Report of day 3 in Ankara


When I woke up, I remembered a nice situation which happened to me in the Milan airport. Before taking the plane, I met a girl at the check-in line who started talking to me in Turkish, thinking I was Turkish and was asking me to help her because she had too much luggage and didn’t want to pay the fine. I just helped translating what she needed and didn’t see her anymore until we met at the Istanbul airport. There, she insisted I take her phone number, telling me that if I needed anything in Ankara, I had to call her. So I sent her a text message telling her we were at Babil café. 

She came and from the beginning a light-hearted atmosphere was created. When I started talking to her about the Message she immediately tuned in with us. She commented that when she had told her mother she was going out to meet a girl she had met at the airport, her mother had looked at her as if she were crazy… But she said she had noticed something pushing her to come and that she was probably looking for something without knowing what it was. She said that when she came back to her city after the years spent studying in Italy, she was afraid to go back to the landscape which had not allowed her to have international relations and that we were giving her an opportunity she didn’t want to loose. As a matter of fact we spent some very inspiring hours together, touching upon many interesting issues.

When we told her we had to go fix the ambit before our friends arrived, she thanked us a lot for the talk and was very sorry not to be able to come to the Salita.
The evening was also lovely: Zeinep arrived with three friends of her which participated in the ceremonies for the first time. Huseyin stayed with them for a long while, explaining how the ceremonies worked and introducing them to the book of the Message.
In the meantime Aylin arrived and we went to the Salita where we did some very beautiful ceremonies. In that moment, I realized the reach of Huseyin’s contribution. If he hadn’t been there, it would’ve been very difficult to create such a light atmosphere with people we didn’t know and who didn’t speak our language. It was also very clear that he did so from an inner experience and that he felt an inner responsibility to present our project to the new friends.
Zeinep and one of her friends left as soon as we finished the ceremonies. The others stayed to eat together what we had prepared before.

After the food, the other two new friends left, and another very interesting situation took place with the “elders” of the Salita. We decided to look at the video of the Experience together and this opened a beautiful interchange among everyone. We all started commenting on what the Message means to all of us, giving the opportunity to Yuksel and Aylin to express their opinions and integrate the others’ experience. It was all very heartfelt and, as a matter of fact, when I was getting my things together, it was very hard for me to leave this place due to the strong emotions I felt during this visit.
Manuela

No comments:

Post a Comment