We have a car! There are several reasons I am glad we have a car but probably the biggest reason I'm grateful for our car is that our children can now travel safely in car seats in our car.
In the UK, the law regarding car seats for children is strict and I think generally accepted. Before a newborn baby leaves hospital, nurses will often check that there is a car seat. Failing to transport children, especially small children, safely in a car is usually seen as not only illegal but a moral failing of a parent, a form of neglect. I'm generalising, I'm sure there are parents in the UK who don't use car seats for their children, but on the whole the use of car seats for small children seems to have entered the collective consciousness in the UK as one of those things that you really should do. A similar thing could also be said about wearing seatbelts; over several decades the introduction of new laws and hard-hitting television adverts has helped increase seat belt usage and convince the vast majority of the UK public as to the necessity of wearing seatbelts.
In Turkey, the law is clear. Everyone in a car must wear a seatbelt and children under 150cm and less than 35kg must be seated in an appropriate child car seat. And children are not legally permitted to travel in the front of the car.
However, it is fair to say that here, although the law may be clear, it is flouted regularly. Although I have seen some car seats in cars here, it is very common for children to sit on the laps of parents (more generally in the back, sometimes in the front) or to sit by themselves in the back, without car seats and often without seat belts. It is also common for the maximum occupancy of the car to be exceeded, sometimes considerably.
This has put us in an interesting position. I don't like the fact that we've done it, but we have, when necessary, taken our children in cars without car seats. This was a short term measure (until we got a car) and wherever possible, we have gone out of our way to try and make sure we travelled safely. However, while Turks are usually very concerned about children's safety and wellbeing, from the people I've encountered here, there often seems to be a lack of understanding about the importance of both car seats and seatbelts.
We had anticipated that some people here wouldn't understand the priority we put on our children travelling in car seats and that was a major factor in deciding to get a seven seater car - we wanted to be able to help by giving people lifts to meetings but still wanted J and S to be safe. However, when we first got our car, we hadn't really thought through what we would do if we were giving lifts to people who didn't use seat belts (never mind car seats), which led to at least one uncomfortable situation where we had children (not ours) in our car who were not safely restrained. After checking with a couple of people, we've learned that we can politely request people in our car to wear a seatbelt without causing offence and now do so. We also don't take for granted that everyone will automatically wear their seatbelts and check; just the other day I had to remind a 17 year old to wear his seat belt. Car seats are a trickier issue because we really would cause offence if we refused to take somebody because there was no car seat. In addition, car seats are expensive. So we're still thinking through how to approach this one.
This whole issue has brought up bigger questions though. Generally people like us learn to think very carefully and wait to make judgements on any cultural issue. We have to appreciate that different cultural practices come from different cultural values, and usually that's fine. Different, and maybe sometimes a bit weird to us, but fine. I understand that Turkish culture is different from British/Western culture and just as there are both good and really terrible things that come about due to Western culture, there are similar good and bad things that arise from Turkish culture.
So we understand and accept that some things in this culture are just different and maybe a bit uncomfortable but depending on your cultural viewpoint, are not by themselves morally bad. For example, when I first heard that traditionally a woman would need to get permission from both her father and her older brother to get married, I was shocked. Why should an older brother get a say? But in this culture, an older brother has important responsibilities regarding his family, and as I live longer in this culture, I can appreciate the roots and logic of the practice.
But what do you do when there is something in the culture (in this case, a lack of awareness of the life-saving importance of seat belts and car seats) that you think it just plain wrong? Do we accept it anyway - we are guests in this country, after all - and just keep our thoughts to ourselves? Do we try and explain what we think? If so, how do we do that in a sensitive away, without causing unnecessary offence? How would we feel if a foreigner who'd lived a couple of years in the UK started trying to explain why something that British people were doing was wrong and should be done differently?
I don't have easy answers to these and we're still wrestling through with some of these questions. I think that one of the major factors has to be how important something is. Some people in Turkey believe that eating ice cream or going barefoot indoors in winter will make you ill. To be honest, those issues are not important enough that I'm going to worry too much about them. And if someone tells me my children should wear socks or they'll get ill, I'll happily explain why I don't believe that, but I'm not going to insist on converting everyone I meet to my viewpoint. However, seat belts and car seats are important and can literally be life or death issues. So that has to have an impact.
I've mentioned that we now have a practice of asking everyone in our car to wear a seat belt. I think that, given the right moment, I would take an opportunity to explain why seat belts (and car seats) are so important. And if I knew someone who was going to have a baby and I suspected that they were not thinking of buying a car seat, I might gently broach the subject with them and ask if they were going to get one. And undoubtedly as I spend longer in this culture, I might learn to take a different approach.
In thinking this through though, one of the points that has been going around my head has been how would I respond if I lived in the UK and a non-British person tried to tell me about something that many/most British people do which they believed was wrong and dangerous. Would I have the humility to listen to them? Could I conceive that I, and most of my country, might be wrong on an issue? Or if I was in the minority and happened to agree with the foreigner on the issue they were telling me about, would I be prepared to use my non-foreigner status in the UK to try and convince other British people that they should change their minds on a particular issue?
