Rama Yigit | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Rama Yigit is a baker of Kurdish bread and baklava. He’s a circus performer and a paralegal who helps fellow asylum seekers document their stories. He also is a shepherd and farmer from Kurdistan, a region in eastern Turkey that is not recognized by Turkey.
Rama is most of a decade into the process to gain U.S. citizenship as an asylum seeker. He talks with Adam Williams about the how and why of that, what his fears are and how he feels about not being able to return home to see his village or family, who he’s not seen in many years. They talk about life in that village where Rama grew up.
Rama and Adam talk about what it means to be Kurdish in Turkey, where the mere existence of Kurds is an inciting incident for many Turks, and certainly for the government. The Kurdish language and culture are effectively illegal and socially intolerable.
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
Rama Yigit & Rama’s Bread
Facebook: facebook.com/ramasbread
Instagram: instagram.com/ramasbread
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
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CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:12): Welcome to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness and well-being rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams.
Today I’m talking with Rama Yigit of Rama’s Bread. Rama is a baker of Kurdish bread in baklava. He’s a circus performer and a paralegal who helps fellow asylum seekers document their stories. He also is a shepherd and farmer from Kurdistan, a region in Eastern Turkey that is not recognized by Turkey. That will be a very relevant detail in this conversation.
Rama is most of a decade into the process to gain citizenship in this country as an asylum seeker. We talk about the how and why of that, what his fears are and how he feels about not being able to return home to see his village or family who he’s not seen in many years. We talk about life in that village where he grew up and some of the challenges and joys he experienced there.
(00:01:08): That Rama is here in the States at all is a story in itself. An opportunity through his college brought him to the US in the summer of 16, but that he ever went to college or school at any level was not a given in his Kurdish village. He’s the only person in his sizable family who is literate and formally educated and who knows the Turkish language, let alone English and other languages.
Rama and I talk about what it means to be Kurdish in Turkey, where the mere existence of Kurds is an inciting incident for many Turks and certainly for the government. The Kurdish language and culture are effectively illegal and socially intolerable.
And get this, Rama did not know his officially recognized name, that is the name given to him by the Turkish government until he was seven years old and went to school. That’s where he had to present his Turkish government issued ID, which no one in his family could read.
(00:02:05): In a way, Rama’s story is representative of the broader immigrant experience in this country. We could only have this incredible conversation because he knows several languages and one of them thankfully is English. He’s entrepreneurial and resilient, courageous and creative, and full of joy. I loved this conversation with Rama a lot, I think you will too.
The Looking Upstream Podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health. Go to wearechaffeepod.com to see show notes with photos, links, and a transcript of the conversation. You can subscribe to the monthly email newsletter there too. And you can see more photos and support the podcast by engaging on Instagram @wearechaffeepod.
Okay, here we go with Rama Yigit.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams: Let’s talk about baking, Rama and Rama’s Bread, which people around here will know you for, if they’ve gone to the farmer’s market or other places where you sell your bread and your baklava, which is amazing by the way. As you know–
Rama Yigit (00:02:05): Thank you.
Adam Williams (00:03:12): … I was able to try some of that recently. It’s fantastic, and I’m curious about how you learned to bake, and I think it came from your family, so I’d like to hear about that.
Rama Yigit (00:03:21): Yeah, so first I grew up in Eastern Turkey or Northern Kurdistan, depends on who you are, where it’s the home of the wheat. Everybody, all the villages around, we all grow, wheat is, you’ll just see vast fields of wheat all around. So everybody’s a baker too in the village. Every family, they bake their own bread, and that’s how I got really introduced to baking.
We would grow our own wheat, we’d grind it, we’d make a flour, and then with the flour we’d make bread. And that’s how I learned to bake from my mom, my sister. It’s very unusual for men in our culture to be in the kitchen, to be baking. So I was the unusual man who really got into baking, who got really loved putting hands in dough. So I learned some back there and then I never thought about making it a business until I was here in Salida where I would make it to the parties and everybody just really liked it and they asked for more and then suddenly turned into a business from [inaudible 00:04:32], yeah.
Adam Williams (00:04:34): Okay. So your family, they were bakers just by necessity, it sounds like, as a matter of daily life, this is part of what you need to do, but also farmers, is that right?
Rama Yigit (00:04:45): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:04:46): So your dad was a farmer.
Rama Yigit (00:04:47): Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (00:04:48): How many siblings did you have?
Rama Yigit (00:04:50): So I have six other siblings. We’re total seven, and that’s our village is a house of 30 houses and we are considered one of the small family with the seven children. The average, I would say probably nine, 10 children for family. And the whole village is almost completely self-sufficient. There is not a store that you can go buy something in the village.
Now with the technology, they can drive to towns close by for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, but when I grew up, there was no access to outside, especially in the winter. So with the wool of sheep, we’d make clothes, we’d make cheese, we would collect a lot of manure to burn for the winter. So it was completely self-sufficient, and you had to make all of your own food to survive by. And we would do a lot of trading too. We would have a lot of flour or wheat we would exchange with, trade with potatoes, like 50 bags of that will last us the whole winter or a lot of onions with the trade, with the wheat or flour.
Adam Williams (00:06:05): It sounds like then a lot of people probably don’t leave the village.
Rama Yigit (00:06:10): No, they don’t, yes.
Adam Williams (00:06:11): Which makes you extraordinary, because not only have you left the village, but you came to the United States.
Rama Yigit (00:06:19): Yes. It’s very– I resonate with the character in “The Alchemist,” Santiago a lot, being a shepherd and just living the world, that nobody else had left the village. And it was just a very big chance I got to go to school as the first person in my family who became literate. And it was very late, it took me five years to learn how to write my name and that has a different story. But when I was in college, I was really in love with the language, I fell in love with the languages because just growing up in that small village, there were three languages in a tiny little village.
(00:07:09): We would speak Kurdish in the house, that’s what everybody speaks. And at the school we were forced to learn in Turkish, and then at the mosque everything was in Arabic. So at a very young age I was exposed to three languages and in college that became more like an passion for me to learn languages, to actually… So I started learning English in college and I fell in love with it too, and I was looking for ways to improve my English, and there was a program that I could come to US for a summer, improve my English, and then go back, because I was a college student and even the idea of it was a dream and I applied for it, I got accepted, and that’s how I end up in US.
Adam Williams (00:08:02): I want to come back to that period of college and then especially coming to the US. But I think that there are more things from your early years that I think we probably ought to talk about and I’m certainly curious about. If you were extraordinary for being a boy in the house who is baking, I’m curious how your father, and if you have brothers among those siblings, maybe others in the village, how did they view that?
Rama Yigit (00:08:29): Yeah, that’s a really good question. They don’t view it very well. A lot of them believe in strict gender roles, and I was little bit breaking that and that would make them uncomfortable, which would make them call me like a woman headed or gay, but I didn’t really care much about…
Adam Williams (00:09:01): You didn’t care that they did that, that they thought of you or said those things in that way?
Rama Yigit (00:09:07): Yeah, because it was more like a teasing, it was never something that became violent.
Adam Williams (00:09:14): You also did the things that were supposed to be for men, right? The “men’s roles” of you said you were a shepherd.
Rama Yigit (00:09:23): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:09:24): Were you also working in the wheat fields and doing the various farming tasks as well?
Rama Yigit (00:09:30): Yes, exactly. Yeah, I was doing all the “Men tasks,” going out in the farm, shepherding, also playing soccer, going out playing soccer.
Adam Williams (00:09:42): So you showed up in all the ways that the boys and men were expected to, you just added onto that with the baking skills.
