My Time In Turkey

This man sold us the best
mussels I have ever tasted.

I remember the time an incident I had heard on the news forever became a reality; when I could now grasp something that never effected me. I visited Turkey just a little over a month after the coup attempt (which happened July 2016) to visit my uncle. The beauty of Istanbul was overwhelming.
When we were in a busy dock after riding a ferry across the Bosphorus Strait (separating the European and Asian sides of Istanbul), I saw young children and women selling small items such as water bottles, and older men selling small snacks. At first, I thought nothing much of it, seeing them as normal street vendors, until I realized that they were speaking Arabic.
The daily tragedies of the crisis in Syria that flooded my twitter news feed and television then clicked. I saw, firsthand, Syrian refugees.

No one is able to understand the weight of a situation until they have experienced it firsthand, and something as small as just seeing the refugees opened my eyes. As a result, a situation that was known to me by name took full form, giving me something concrete to understand. It must be realized that this will never be enough (honestly nothing will be) to understand what these refugees went through. Similarly, Art Spiegelman was always caught in a cycle of guilt and feelings of disconnection as he never knew what his father or mother experienced during the Holocaust. Spiegelman says in volume 2 of Maus "I can't even make any sense out of my relationship with my father...How am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz?...Of the Holocaust?" He can look at the number on his father's arm, but experiences can never be relived.