At this point in the internship, I have had time to think, work, and reflect, all of which have been fruitful endeavors. The work of the internship, the physical work, has been truly enjoyable. I love working in the sun and heat, wearing myself out digging. It is tough, but it does not require much willpower I have found. I want to do right by my peers, which is all the motivation I need to work the hell out of my body and beat the earth to my will. The true challenge of the dig has been the length of the day. It is an early wake up, work until 1, then eat and get back to the Dig House, at which point you are already tired, but you have to do something always. Get snacks for the next day, shower, read, something. Leisure is even tiring, as you have to walk a good distance to the beach, which is an ocean, and requires a lot of work staying afloat. After dinner there are journals, which is more mental labor at the end of a long day. All this to say its not uncommon for me to find myself tired at 9 pm when normally I am energized for a long evening of doing whatever I can to wear myself out.
The thought and reflections though are another topic of mine. I have long been thinking about the ethics of travel and studying abroad. I really don’t think there is a good ethical reason to do it because it fundamentally is fetishizing another culture in order to value it. One might think “I get to experience a different culture in order to learn something new” and say that this is not fetishizing it, in practice, it really is. For example, yesterday we went to the mountain festival and I wanted to get a pair of pants. The guy was selling them for 250 lira, which was clearly a number meant to be haggled with. That said, this is about 7 dollars for me, and is a steal. Just because the meal I eat costs 150 lira, does not mean that the pants should be that much too. I missed out on a cultural experience (That probably would have required Turkish to experience by the way) and instead paid more (which was at least arguably taking pity on the poor poor mountain people). There is no ethical way of going about this; for goodness sake we don’t even speak the same language.
The question I want to ask is what it means to work abroad. Arguably, the work I am doing is more valuable than the money I might extract from the job if I were a laborer here, making Turkish wages. I get experience, and something to put on a resume that will enable me to get into schools and jobs later in my life. The amount I would make in USD here if I was paid what the Turks were for the full trip would be 630 dollars. Now even compared to the price tag of the educational experience, this does not make any financial sense to compare. I believe I am paying around ten times that for the trip. This means I believe the trip to be ten times more valuable than the work I do. Why is it so much more valuable to me than it is to a Turkish citizen? Obviously it is a class to some degree, I write and read and have a professor, but the value of it really is the experience of the work, which I can put on a resume. Why is that different from a Turk? Why don’t they make 6 grand a month? Maybe I am thinking about this wrong, or maybe I am too cynical but it crosses my mind nonetheless.