Participants of Turkish Olympiads No Less Colorful than the Evnt
The 700 students who are currently visiting Ankara for the 7th International Turkish Olympiads have a wide range of interesting life stories and have been drawn to Turkey by a number of different factors.
Natalia Gomez began learning Turkish two years ago at the Turkish Language Center in Colombia. Now, at the same language center, she teaches Turkish to Colombians. Gomez won a silver medal in the spoken competition of the Turkish Olympiads last year, and this year she has returned to Turkey with some of her own students. Gomez, who is still a university student in Colombia, is quite hopeful about the performance of her student Daniala Rueda at this year's competition. She notes that in the first year of the competition, Colombia came away with a bronze medal and that last year it won a silver medal, concluding that this year they are due for a gold medal. She adds that next year there will be even more visitors from Colombia.
Japanese student Chikako Kuroe explains that her life was changed by a documentary about how Turks saved the lives of Japanese people during the Iran-Iraq War. Chikako said she watched the documentary on a Japanese television station, and then thought to herself, "How can I look a Turkish person in the face without being able to speak some Turkish?" It was then that she decided she had to learn Turkish. This 19-year-old student, when speaking about this documentary with her Turkish teachers last year, said in Turkish, "İzlerken gözümden yağmur geldi," (As I was watching, rain fell from my eyes). She says she loves Turkey and the Turkish language enough to be able to say, "I am a Turk." When people ask her how many siblings she has, she answers "four," including in her count her Turkish teacher, Havva Bayram, as part of her family. The topic that Chikako presented at the Turkish Olympiads was, "My love for Turkey, which words alone are not enough to describe."
Two extremely tall participants at the Olympiads draw attention to themselves as they walk around. One is a teacher, the other a student. Mehmet Akif Gümüş has been teaching Turkish for three years in the West African country of Senegal and, though he is quite tall, he is still three centimeters shorter than his Senegalese student, Moussa Dabbo. Still, when asked about his height, Dabbo, with an embarrassed look on his face, bends his legs, insisting, "No, I am shorter than my teacher." He is 16 years old and a student at the Yavuz Selim high school in Senegal. He is competing in the writing and speaking part of the competition this year. This is his first time in Turkey, and he really likes it. One story he tells is that one day in Senegal his teacher was telling the students about the earthquakes that have hit Turkey in the past. The teacher asked the students why there were no earthquakes in Africa, and Dabbo rose up out of his seat and exclaimed, "Hoja, it is because god really loves us!" But after Dabbo had a chance to see some of the magnificent mosques and historical structures in İstanbul, he turned to his teacher and said, "Hoja, it looks like God loves you even more!"
Another student participating in the event is Cambodian Monyneath Lim, who sings Turkish "sanat müziği" or art music. Lim says she had a difficult time with the sound "of" in the song "Sabret Gönül," which she is performing in the competition. In one part of this song, the "of" sound goes on for a full 15 seconds. Lim says she worked hard on her performance of this song, spending all her free time on it. Lim is in the second year of high school at the International Zaman High School in Cambodia. She belongs to the Turkish song club at her school. She knows around 30 folk songs and melodies in Turkish. Lim says she wants to eventually study at a university in Turkey and to visit Turkey as much as possible in the near future. Turkish teacher Vesile Kaplan, who has spent the past two years teaching Turkish in Cambodia, notes that learning Turkish is sometimes very difficult east Asian countries, as letters such as "Ü," "Ö," "Ş," "Ğ" and "I" don't exist in the languages spoken in this region.
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