Rama Yigit (00:09:42): Yes, absolutely.
Adam Williams (00:09:50): Why did you like the baking and when did you start with that? At what age were you with your mother and sister and learning those things?
Rama Yigit (00:10:00): It was really early age that I showed a lot of interest, spending time with my mom and my sister also. I would spend time with my dad, learning the tractor, how to fix the tractor, how to oil the tractor, oil all the parts. But I also really enjoyed being around my sister and my mom, who would go milk the cows, bring the milk. I don’t know what the process called, but just separating fat from the milk, making yogurt, making butter, all that process also seemed very fascinating to me as much as the other ones. But the other boys seemed like they had… They was like, “Oh, you don’t do this. You don’t milk a cow, this is woman’s work.” But I just really did it, not as a chore, but as something, it was really fascinating to me that they knew how to do all of this and baking was one of them too.
Adam Williams (00:11:00): How old were you when you started?
Rama Yigit (00:11:03): I would say I remember being a shepherd for as far as remember myself. I was a shepherd and I would say from age of eight, nine, I started really just becoming familiar with baking, with making cheese, making yogurt.
Adam Williams (00:11:22): I’m also curious where you fit into the lineup of your siblings. Was your sister older than you?
Rama Yigit (00:11:27): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:11:28): How many sisters? How many brothers and where do you fit in the line of birth order?
Rama Yigit (00:11:33): Yeah, I have one sister and five brothers. So we are six brothers and one sister, and I am number five. My sister is older than me and I have two brothers who are younger than me and the others are older than me.
Adam Williams (00:11:48): You’ve described it as you were born to be a worker, not a child who got to have fun and play and go to school and learn and do all the things that we think about in a place like, I guess here in America where it’s like, well, we want to have kids because we want to, I don’t know, have a family of love. And you were a worker. It sounds like in that case, with one girl, six boys, that your father got a lot of help in the field and with the animals.
Rama Yigit (00:11:48): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (00:12:19): And your mom got some help in the house.
Rama Yigit (00:12:23): Yes. So this is not only something for my family, this is for every single family in the village, and this is completely my own observation.
Adam Williams (00:12:33): Sure. Okay.
Rama Yigit (00:12:34): Especially after living the village, living in Western Turkey for few years and living in the US for eight years, I got to compare how people, how Parents treat their children and with us, I realized especially first there is not that birthday culture to make your child feel special like it is in Western Turkey with the Turkish people or here. For us, none of my siblings they know their birthdays or not in the village, none of the people they actually… And one of the reason is because the parents, all the parents are illiterate. They can’t keep track of the day, say, “Well, this is the exact day you were born last year.” How would they know? They would just say, “Well, it was spring.”
Adam Williams (00:13:22): Okay.
Rama Yigit (00:13:23): Yeah, “You were born, it was the harsh winter just ended.” They just describe it that way. You would see children working at a very young age in the fields, shepherding. They’re more like, it’s a very common sense like, “Oh, you got boys that are three, four years old in a couple of years they would help out. They would help you. They would catch up with you.”
Adam Williams (00:13:54): And so there’s also probably a similar perspective on when it’s time to get married and things. It all kind of is vague and practical.
Rama Yigit (00:14:04): Yes, absolutely. Yes. You get married if you’re a man, once you are 18 years old, you go to your mandatory, you do your mandatory army duty.
Adam Williams (00:14:19): For Turkey?
Rama Yigit (00:14:19): For Turkey. And then after that you come home and you get married, and then your parents decide who you’re married to.
Adam Williams (00:14:27): And it’s a guess at when you’re 18 years old, more or less? Or do they count 18 springs? For example, you were born in the spring. Oh, that was 18 springs ago?
Rama Yigit (00:14:36): Well, here is how it works. We have an ID. We all have a Turkish ID because we’re Turkish citizens. There’s an ID that is given to us, and in that ID, we have a birthday, which is the day that my father went to the official building and said, “I have a child, can we have an ID?”
Adam Williams (00:15:00): Which might or might not have been the day you were born, it was just when-
Rama Yigit (00:15:02): Usually it’s not.
Adam Williams (00:15:03): … your father went. Right. Okay.
Rama Yigit (00:15:05): Yes. Exactly. Even though right now in my ID, my birthday says November 23rd, 1994, but all my parents are sure that I was born in the spring.
Adam Williams (00:15:16): In this spring, which ties to your name is my understanding?
Rama Yigit (00:15:21): Yes. That’s also, yeah, because when you go get your ID, they ask, “Well, what’s the child’s name?” And then when you say a Kurdish name, they won’t accept it. So they would give you a Turkish name, which was given to me that… They would have given me a Kurdish name.
Adam Williams (00:15:43): Your parents would have?
Rama Yigit (00:15:44): Mm-hmm (affirmative). But it was, they just put the Turkish one for it.
Adam Williams (00:15:49): The Turkish government assigned you a name basically when your father went in several months later?
Rama Yigit (00:15:54): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:15:54): And that is your name?
Rama Yigit (00:15:55): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:15:56): Rama, which is short for your real name. Your full name?
Rama Yigit (00:15:59): So it’s Ramazan. That’s my Turkish ID name, which is Ramadan, which is the month that I was born in that month. So my parents wanted to name me the Kurdish name for the Ramadan, but they gave me the Turkish name for Ramadan.
Adam Williams (00:16:19): Is that why the Turkish government gave you that name? Was your father the one who went into the office and said, “Well, this is the name we want in Kurdish.” And they’re like, “No, no, no. You don’t get to use Kurdish, but we’ll give you the Turkish word for it.”
Rama Yigit (00:16:31): Yeah. Well, the fact is that the Turkish officials government does not recognize Kurdish as a language at all. So they say if you are a citizen of Turkey, there is one language in Turkey that is Turkish, and your name needs to be a Turkish name.
Adam Williams (00:16:53): There’s a lot for us to unpack here because I understand that there is a lot of strife with Kurdish people, and not only in Turkey, in the collection of countries that are touched in the region of what you recognize as Kurdistan, but officially is not recognized by Turkey.
Rama Yigit (00:17:12): Not any other countries in the world, actually. They’re not recognized as an official country.
Adam Williams (00:17:21): I would assume that countries like the United States or others would have an official relationship and recognition for the country of Turkey, and Turkey does not recognize Kurds and Kurdistan, therefore, politically, other nations in the world will not officially recognize a country that Turkey does not recognize?
Rama Yigit (00:17:40): Yes. Also, after the First World War, right after Ottoman Empire vanished, there was all this movement, the self-determination movements, like every ethnicity would have their own right to rule themselves. And at some point it was promised that Kurdish people would also have their own control over that own region, but somehow whatever happened, it was called a Sevres agreement after the first World War I. I don’t know if I’m saying the English name right, but basically instead of giving that region to Kurdish people to rule themselves, they just divided into four pieces and Turkey got some, Iran got some, Iraq got some, and Syria got some. That’s how Kurdish people became the worst largest minority.
Adam Williams (00:18:38): There are, I think you’ve said 20 million Kurds just in Turkey, is that right?
Rama Yigit (00:18:44): Yeah, 15 to 20–
Adam Williams (00:18:45): In the Turkish portion?
Rama Yigit (00:18:46): … 15 to 20 million just in southeast of Turkey. Well, just in Turkey because not only South. They are predominantly in Southeast, but they also have moved to the big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir.
Adam Williams (00:18:58): Okay.
Rama Yigit (00:18:59): There’s a big population of Kurdish people in those cities too.
