As my own personal network grew over time, that list has expanded. Every job I have found in Turkey has been through connections. When I need a repairman, I simply ask around and suddenly just the person I need shows up, usually with a reference from a friend of a friend. And now, as I recently discovered, even my 6-year-old son has connections that I was not aware of. My son and I had to renew our Turkish passports this week. After going through the forms, and my hoping that I had enough photocopies as well as all the required photos, we headed out to the passport office. We paid the fees and waited until it was our turn to hand our paperwork over to the officer to process. As she sorted through our pile of papers, she looked over the counter at my son and said “Oh, Ali Adem, I hear that you are behaving better at school lately.” He looked up at her, nodded and smiled, apparently a little in awe of the woman in uniform addressing him. Surprised, I asked the officer how she knew my son had been showing off for the girls at school. “My daughter is in his class and has a little crush on him,” she explained, “she talks about him at home and how he speaks both English and Turkish fluently.”
We laughed and talked about the school and our children for a moment, and then returned back to the business of the passports. I needed an extra copy of our ID cards, and rather than being sent across the street to the photocopy shop to wait in line and then return to wait at the passport office again, the officer handed our cards to an assistant and asked him to make the copies for us. “They’re friends,” she told him, as he started to say we should go across the street like everyone else. “Her son is in the same class as my daughter,” she added. The assistant smiled, and said: “Oh, they’re family then. No problem. I’ll be right back with everything.” Within a few minutes our copies were made, forms stamped, sorted and ready to be processed for pickup in two days. Due in part to my son’s connections, we were in and out of the passport office in record time.
I realized on the way home that once again the Turkish networking system had eased our way. Surprising as it seems, a 6-year-old’s connections had saved us time. Too bad he doesn’t have a phone book that I can dig through for more connections. I guess I’ll just have to wait until he learns to write to find out who else he knows.
