Hope to Meet You All Again

I had the great luck to travel to Kayseri and Denizli for the solidarity football matches and the interviews with LGBT refugees, together with Hayriye (Kara) and some other interns. Why it feels like great luck to me to have participated in this journey? Well, of course I learned a lot and saw a lot and experienced a lot which is interesting and helpful for my work as a social worker and for my activism as a private person. But most importantly, I have just met so many warm and beautiful people there! Especially in Denizli, where we spent most of our time, we were welcomed with great warmth and hospitality to their „gay family“, as they put it.

 

Our schedule was quite tight: Tuesday morning with the bus to Kayseri, where we met up with activists and LGBT refugees and went to a sports hall where the first solidarity match took place. It was quite delightful to discover together that football is not only something for straight men - as some people first suspected - but is even funnier if you don’t take it too serious. So the clear focus of the game was not winning, but having as much fun as possible.

 

After the match we had dinner together (with lots of interesting conversations) and then we went back to the bus terminal to catch the bus to Denizli. When we arrived in Denizli, we first went to our hotel and relaxed for two hours, for we all had not slept too much during the night on the bus.

 

In the afternoon, we went to an LGBT activists house (he does not call himself an activist, but Hayriye assured us that he is one), where we had, one by one, interviews with 16 LGBT refugees from Iran. This was quite a moving experience, for on one hand we met all these nice, open and congenial people, and at the same time heard so many outrageous and sad things from their mouths. Being confronted with so many really difficult stories and life situations, I had to - once again – think a lot about myself and my own privileged situation. After the interviews, we sat together with the man in whose flat we had met all these people. He asked me and the other intern that was present during the interviews: “so how was it for you to hear all these stories? Was it good?’ And M. and I looked at each other and felt a little awkward and we answered: “well, it was not exactly good, it was quite hard to hear all these tough stories, but it was, of course, also very interesting for us.” Saying this, I felt a little ashamed, because the stories of these people cause great distress and problems for them, while for me, they are “interesting.” But this man understood the situation perfectly well and he said: “For you it must be like hearing some crazy story. You hear it but you cannot imagine at all how it is to live in such a country, because in your countries, such things don’t exist. Well, we always try to imagine how it must be to just walk down the street hand in hand with your partner, to kiss in a cafe... But we cannot really picture it, either”

 

Well, of course Germany is not heaven and as a gay couple, you have to know when and where to kiss in public, for in some neighborhoods and places people may insult or even attack you for that. But there is an anti-discrimination law for such cases, because actually, gay people have the same legal right to kiss in public as heterosexuals. This, and the fact that there really are places where gay people can kiss in public, of course makes an incredible difference. So yes, I cannot imagine at all what it must be like to live in a situation where there is no law to protect you and where just anything can happen to you because you love a person of your own sex. I have the great privilege to not being able to fully imagine such a situation. During the interviews I could not stop thinking about how crazily unfair this world is.

 

After the interviews we were invited to the home of some of the people who had come to the interviews. They surprised us with a delicious dinner and we spent a lovely evening together, eating, drinking tea and wine, chatting and laughing a lot.

 

The next day, we went to the second solidarity football match, which took place outside in the fresh air in front of a beautiful mountain scenery. This match was even more joyful and hilarious than the first one. One participant, e.g., performed somersaults all over the football field whenever his team scored a goal. After the match we all went to a nearby restaurant where we had lunch together and everybody took lots of pictures of and with everybody.

 

One of the most beautiful experiences for me took place after that lunch. We had some time left before our departure and so we sat in a cafe together with a small group of people, chatting and laughing. One woman told that she writes poems in Farsi and in English and is about to publish a book with her poems. I was very interested in this topic and mentioned that I also write poems. They said to me: “can you tell us one of your poems? We will not understand the meaning, but the sound of poems is always so beautiful.” So I told one of my poems that I know by heart and everybody listened to me attentively. When I stopped, they applaused and thanked me for sharing my poem with them. Well, this might sound like a very random thing. But I am usually very shy about sharing my poems and the fact that they were interested in it and appreciated it and the fact that it felt very good for me to tell them this poem showed me how much on ease I felt in the presence of this group of people.

 

But though the journey was very delightful for me in various ways, it would be wrong to just describe it as an entirely happy event. For the fact that the very basis of all these actions is the fact that there are people who had to leave their homes because they are persecuted for being LGBT, is, of course, not delightful at all and I force myself to keep that in mind when remembering this journey - it seems so easy for me to forget this. I wish everybody all the best and hope to meet again as many people as possible – here in Turkey, or in some other place. I exchanged e-mail addresses and telephone numbers with some people and who knows, maybe next year we will have a coffee together in Berlin?