Adam Williams (00:19:02): And Turkey does not recognize you, they don’t recognize Kurds, the Kurdish language, the Kurdish culture, the Kurdish region seems to be maybe just tolerated? I mean, I don’t understand how it all-
Rama Yigit (00:19:17): Not even tolerated-
Adam Williams (00:19:17): … how it works.
Rama Yigit (00:19:18): … not even tolerated. There is no toleration. If you say in Turkey that I’m from Kurdistan, I’m Kurdish, there is no tolerance. If you say you are… Even just saying the word Kurdistan in Turkey is a big taboo. It’s right away–
Adam Williams (00:19:45): To just the average citizen?
Rama Yigit (00:19:47): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:19:47): We’re not even talking about, say a police officer or a government official, we’re saying to somebody in the cafe?
Rama Yigit (00:19:53): The street, yeah, absolutely. You say Kurdistan and they would just come to you. They’re like, “What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Tell me where that is.” And then if you show here, “This is it, some of Turkey is in it.” And they look at you like you’re the enemy, that you want their land. It’s like you want something from their pocket. Yeah, it’s very strange.
Adam Williams (00:20:20): How or why did this come to be where there is such disdain for those who are Kurdish?
Rama Yigit (00:20:32): From my knowledge, from what I know, it’s like right after Turkey was established, after the First World War in 1923, it was established on this basically three pillars, nation state, where it says one language, one flag, one nation through 1923. So that already put all the saying, well, one language we don’t recognize. By that they mean because it’s not one language.
As I said the other day, you go to the airport, you go everywhere, there is everything written in five languages. You got Arabic, you got English, you got French, but there is no Kurdish. And it’s like to me, by saying one nation, one flag, one… Is like, we’re not going to tolerate Kurdish people. That’s how I read it and that’s how it started. It’s like we are going to assimilate them by that we are not actually going to recognize their existence at all.
Adam Williams (00:21:37): We’re going to force them to be just like us.
Rama Yigit (00:21:37): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:21:39): In every way as much as possible.
Rama Yigit (00:21:41): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:21:41): But if we take this back to when you were a child and you went to school, you didn’t know Turkish, nobody in your family was literate. Your parents wouldn’t know the official birth date because they couldn’t read your official Turkish ID and you go to school as a child, which already was extraordinary, wasn’t it?
Rama Yigit (00:22:04): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:22:05): Tell me about that experience. Let’s go back to some of the roots of this experience for you personally in understanding that you were somehow seen as different and less than.
Rama Yigit (00:22:15): Yes. So first of all, this is difficult for me to remember because that was the actually most difficult part of my life, just going to that school, not speaking a single word of your teacher speaks. And it would be different if I was the only one who didn’t speak Turkish and everybody I spoke, I was one minority. The strange thing, all the kids, every single kid, none of the kids knew a single word of Turkish. And the teacher doesn’t speak a single word of Kurdish. And we were put in this classroom, and there’s also one teacher for, we are all in one classroom, first to fifth grade.
(00:23:05): So there’s a row of first graders, second graders, third graders, fourth, fifth, and there’s one teacher who is trying to teach all these kids in a language that they don’t have a common language. And the teacher is in position of power, and it just got very violent. It just got very violent that the teacher would lose patience and there’ll be a lot of punishing for, because the teacher will ask something and you don’t understand and you don’t know what to say, and you just end up looking down at your shoes waiting for the moment to end that this man will just leave me alone.
Adam Williams (00:23:56): When you say violent, meaning that the teacher would slap kids, what do we mean by violence?
Rama Yigit (00:24:05): Imagine the worst ways of punishing children. Here is the worst one. They would put two children in front of the blackboard in the classroom, and the teacher would make them face each other, and then he would tell one student to slap the other.
Adam Williams (00:24:05): Oh, wow.
Rama Yigit (00:24:31): They put the good friends. And then a friend would slap his friend slowly and the teacher would slap him as hard as he could and say, “This is how you would slap.” And then he would just end up both of the students crying. And…
Adam Williams (00:24:53): So it’s not only that a grown man, he wouldn’t even necessarily take the abuse on himself. It sounds like he did as well, but he would go a step further-
Rama Yigit (00:25:04): Yeah, make student. Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:25:04): … psychologically, emotionally, all the things of making kids become participants in the violence against each other, and they all were enduring, you all were enduring the same treatment?
Rama Yigit (00:25:17): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:25:18): Did your parents know this was going on?
Rama Yigit (00:25:21): No.
Adam Williams (00:25:23): You felt like you couldn’t tell them?
Rama Yigit (00:25:25): Mm-hmm. (affirmative) There was one night where the teacher had used a stick to hit my palms so bad that my palms were swollen. But the pain was so much at night that I just started crying and my mom heard me, and that was the night that I showed my palms and she was like, “Who did this?” And I was like, “The teacher.” And then it was a snowy night and my dad got up, and so the only person who speaks Turkish in the village other than the teacher is imam, which is the head of the mosque, the religious guy.
So my dad just took me to imam’s house and showed my palms to imam and basically saying, “Can you go communicate with the teacher to not do this?” And so the next morning, imam talked to teacher and I was very nervous to go back to school, and I just remember the first thing the teacher asked me is to show him my palms and the next day, and I did. And yeah.
Adam Williams (00:26:53): What happened from that?
Rama Yigit (00:26:55): I honestly don’t remember how things changed. They never probably, I got beaten less, but still I have a lot of memories of in all the different ways that my friends were tortured or forced to torture each other.
Adam Williams (00:27:11): How many years did this go?
Rama Yigit (00:27:14): My five years, the whole year in the… The whole time in that school. On and off there will be some good teachers, let’s be honest, but the good teacher was the teacher who wouldn’t beat us deadly.
Adam Williams (00:27:28): After fifth grade then, how did school continue for you? Because you’ve mentioned going to college, so we don’t have to go deeply into this, but what’s kind of the rest of that trajectory, that line that took you from fifth grade to going to college somewhere?
Rama Yigit (00:27:42): Yeah. Okay. So I imagine nobody would want to go to school after seeing that, “Wow, this is how school is. Five years. All I have learned is different ways of torturing people.”
Adam Williams (00:27:55): Sure. It would make you want to quit and stay home in the village and not go anywhere.
Rama Yigit (00:28:00): Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. But it comes to children being workforce. So when I’m not going to school, this time, my father was like, “Okay, let’s do like I did with the older brothers. I’m going to take you to another village far away and you’re going to take care of a hundred cows of this family.”
First I was like, “Yeah, better than school.” And then my father took me to this village, first time I’m being sent far away from home and I’m going to be there for six months to just basically take care of this… And this is very common. There’s a word for it. All my older brothers did it. They go for a summer, take care of somebody else’s livestock. Yeah. When I was taken to that village, I first was very scared because that was my first time being out of my own village and everything looked so different and I was very scared. I was scared that snake was going to show up somewhere.
Adam Williams (00:29:04): I’m scared of that too.
Rama Yigit (00:29:06): Yes. So I just remember sitting down and just crying, like while herding these hundred cows, just crying.
Adam Williams (00:29:15): How old were you then?
Rama Yigit (00:29:17): I had just finished fifth grade, so I would be 13. And then the owners came and they saw me. They were like, “Well, you are a child, you can’t do this.” And he sent me back home. Put me on a bus, send me back home. So when I got back home, I just begged my father that I was like, “I would go to school. I really, please allow me to go to school, because that was worse.”
Adam Williams (00:29:47): When you thought that school equaled essentially torture, you thought that was better than having to go to another village and watch somebody’s livestock?
