Community

I think we've established already that L and I are not really 'big city' people.

Yet one of the best things about living in a city and not having a car is that we feel like we have a real community of people that we know living close to us. 

It's a 10 minute walk (at adult speed, more like 20-30 mins at toddler speed) to our nearest playground and our route there takes us directly past three different friends' apartments. And not just any friends, but all friends who very conveniently have similar aged children to J. As everyone walks everywhere in their immediate neighbourhood, we often end up bumping into friends in the street or on the way to or from the playground, which is lovely. In fact, I took J to the playground last Saturday morning and there were two other parents I knew and their respective children there.

There aren't really free/very cheap parent and toddler groups here like there are in the UK, so when we have rainy days (which has been quite a lot this winter) and the prospect of a long day trying to entertain a toddler beckons, I often end up getting together with friends at one of our houses for a rainy day play date - which is considerably easier when it's only a 5-15 minute walk between our houses. 

Walking everywhere from our flat also means that we get to know and recognise some of the local people living around us. We go and get our bread most days from the little corner shop, and say hello when we meet the proprietors out on the street. There are a couple of small underground car parks further down our road, and the men who run it spend most of their days standing at the car park entrance on the street ready to bring customers' cars in and out of the car park. They will almost always wave or come and say hello to J (who they know by name now) when we pass. We end up going to our little supermarket 5 minutes walk away most days and some of the staff there invariably wave/say hello/exclaim "cok tatlı" (which means 'very sweet') to J.

Our weekly home group is also a community that we love. It currently alternates between our house and another family's house, who live about a 20 minute walk from us, and several of the other attendees live in the immediate area. Typically we have representation from at least 3 and usually 4 continents. We love eating dinner together first and - well, I was going to write 'sharing together what is going on in our lives' but probably a more accurate description of our conversations would be 'updating on what's going on in people's lives and developing a trans-cultural hodge podge of banter and jokes in a mixture of English and Turkish'. 

There's also an online community of foreigners and foreign mums that I'm very grateful for. Facebook groups are wonderful things! I've learned many useful things about bringing up a child in Istanbul from these groups and they've proved to be very helpful in sourcing information about antenatal care here. There's something about being in the same boat together as foreigners here that makes people willing to freely share advice and experience with strangers.

We're so grateful for the friends and community we've found here :-)

What's normal?

I have learned a lot about antenatal care and childbirth in Istanbul over the last few months. Suffice to say, it's fairly different from the UK. Generally, if you can afford it, private doctors and hospitals are preferred. Turkey has a very high caesarean section rate and birth is often quite/very medicalised. Even if you find a doctor here who is 'pro-natural birth', their methods and practices probably differ considerably from what might be considered 'normal' in the UK with the NHS.

Since announcing my pregnancy, various people have asked me if all the 'normal' checks are done here, if there is 'normal' midwife care etc. Now, I have my own opinions on the two different systems and which practices/methods I prefer, and what should be 'normal', but it has got me thinking about how we use the concept of 'normal'. It's such a relative term, based on a mixture of our own experience, what we've heard as being the general way of doing things, and (hopefully) some facts and evidence as well. Yet it's also one we (myself definitely included here) can't help but use, because it's so intrinsic to how we make sense of the world around us - and so this post is most definitely not a criticism of anyone who has ever used the word 'normal' when communicating with us!

What is 'normal' differs from country to country, and you can state what is 'normal' without attaching a value judgement to it. To illustrate this, here's a made-up dialogue between two Turkish women, one of whom is experiencing the NHS antenatal system. Please note, this is in no way a criticism of either the Turkish or British health systems - I just want to try and show that what we think of as 'normal' is very subjective! Also my only experience of the healthcare system here has been private practice, so I am fully aware I am comparing private healthcare in Turkey to state healthcare in the UK.

Ayşe; Hello, how are things going in England? How's the pregnancy?
Havva: Things are going well thanks, I'm still getting my head round how things work here though. It's so different from Turkey.
Ayşe: Really? In what ways? Are they doing all the normal checks?
Havva: Well, if you're considered low-risk, you usually just seen midwives for your antenatal appointments. You might not even see a doctor for the birth!
Ayşe: Wow, that's so strange!
Havva: I know! And you know how at home you see a doctor every month and have a scan at each appointment? Here you might go 6 weeks without seeing a midwife, and if everything is okay, you only have 2 scans during your pregnancy.
Ayşe: That's definitely different to here. What if there's a problem, can you call your midwife?
Havva: Of course, but it's an office number, so it might be a different midwife you speak to. And instead of giving you a list of tests, you choosing a lab or hospital to go and get them done at, and sending the results to the doctor, in the UK they do your tests, get your test results then call you if there's a problem.
Ayşe: Interesting. When my friend had a baby here, if she had a question or needed to send test results to the doctor, she just Whatsapped her doctor. I guess you can't do that in the UK, right?
Havva: I don't think so...
Ayşe: So after the baby's born, will they do all the normal vaccinations?
Havva: Most of them are the same, but generally in the UK babies aren't given the BCG vaccine or the Hepatitis B vaccine. So I'll have to find a way to get them done somehow. And there's a couple of extra ones I hadn't really heard of.
Ayşe: I guess you'll find a way to work it out somehow...

It's a bit over the top, but the point stands - just as what I, coming from the UK and with experience of the NHS, consider 'normal' childbirth practices isn't necessarily 'normal' here, so a Turkish person would probably find that their experience of antenatal care under the NHS isn't what would be considered 'normal' in Turkey.

I see this in all kinds of areas of life here, and it is always challenging me to reconsider what I think is 'normal' and why - and reminds me that there are many types of 'normal'. It also reminds me not to assume that just because something is normal for me it's also normal for someone else.

Clearly, something that is considered 'normal' in a place can also be considered right/wrong/superior/inferior to what is 'normal' in other places (depending of course on your criteria for assessing morality, but that's a whole different post).

But just because something is or isn't normal doesn't imply that it's right or wrong - it might be just plain different.

(And for anyone who was wondering, I am super pleased that I have managed to find a doctor here whose practices and philosophy is much more in-line with what I consider 'normal' than what is usually considered 'normal' here.)