could have in other places. There are so many other places in the world. We had endless conversations about the possibilities: “What do you think about China?” “Hey, what if we lived in the Middle East?” “Do you think we could do the Caribbean year-round?” “...How much do you know about Latvia?” (answer: very little.)

Earle has been teaching history and literature for about 10 years now, so once he put his resume up on a couple of international school headhunting sites (Search Associates and International School Services were the ones we used) it wasn’t hard to make contact with a bunch of schools all around the world. The American Collegiate Institute of Izmir was one such school. It was one of the first to make him an offer; he also received offers from a school in Taiwan, Shanghai, and Mexico City; I remember calling him the “prettiest girl at the ball.”

We could have kept going. Earle had, at this point, talked to less than 10 schools. But we stopped, and that’s scary for me because I’m an optimizer. The tricky part about the world is that it’s so big, and there are literally hundreds of schools and cities where we could have a great adventure. How could we figure out which one would be best? So I think we ended up artificially limiting ourselves in order to make an easier decision. The deadlines that the schools put on their offers helped (e.g. “1 week”), though this was pretty scary at the time. Eventually, completely out of character, I said to Earle, “Turkey just feels right.” Not an unfounded statement -- Earle would be teaching a class he was really excited about; the people who worked there seemed very friendly and great to work with; Turkey’s geographically convenient to a bunch of interesting places -- but since when I have done things because they “feel right”?

But, it did. And so we made a decision. The geographical convenience is the reason I cite most often; Turkey’s a great jumping-off point to anywhere along the Mediterranean, most of Europe, the Middle East (though Izmir has very few direct flights, I’ve learned). The other part is that I wanted to find the right amount of “different”: something that I knew would have some degree of culture shock (different language, a history unknown to me to immerse myself in, interesting food, etc.) but not so different from my everyday experience that I wouldn’t feel comfortable committing to 2 years. Like, I don’t know if I could do 2 years in India (it’s not you, India; it’s me. Give me a couple years in Turkey and I’ll re-assess). And something like Sydney or London...lots to learn, but I think I’d get the hang of it pretty quick.

Over in the education world (expect this to come up a lot #sorrynotsorry), we might call this my “zone of proximal development.” Technically this is the area between what a learner can do without help (live in San Francisco or New York) and what they can’t do yet (commit to Ethiopia or rural China); more generally it’s like “the just-right stuff for a student to be learning.” Turkey is my zone of proximal development: I anticipate being uncomfortable and confused, but not insurmountably so. It’s a brand-new language, but there are 80 million speakers and tons of resources. The water from the tap tastes bad, but it’s not going to make me sick. The transit system isn’t on Google Maps, but all the roads have names that I can read.

So that’s the story, and that's why Turkey. I’m really looking forward to unpacking all these challenges over the next two years; follow along if that sounds fun to you, too.