Rama Yigit (00:29:58): Yes, because it was so difficult to not be able to eat food, because I was only used to eating food from our own house or in the other houses in the village. And what just put me in tears, of course, I was scared, and then when I was going to have a lunch, there was a bread that they made with barley, and I had never had barley bread.
Adam Williams (00:30:24): Instead of wheat?
Rama Yigit (00:30:25): Instead of wheat. And I couldn’t eat it. I was like, I could see the bits, I was like, “I can’t eat this.” And the cheese they had made, the person who prepped my lunch, I just never forget this. There was fingerprints of dirt on the white cheese. It was like she hold it, and then I smelled the manure. I was like, “There is no way I’m going to eat this up.” So I was like, I’m… Because the school in the village ended, I knew I was going to go to a different school, which was in town, we would go with a school bus, it’s 20 minutes away. It’s a big school, big school with maybe like 600, 700 students.
Adam Williams (00:31:07): Were they all Kurdish as well?
Rama Yigit (00:31:11): I would say like 95%, 96%. Because now it’s a town. There are people from the West who are doctors or police officers came to the village and their children are also there. But the whole town is Kurdish, only people who came from West to work their children are Turkish.
Adam Williams (00:31:30): Were those sympathetic people, non-Kurdish people who were sympathetic for Kurds? So they were willing basically to be in the presence and send their kids to be in the presence of an almost entirely Kurdish school?
Rama Yigit (00:31:45): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:31:46): That would seem like maybe the idea of sympathy is not, well, certainly not the word I would like to use, but it kind of seems like at least somebody who is willing to be kind and be among people that society-wide around Turkey, look down on?
Rama Yigit (00:32:00): Well, you need to look at this way. Also, it’s kind of seen as exile for the police officers, teachers from West to be sent to the Wast. It’s like going to the war zone, going to the…
Adam Williams (00:32:15): So that wasn’t necessarily their choice-
Rama Yigit (00:32:16): That wasn’t their choice.
Adam Williams (00:32:17): … they had done something that someone-
Rama Yigit (00:32:20): They’ve been appointed to come there and usually, I mean, I’m sure there are some that who love being there. I don’t want to talk for all of them, but a lot of them is very obvious they did not want to be there.
Adam Williams (00:32:35): I feel like as we’re talking here, it’s almost matter of fact between you who come from this place and these circumstances, and me who representing anyone listening, we have, I can’t imagine living under these conditions and being viewed as, I don’t even think second class is the right way to describe it.
So I don’t want to be dismissive of the psychological and emotional impacts of being a human being in this world and in this country where you’re from and have people treated as if to be with you is some sort of punishment, that your language and your culture and everything are not allowed. I don’t know how to move forward with that. I just wanted to say… I want to do this respectfully and with regard to what that really feels like and not come off as dismissive or acting as if there’s not feelings involved in this.
Rama Yigit (00:33:38): Yeah. I mean, when I say this, I feel these things too. The truth is I didn’t know that it was very unusual that until I left it, until it’s in the past. When I think about it, when I meet other people who react this way. And just I feel like I did not let it turn me into a violent person when I think that’s what their goal was if they had a goal.
Adam Williams (00:34:13): I think the goal in that kind of situation surely must be to break you, to break your spirit, to make you not even want to rise up and bother with violence.
Rama Yigit (00:34:24): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:34:24): But it’s such a natural response that at some point a population is going to rise against that. They’re going to be angry, and what they are doing is creating a lot of bitterness and anger, and at some point there’s only going to be a violent outbursts because there’s nothing else you can possibly do. You lose control of it.
Rama Yigit (00:34:47): Well, this is what happened. A group actually did rise in 1970s. They realized, well, they say they realized that there was no way to gain any rights, equal rights through peaceful protests or through the election system in Turkey. So they are considered a terrorist organization, and they are in the mountains volunteer people, volunteering men and women going to the mountains to actually fight with Turkey for, they say for the price of Kurdish people. And so what this does is gives Turkey an incredible excuse to criminalize, marginalize somebody for only listening to Kurdish music because they speak the same language.
(00:35:54): And this is what happened to me. Growing up, a lot of times we listened to Kurdish music secretly. We would bury it after listening to it, because the Turkish police or soldiers would come search every house to see if you have anything related to Kurdish. So I didn’t realize how dangerous it was when I was so excited to buy my first computer after working a full summer to buy this computer that I was going to use in college. I was very excited.
(00:36:30): Of course, I downloaded a lot of Kurdish music to it, and I didn’t even realize what was in the background. I didn’t know that there were some music that was made by members of PKK, but they were Kurdish music. They were music that my mom would understand, I would understand. So I was just listening to those and I was in college in Ankara. I had just moved to an apartment with a couple of friends. And one morning at 5:00 A.M. I woke up with 10 police officers with guns in my apartment. I’m in the bed and they’re yelling, “Don’t move, don’t move.”
(00:37:11): And I’m just listening to… I’m obeying what they’re saying and they’re searching everywhere. Just like my childhood, when they would come to the house, look for anything, and I was the only one with the computer at the apartment. So they’re like, “Whose computer is this?” I was like, “It’s mine.” They copied everything to a machine to their own that was in the computer, and they took me a computer with them. And then they arrested a roommate that they were looking for.
Adam Williams (00:37:42): They weren’t even looking–
Rama Yigit (00:37:43):
They were looking for my [inaudible 00:37:44].
Adam Williams (00:37:44): It wasn’t even a random search, they were looking for one of your roommates?
Rama Yigit (00:37:46): Yes, exactly.
Adam Williams (00:37:48):
And so you got caught up in that?
Rama Yigit (00:37:49): I just met. I got caught up in that. So I had just met these people. I moved in because it was so cheap. The housing was… I knew they were Kurdish because yeah.
Adam Williams (00:37:59): Okay.
Rama Yigit (00:38:00): So I moved in. Right after I moved in, the police raid happened, and then six months later I got a call from the police station saying that I needed to go and pick up my computer. That’s what they told me. But when I went there, they put me in a room and they interrogated me. And they show me things that they found in my computer, Kurdish music, and they’re like, “Why do you have this in your computer?” And I literally said, “I didn’t know that it was a crime to have this in my computer.” And they just wrote it down. And they asked me some other stuff, things that weren’t in my computer. That was the most difficult part about that interrogation because they were like, “Well, we found this article.” About the some acts, some violent acts and their history. The articles about it.
(00:39:00): I was like, “I have never heard of this. I don’t know how it got there.” And then he was like, “Well, it’s your computer, right?” I was like, “Yes, but I don’t know how this got there.” And they were like, “Could your roommates have downloaded them?” I was like, “I don’t know.” It was just so much psychological pressure that at the end they had to write that, “Hey, these things were found. But he said that his roommates might have downloaded them.” Which made me look like I was just blaming, but I was completely psychological pressure.
(00:39:36): And anyway, so this happened. I got out, they gave me my computer, and this was the first time I realized the seriousness of the situation. I’m like, “Wow, they are charging me that I’m… They’re charging me like I’m a terrorist literally right now.” Even with the interaction with the police, because the first thing he told me, he was like, “Look at you. Your parents send you all the way here for you to go to school, find a job, look what you’re doing.” When I’m just not doing anything at all. I just showed how to pick up my computer.
Adam Williams (00:40:14): I did some research, a little bit, on trying to understand before you and I would talk about what’s going on in Turkey and with regard to the Kurds. And it seems like there have been laws in more recent decades and more recent years that have increasingly intensified the hatred, if that’s not overstating it, and have ruled almost everything is terrorism. It’s a word that they’re applying extremely broadly.
Rama Yigit (00:40:39): Yes, absolutely.
