Ramadan the Turkish experience......Istambul, Turkey--081310

This is my first experience of Ramadan in a Muslim country, Turkey! I cam the day Ramadan starting. I am staying with a Kurdish family in Istanbul. The first two days I was taking it easy. I didn't do anything touristic, just relaxing and spending some time with the family. I did my hair and later went for a walk on the neighborhood. We passed by the bazaar and got some makeup and two shirts. The girls at the store were really cute and were teaching me some Turkish. We went out at night for a walk and to meet Mehmet, one of our friends from school.

The second night we went to another cafe where they had live music. The third day we went out from the house earlier and we took a bus and the driver ran over a guy that was crossing to try to catch the bus. It was a terrible, the guy was caught up in between the bus. Thank God that Mahir started screaming to the bus driver to stop the bus otherwise the driver would have driven over the man's body. Everyone went off the bus and people including me were in shock. I was so nervous that I started crying. Mahir saw everything and he said that it was the guy's fault for trying to cross the street when the bus was turning and the bus hit him and he was caught in between the front and back of the bus. After that shocking experience, I was paranoid about crossing the street the rest of the day. After this we caught a ferry to the Asia continent...The views were really beautiful!!!

When we were going back to the house, had a second incident with a different bus. The driver hit another bus and the two drivers wanted to fight. This was in the Asian part of Turkey. After these two experiences, I started to reflect on the meaning of Ramadan nowadays! People fast for more than 15 hours in the hot summer weather, and they still have to do the things they do regularly, but except that they can't eat or drink. For me it is not practical nor healthy. Is ok if you are staying home, resting and praying but if you have to work and be outside under the sun at 35دC, it can be dangerous for you and for the people around you. You are tired and your mood is not good because you are hungry and thirsty; you get even violent. That takes away the holiness out of the whole fasting purpose. Mahir was telling me that he read that the prophet fasted only for the last years of his life and that it was never during the summer.

Ramadan is supposed to be a means to control your desires, by fasting you become stronger in spirit. By fasting you also feel weak and vulnerable and it helps you appreciate the things that you have. But not drinking water in a weather that is extremely hot is never going to make you stronger. Then at the end of the 15 hour fasting you eat so much, that you feel completely full, so I don't understand why you have to put your body and even your health at risk for 15 hours daily for a whole month. Well don't get me wrong, I do get the point, but what I say is that is too risky and after all people keep smoking, drinking and doing the same things and not changing their behavior. So, Ramadan, as has also become Lent and Easter in modern times, have become something cultural but without a real life changing effect, a in modern Christian tradition. A month where you do some sacrifice, give up something for a short period of time, but at the end you really don't change the bad behaviors which should be the ultimate goal, to have a definitive transforming effect.