Adam Williams (00:40:40): So that such a thing renders you and anybody who is a Kurd who is existing almost is a terrorist.
Rama Yigit (00:40:48): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (00:40:48): Simply for not matching whatever they want you to be.
Rama Yigit (00:40:51): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (00:40:53): Did it cross your mind that the police officers might not have found those things on your computer and they were using those to-
Rama Yigit (00:41:01): Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That’s exactly, I 100% believe that’s what went on.
Adam Williams (00:41:07): When they interrogated you, did that turn violent and scary?
Rama Yigit (00:41:12): No. It’s definitely scary with the psychological pressure. I can only say this words, but you really had to be there with the way a man of a position of power with a gun is there looking at you like you are not a human, questioning you like the court has already decided whether you’re guilty or not, I’m already guilty.
Adam Williams (00:41:39): And you feel like the only way out of that, the fastest way out of it is to simply comply, hoping that somehow there’s mercy on the other end of it?
Rama Yigit (00:41:47): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (00:41:47): But there’s not.
Rama Yigit (00:41:47): There’s not.
Adam Williams (00:41:49): All they’re looking for you to is go along with it.
Rama Yigit (00:41:53): Give them more names, give them more people.
Adam Williams (00:41:54): And justify them, and sure, so now they’ve got you appearing to turn against your roommates who you don’t actually even have a real relationship with. Do you know what they were coming there looking for that roommate for? Was he involved in anything like PKK or anything like that that you just didn’t know?
Rama Yigit (00:42:11): I honestly am not sure. Later, I mean, in the indictment says there was a fight at one of the universities between students with the opposite ideologies and somebody was stabbed in that fight. And then, yeah, and that’s why they were looking for him. But the thing is, it turned out that the way they wrote the indictment, they say that I was also in that fight stabbing somebody while I don’t even know where this happened.
Adam Williams (00:42:43): Wow, okay. You are in this country and have been for several years seeking asylum. You came here initially for that summer related to college. You thought you were just going to be here for a summer, it sounds like then?
Rama Yigit (00:42:56): Yes, absolutely. I had gotten my both ways, plane ticket, round trip, even though I went to the police station before, they told me that I was going to hear from the judge, I still had little hope in the law system in Turkey, in courts. Because what they were charging me for, being a member of terrorist organization based on the music they found in my computer, I was like, I can easily tell them, “Hey, how would I have known that this was a crime?” And I was like, another thing they say that I stabbed somebody in the day that I have proof I was in my classroom, that I had a class at the university, I signed it, the attendance, I was not anywhere else.
(00:43:43): So I had hope that I would explain all this to court, I’ll be free. And then when I got to US in summer of 2016, a coup attempt happened. A group tried to overthrow the government in July 2016. Right after this happened, the president declared the state of emergency, which meant that anybody that the government thought was a suspicious was being arrested right away without a trial, without a defense, anything, a state of emergency, a coup attempt just happened. We have no time to go to court.
Adam Williams (00:44:30): Everybody’s guilty.
Rama Yigit (00:44:31): Everybody’s guilty. Everybody who we think is suspicious is guilty.
Adam Williams (00:44:34): Which easily brings in about 20 million Kurds.
Rama Yigit (00:44:37): Absolutely. So that was the time where hundreds, thousands of students, journalists, politicians, all got arrested who are still in prison, who a lot of them went to the Europe Human Rights Court because Turkey is a member and has to obey the rules. And even though they have said many times that Turkey is detaining all these people who without A, what do you say, who have not committed a crime, only for political reasons. So those people should be let free but Turkey wouldn’t obey.
Adam Williams (00:45:20): Is Erdogan the president at that time?
Rama Yigit (00:45:23): Yeah, he’s been for 20 years.
Adam Williams (00:45:25): Is president the word we use? Is that officially his title?
Rama Yigit (00:45:29): He’s president.
Adam Williams (00:45:30): But really the way he’s governing is not what we here might think of as the role of a president. It sounds more like, if I can use the word dictator or something of that sort in some of the behaviors. Is that dicey for you to talk about?
Rama Yigit (00:45:49): Yes. Because I am honestly a little bit scared of– my family has been threatened before, because what I posted on social media here.
Adam Williams (00:46:04): All the way from here?
Rama Yigit (00:46:04): And I stopped.
Adam Williams (00:46:06): They were following you from here?
Rama Yigit (00:46:07): And the last time was, it was February of 2021 when I did a post, my father was threatened. I didn’t make the connection. I did another post just saying who I would vote for in a legal political campaign. I just said I would vote for this predominantly Kurdish party. And they called my father again and my father was like, “They’re really harassing me.” And so, I mean, I am not very scared, I would of course use any word, especially the one you used.
Adam Williams (00:46:45): Are you scared more for your family than-
Rama Yigit (00:46:46): I’m scared for my family.
Adam Williams (00:46:47): … for your own well-being here?
Rama Yigit (00:46:48): No, I am not scared for my own scared of-
Adam Williams (00:46:51): But they are tracking then, clearly they’re aware of where you are and they are paying attention to… Which that sort of behavior of a government is baffling to me, in part because so much in terms of resources, so many people, so much time goes into trying to track and control people. I feel like there are better ways if we turn to the more humane. I know that sounds naive, especially in a world where unfortunately the experiences you’re talking about are not, I don’t know how common or not they are, but they certainly exist in some similar form in many places around the world.
(00:47:30): Just it’s a baffling thing to me to try to use fear and intimidation and violence and hatred to control people, rather than gain some sort of humane, compassionate cooperation. We can all do better when we all do better by each other. So I’ve been curious how you have contact with your family if Kurdish as a language is not allowed, your parents, I assume nobody in your family, they still don’t know Turkish. How do you have contact with them in that village where, I mean, do I assume there’s no internet?
Rama Yigit (00:48:08): There is now, yes. They have it now. Well, they speak only Kurdish, and it’s not that the Turkish police is policing them in their house to not speak Kurdish. Right. It’s more like-
Adam Williams (00:48:22): Phone lines.
Rama Yigit (00:48:23): They do listen to phone lines, but they won’t come after you because you spoke in Kurdish on the phone. Because they say they’re not that bad, it’s not illegal to speak Kurdish, it’s illegal to speak Kurdish in government places, which is school’s one of them, because they’re public schools, they belong to the government. So me speaking in the streets, in Ankara, in Istanbul, in Turkish is not constitutionally illegal.
Adam Williams (00:48:54): To speak Kurdish?
Rama Yigit (00:48:55): To speak Kurdish. In the school it is.
Adam Williams (00:48:57): Yes. But to speak Kurdish on the streets of Ankara-
Rama Yigit (00:49:01): It’s legal.
Adam Williams (00:49:01): It doesn’t matter who hears you?
Rama Yigit (00:49:03): It’s legal, but it doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Adam Williams (00:49:07): Sure.
Rama Yigit (00:49:08): Does that make sense?
Adam Williams (00:49:09): Okay. Yeah, it does. It does.
Rama Yigit (00:49:09): Yeah. So it’s like even though it’s legal, but somebody might just punch you or… Have just a violent reaction to you because you speak Kurdish, because there is a lot of people who have, I think this is where it comes from, the people who have very strong reactions towards Kurdish, especially. A lot of them, they don’t only hate Kurdish people, they’re just little racist thinking that the Turkish is superior than all the other races. It’s not like, really? I hate Kurdish people. It’s like, actually, I hate all the other races or ethnicities because they’re inferior.
(00:49:51): Here’s what I think it comes from. So in, I think it was 2011 that, what was…? The UNESCO, I think. Before then Turkey was practicing this really inhumane practice with children. Every morning, and this was my lifetime too, every single morning I would go to the school line up in front of the school with all the other kids without speaking any Turkish, the first thing we had to memorize was Turkish, national anthem. And here is how it goes. It’s very long. So it starts with “I am Turkish, I’m honest, I am hardworking.” And it keeps going. And at the end you finish with “How happy to the one who says, I am Turkish.” Every single day. This is the first thing I memorized in Turkish without knowing what I was saying. And all the Turkish students also memorize this. So this was declared very against human rights and was-
Adam Williams (00:51:03): Indoctrination.
Rama Yigit (00:51:04): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:51:05): Especially for you as a Kurd being forced to embrace essentially your oppressors.
Rama Yigit (00:51:12): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:51:14): You mentioned the psychological pressure of interrogation. It seems to me that there would be this psychological strain and stress of simply existing. You’re on that street and you don’t know who might take exception to you talking to a roommate in Kurdish. Or you’re at a cafe or anywhere. When you were in the classroom, for instance, you had to speak Turkish?
Rama Yigit (00:51:38): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:51:39): Which you eventually pieced together enough learning, it sounds like, when you were a child, when you first started going to school. Having to learn it by very violent means. Just the connections that must be going on inside of you, these things that you’re being forced to know and to do and to say and to deny, it’s just stunning and it’s heartbreaking.
Rama Yigit (00:52:10): It is. But I also look at it this way, that it allows me to enjoy the life so much more. To think that this happened to me in the past. Of course, it’s very difficult to think that it’s happening right now to the children. Maybe not as intense as it was during my time, because now there is technology and hopefully people are better these days. But I feel like it’s taught me a lot. It’s just taught me to not how to be.
Adam Williams (00:52:48): When you came to the United States, again, it was the summer of 2016, you talked about a coup happening in Turkey, which made things worse there. I think, well, let me ask, what happened that made it clear you could not go back? Because you’ve not gone back ever since. We’re talking eight years and counting now.
Rama Yigit (00:53:11): More than eight years, yes. So what happened was that my parents received a document from the court, a court summon, saying that I was a suspicious member of a terrorist organization because they found this, this, this in my computer and everything’s written down.
Adam Williams (00:53:35): Do your parents understand?
Rama Yigit (00:53:37): No. They too–
Adam Williams (00:53:39): The bogus nature of this, or do they actually think that you are somebody that they have not known?
Rama Yigit (00:53:42): So, no. So what happened was my family was like, “Hey, this person brought these papers and they said it was for you.” And I told my brother, I was like, “Take a picture and send them to me.”
Adam Williams (00:53:52): It’s got to be in Turkish, doesn’t it?
Rama Yigit (00:53:54): In Turkish.
Adam Williams (00:53:54): So they wouldn’t even understand it. They wouldn’t be able to read it.
Rama Yigit (00:53:56): Yeah. Even if it’s Kurdish, they won’t read it. They were, they were scared. They were like, “Well, this person brought them. They said, it’s from the court.” And they got super scared already. And then I read it. I basically said, yeah, I told them what happened because they were like, “What is this?” I was like, “Well, when I was in coll… They took my computer. I never told you anything, but now they’re charging me this.” But I tried to not make them scared. I was like, “This is not a really big deal because I can easily prove that I’m innocent.”
(00:54:28): But after that, I just thought about it more. I had taken some international law classes at the university, so I was a little bit familiar with the asylum. And honestly, I was suddenly super excited that I had received those papers, because they were proof that I was being persecuted based on my ethnicity, that now I could stay here longer, have a reason. Because from the time I stepped into the US, I really felt free. I felt so light. I felt like this was a dream. And when I got those papers, I was so happy that I had a chance that I didn’t have to go back because I was very dreading to go back to the court not knowing what were going to-
Adam Williams (00:55:30): When things were not clear, you didn’t know what you would be going home to?
Rama Yigit (00:55:31): Exactly. Yes.
Adam Williams (00:55:34): And how dangerous that might be. So this became evidence, something clear and hard evidence that you could give the US government and say, “See, there’s something. I’m at risk.”
Rama Yigit (00:55:45): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (00:55:48): Again, 2016 is very early on the leading edge of when in this country we have what is relatively a tumultuous period here.
Rama Yigit (00:55:59): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:56:00): That is of course still continuing. I wonder how you feel about that and if you have felt at risk being in this country as someone who is Muslim, someone who is coming from outside of the country? Because it’s only a matter of months later, within six months or so, that there are bans against people from a number of Muslim countries coming into the country, into the US, and there’s been this ride of politics in this country that you would not have expected and we wouldn’t have expected. And I just wonder how it makes you feel, and if you do continue to feel safe here.
Rama Yigit (00:56:32): I do. Yes, I do continue to feel safe. Again, I think it’s because of how worse it was for me in Turkey.
Adam Williams (00:56:38): Sure
Rama Yigit (00:56:38): So coming here when all this was happening, I looked at it more like it was happening to somebody else. I never thought that I was in fact affected by it. I was feeling so free that I honestly didn’t feel any unsafe here.
Adam Williams (00:56:56): It feels like a nightmare, I think, to a lot of us in this country because relatively speaking it is so different. But again, if we look at what’s happening in so many countries around the world and the way governments are functioning and the way people are treated and abused, yeah, this probably feels and looks like to people it’s like, “We’ve been dealing with this forever and worse.”
Rama Yigit (00:57:17): Worse. Yeah, exactly. So I could understand when people were expressing fear, but I honestly there was never a worry that, “Oh, what’s going to happen to me here?”
Adam Williams (00:57:29): It’s not going to be worse than what would happen to you if you went home.
Rama Yigit (00:57:29): Exactly.
Adam Williams (00:57:32): What would happen to you? If you were to go home right now? What would happen? What do you expect would happen with the government? Because I assume they would know as soon as you land in the country, you’re going through passport control or whatever in an airport, there’s no escaping it.
Rama Yigit (00:57:46): Yeah, there is an arrest warrant for me in Turkey.
Adam Williams (00:57:51): They’ve got to have such a huge database of people that they’re looking to… Again, back to the resources. You’re spending so much in trying to do things that are unnecessary to people. But okay, sorry, please continue. What would happen to you?
Rama Yigit (00:58:08): They would arrest me right away.
Adam Williams (00:58:10): At the airport.
Rama Yigit (00:58:11): At the airport and take me to the police station and send me to jail, a prison until the next court date, which I don’t know when it is, but basically every three or four months, they reschedule the court. And when I don’t show up, they keep rescheduling it. So they would arrest me first and wait for the court date.
Adam Williams (00:58:34): And it worsens every time, I assume? It’s like adding interest onto a credit card you’re not paying against.
Rama Yigit (00:58:39): Exactly.
Adam Williams (00:58:40): Every time you don’t show up every few months. And this has been going for several years, most of a decade, they’re getting more and more angry with you, I assume.
Rama Yigit (00:58:48): Yeah. And I’m very scared of being tortured again, but in worse ways than I was before as a child.
Adam Williams (00:58:57): Yeah, sure. As a man, they’ll expect you to take their worst.
Rama Yigit (00:58:59): Because I have heard, I know people whose basically whose toenails were pulled with pliers. And I’ve just… There’s so much fear. I would honestly… Yeah,
Adam Williams (00:59:14): In the research that I was just taking, It did not take very much looking. The treatment in the prisons of Kurdish prisoners is unfathomable. Do you feel like regardless of if you receive asylum here and citizenship in the United States, do you feel like there is ever a time you can return to see your family again? You’ve not seen them in more than eight years.
Rama Yigit (00:59:41): I want to have hope, but a lot will have to change. And right now it doesn’t look like anything is changing. But the thing is, honestly, there’s something very freeing about it, because I adapt very easily. That’s one of my strengths. And I feel like just being here thinking about this is, it has made the whole earth, the whole universe my home. I see the stars, I see the sun, I see the moon. I feel like I have so much larger perspective, so much strong. I feel stronger. I mean, I do feel homesick sometimes to especially, I just miss the nature of the hills that I would walk. I would shepherd.
Adam Williams (01:00:39): Where you grew up around the village.
Rama Yigit (01:00:40): Exactly. Around the village.
Adam Williams (01:00:42): Would you sleep out under those stars when you were a shepherd and you would be out with–
Rama Yigit (01:00:47): All the time.
Adam Williams (01:00:48): … I don’t know if it was actually sheep you were herding, goat.
Rama Yigit (01:00:48): Yes. Sheep and goat and cows, yeah. All the time. Yeah.
Adam Williams (01:00:54): Yeah, I mean, you would spend seasons out there probably, right?
Rama Yigit (01:00:57): Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (01:00:57): Just sleeping in the fields with the animals?
Rama Yigit (01:01:00): Yes. And also the best part was I would graze with the animals, because there was so much generational wealth of knowledge of the plants all around. That’s what I really miss.
Adam Williams (01:01:17): So you learn how to forage?
Rama Yigit (01:01:19): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:01:20): And eat off of the plants of the land.
Rama Yigit (01:01:21): Every single plant, so much, because this was again from my mom, from my sister, from all the other people who in spring we just go out every day we bring huge bags of greens and so many different types of vegetables and it all just grows everywhere. Because I felt like I could just have no food and survive in the nature. And that’s what I missed the most.
Adam Williams (01:01:50): Drink water from the streams?
Rama Yigit (01:01:51): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:01:52): Milk from the cows?
Rama Yigit (01:01:53): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:01:53): Goats
Rama Yigit (01:01:54): Never carry a water bottle because streams are all around.
Adam Williams (01:01:58): That sounds so light and free.
Rama Yigit (01:02:00): It’s very…
Adam Williams (01:02:01): You’re not needing anything.
Rama Yigit (01:02:02): No. Yeah. You have everything you need all around, all the plants, you make your gum, amazing gums with the milk you get from the plants.
Adam Williams (01:02:12): Like gum to chew, like chewing gum?
Rama Yigit (01:02:13): Chewing gum, but so much different. So much earthy, so much natural. And just we would make it’s like every time we were out there, it was like a ceremony, we would cut these roots, get the milk in a can, boil on fire, turn it into gum, and then sometimes make a lot and sell them to send it to the cities because they’re very medicinal too. So yeah, I really miss all the plants that I would forage. That’s what I miss the most. The mushrooms. And they’re so different here, plants and mushrooms.
Adam Williams (01:02:46): Do you forage here?
Rama Yigit (01:02:48): I do, yes.
Adam Williams (01:02:49): Do you talk with your siblings at all?
Rama Yigit (01:02:52): Yeah.
Adam Williams (01:02:52): Do you feel like since the days when you were a boy who was different because you were willing to go learn to milk cows and bake and things and they would tease you about that, do you feel like you’re able to have any sort of understanding relationship with them as you’re the one who’s, you’ve been gone for so long, you went and got educated and you’re wanted by the Turkish government, all these sorts of things. You have a very, very different life.
Rama Yigit (01:03:17): Yes. I mean, I speak to all my siblings, but I feel like who actually understands me is my sister without judging. She just is curious about what I do, how I live my life. I feel like my older brothers, my mom, my dad always is like, “You should be doing that, you should be doing that.” But-
Adam Williams (01:03:41): What do they think you should be doing?
Rama Yigit (01:03:43): They think I should be working all the time nonstop. Make a lot of money and send it to them.
Adam Williams (01:03:49): Aren’t you kind of working all the time? I mean, you work, I know a number of jobs.
Rama Yigit (01:03:54): I do.
Adam Williams (01:03:55): Besides being a baker.
Rama Yigit (01:03:57): I do, yeah, I do work a lot, but I also do play a lot. Because for me, what I work for, what motivates me to work is having that time to play.
Adam Williams (01:04:09): Which you didn’t get to do as a child.
Rama Yigit (01:04:11): Exactly. And that explains how I got into the circus, how I got learned [inaudible 01:04:17].
Adam Williams (01:04:17): Yeah, we haven’t even touched on that. That’s so far in the back of my mind because of this greater story. Tell me about the circus. How did you get involved in that and what do you do?
Rama Yigit (01:04:27): So here is how I got involved with it. I’ll go back little, I’ll go back to the Glacier National Park when I first arrived. And in July, I got those papers. I was like, “I’m going to stay here.” But I didn’t know where to go because I was just planning on staying there. A good friend who we worked together was going to school in Portland, Oregon, and she said that they had an empty room in a house, like a student house that I could move into.
So I moved there and then one of my roommate’s mom, who we met at the house, she visited and then she had sheep, she keeps sheep. And I told her about my experience with sheep and she invited me to her farm to help her out with the sheep. And so I did and I got to share my story. And I was also a little stressed about making money because my employment authorization had just expired. And because I applied for asylum, it would take a year for me to get employment authorization.
Adam Williams (01:05:38): For your first year of the asylum process, you’re supposed to not be able to work?
Rama Yigit (01:05:42): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:05:43): How do they expect people to be able to live and sustain life?
Rama Yigit (01:05:47): Good question. I don’t know. I don’t know. Anyways, I told my story and she just asked. She was like, “How can I help you? What do you need? What do you want?” And I was like, “I really want to learn the English language in an academic level so I can talk to people.” And she was like, “Yeah, I will pay for it. Let’s register you for the community college. You can take ESL classes.” And then she also was like, “I will pay for your rent also, so you have time to put into the studies.” So that was a big life change for me because from the time that I remember myself when I was born, for the first time, I felt like there was no financial weight on me that I had to make money. And during that time, so the first day, first week, I go to the community college, to my ESL class, and then I see this person juggling on a unicycle, five balls, doing a show.
(01:07:05): And I just went in the front row and I was so amazed by the performance. I had never seen anybody juggle before in real life and on a unicycle, I was amazed. And he needed a volunteer. I raised my hand so bad and he picked me. I was just having really good time. And I waited for him to finish his show, to pack up. And then I went to him afterwards. I was like, “It was amazing. Were you born with this skill or can you learn?” He was like, “You can totally learn.” And he invited me and he turned out to be a clown with Clowns Without Borders, which is an organization that they do amazing work.
(01:07:49): And then I started getting involved with them. I would go juggle with them, learn with them once a week, every week. And then eventually I learned how to unicycle, I learned how to juggle. I learned a lot of skills. And then there was a big workshop, a clowning workshop that Clowns Without Borders organized. And people from all around the states came to the workshop, and there were two people from Salida at that workshop, and they were Joe and Joan Lobeck. So we met and they told me about Salida Circus. They just mentioned they would probably have a position open for me, and they gave me Jennifer Dempsey’s number. They said, I should talk to Jennifer.
Adam Williams (01:08:34): Yeah, she’s been on the podcast, so I’ve had the chance to talk with her.
Rama Yigit (01:08:37): Yes. So I called Jennifer, I was like, “Hey, this is what I do. This is what I’ve learned. I heard you might have a position.” And she was like, “Yeah, we have a six months long internship position and there’s housing. We’ll pay you this much.” It sounded like a dream. And I thanked the person in Portland for helping me find my path, basically. And I had already finished all the ESL classes. I felt very confident with my English, and I packed up, got on my car, drove from Portland to Salida, and then after the six months of internship, I really fell in love with the region, with people, with everything and I stayed.
Adam Williams (01:09:25): When was that? What year?
Rama Yigit (01:09:26): This was the new year of 2019 is when I got here.
Adam Williams (01:09:31): I’m thinking about the range of experiences that you’ve had so far. There are some that would seem to be very difficult, you could say. Right? And then there are the ones where you connect with people and there’s a warm, honest human connection, and there’s generosity and there’s this, I like to use the word serendipity, these things that lead us along the path of life, is fascinating to me.
Rama Yigit (01:09:57): Yes. Absolutely. This is why, just like that Zen story of maybe, maybe not we talked about, it’s like,
Adam Williams (01:10:05): Yeah, good, bad, I don’t know.
Rama Yigit (01:10:06): Yeah, good, bad. Exactly. You never really know what is good or what is bad, because you never know what it’s going to lead you to.
Adam Williams (01:10:11): It’s such an incredible perspective, especially considering the experiences that we’ve already talked about that you’ve had early in your life.
Rama Yigit (01:10:19): Yes. So I feel like for the mental state I’m in now, for how good I feel, how content I feel, I would say it was worth it for maybe that, I don’t know, it’s just got me here, got me where I am.
Adam Williams (01:10:35): I think it says something, and there’s a lot of value in the fact that you appreciate where you are.
Rama Yigit (01:10:40): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:10:41): Is I think the important point as you move forward, rather than I wouldn’t want anybody to go through the torturous experiences.
Rama Yigit (01:10:49): Of course.
Adam Williams (01:10:49): And at the same time, I see you as this resilient and joyful person. Sometimes on here with people when they’re talking about their experiences and they include some dark and heavy things, I find it sort of remarkable that when you can come through that and still be the person who has gratitude and has joy and is out there to play instead of turning toward bitterness and anger and other things that you could be doing. And so I bring that up from time to time because I think it’s just such an amazing characteristic or however that should be described.
Rama Yigit (01:11:21): Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I feel like this is my way to resist by just feeling joy.
Adam Williams (01:11:27): To live the life and to be the full human?
Rama Yigit (01:11:29): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:11:29): That you actually are, but the Turkish government does not want to let you be?
Rama Yigit (01:11:32): Yes. Exactly.
Adam Williams (01:11:33): That’s a form of protest.
Rama Yigit (01:11:34): Exactly. Yeah. And one of the things that I also really love is connecting with people from all different backgrounds. And I feel like just having the philosophy of anybody I meet is somebody that I will learn something from and maybe I will teach something has allowed me to make amazing connections where it’s just so easy to connect with people.
Adam Williams (01:12:05): You left Salida for, was it a couple of years?
Rama Yigit (01:12:06): Couple of years, yes.
Adam Williams (01:12:09): That you went to Boston. What was that trip for? And then I’m curious too, you decided to come back to Salida.
Rama Yigit (01:12:09): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:12:15): So I am kind of curious about that two year period there for you.
Rama Yigit (01:12:21): I really felt like I wanted to learn about immigration law because of going through the asylum process, I just felt like there was too much that I didn’t know that I was overwhelmed with for my own situation. And I have a really good friend who was living in Boston and I just moved in with her and I just applied for school and I also worked for circus companies in Boston. But after I finished school, I worked at an immigration law firm. I was working as a paralegal, but I realized that living in Boston wasn’t really for me because I would have a lot of homesick dreams about Salida.
Adam Williams (01:13:23): Oh, about Salida.
Rama Yigit (01:13:24): About Colorado. Yes. And that was so… I was like, “I feel homesick towards home where I can’t go, but I’m going to go back to where I can go.”
Adam Williams (01:13:35): Okay. Yeah
Rama Yigit (01:13:36): Because it feels home also to me. It really, I would see the mountains in my dreams, I would see the river, I would feel the air and I was like, I know I really miss it, so I’m going to go back and now I can do the paralegal work online. I got that in my pocket and I learned so much about it. I can go back to my baking that I loved because, I knew I would come back, to be honest, because when I left, I put all my stuff, packaged it all, put it in a storage. I was like, here.
Adam Williams (01:14:11): Here, you left your things behind here, knowing you would come back to them?
Rama Yigit (01:14:15): Hoping I would come back, yes. And I did.
Adam Williams (01:14:19): Do you feel like you are part of this community? Do you feel welcomed into this community?
Rama Yigit (01:14:24): Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. This is why I am here. I definitely feel very welcomed, very loved, accepted by the community. I love walking out and seeing a lot of faces, talk to them, being present. I really, yeah, it’s definitely, I feel like I belong here to Chaffee County community.
Adam Williams (01:14:51): If we circle back to Rama’s Bread, your business as a baker of bread and baklava, taking in your whole story, how and where you learned to bake, the story of your family and that village and all the things, it’s incredible that you’re now using that here, I would say, as representation of your family and what your mother and sister taught you.
Rama Yigit (01:14:51): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:15:14): It’s representation of a culture that’s not allowed in the country where you’re from. It’s also livelihood or at least part of it, right?
Rama Yigit (01:15:23): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:15:24): Can you tell me what that means to you that this boy who wasn’t supposed to learn how to bake in that village is now bringing this to so many people here in the United States?
Rama Yigit (01:15:35): Yeah. It’s really my favorite thing to do in the whole world, to bake. And to me, it’s really sharing my culture, sharing because it’s not only the bread you eat, the baklava you eat, it’s that interaction we have when you get it. I feel like I really represent the culture I came from with all the aspects, not only through the food, of course, but through interaction, through making people feel cared for or caring for people, actually listening to them. And I really love that. I love connecting with people through having something to offer.
Adam Williams (01:16:22): There’s an element of you providing joy through your food, through the circus performance to someone who wasn’t given that same care that you ought to have had, I think, when you were younger.
Rama Yigit (01:16:34): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:16:35): So again, it comes back to the resilient spirit where you’re saying, “I know I was treated this way, but I have this to offer.” And it’s such an important piece of, I think the connection you have here in this community. People recognize you for that baking that you do.
Rama Yigit (01:16:50): Yes. And yeah, even though it’s a business, honestly, it’s never from my end, it’s never completely profit driven. I want to make people’s days really, that’s my goal. And a lot of times it works. As long as I keep doing that, I will feel successful.
Adam Williams (01:17:18): I want to say again how amazing that baklava is, and I brought my son to meet you at the recent farmer’s market, and he’s really taken with your story what little bit of it he already knows. And he definitely, he loves pastries and he definitely loved the baklava. So thank you very much, Rama it’s an honor to be able to talk with you. I appreciate your being able to share your story and your willingness to do that with me and everyone else.
Rama Yigit (01:17:44): Same. Well, I really appreciate your present energy, your wonderful questions, and all your time that you put into this. It’s been a pleasure.
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Adam Williams (01:18:02): Thanks for listening to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream Podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you. And if so, you can learn more in this episodes show notes at wearechaffeepod.com. If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me at adam@wearechaffeepod.com. I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever platform you use that has that functionality. I also welcome you telling others about the Looking Upstream Podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
(01:18:39): Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer, and photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado. And to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment. And to Lisa Martin, community advocacy coordinator for the We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative. You can learn more about the Looking Upstream Podcast at wearechaffeepod.com and on Instagram @wearechaffeepod.
You also can learn more about the overall We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative at wearechaffee.org. Until the next episode, as we say at We Are Chaffee, “share stories, make change.”
[Outro music, horns and guitar instrumental]
