Becoming “Almost Local”: Ramazan Nights, Doorstep Homework & the Slow Magic of Belonging

Post 3 of 3 - first published 2008

I wondered often — just as I had in Alice Springs — how long it would take before the doubt in my neighbours’ eyes softened. A few more years? A decade? Two? But it wasn’t actually time that shifted things. It was my daughter.

Her Turkish blossomed. Her friendships extended into houses I barely recognised. People who watched me with suspicion greeted her with warmth. She softened the neighbourhood long before it softened to me.

But I changed too.

The graffiti on my walls stopped bothering me. The doorbell-ringing children became familiar faces. Summer no longer felt like a season to survive but simply… life in Balat.

And then, somehow, community settled around us quietly.

This Ramazan, I found myself sitting on my doorstep helping the same kids who once drove me mad with their English homework. I watched my daughter race between houses carrying news of great importance. We dashed to the bakery for hot Ramazan pide — sometimes too late, earning playful teasing from the bakery owner.

We chatted with the greengrocer, the electrical shop man, the cake shop brothers, the hardware owner, the shoe-repairer. The greetings became natural, expected, mutual.

And each evening, we walked past our own house and called out “Songül, biz geldik!”

Her keys would drop from the window, and we’d climb upstairs to a low table set for iftar. We’d sit on the floor with family-not-by-blood, waiting for the call to end the fast.

And it struck me — after three and a half to four years in Balat, the number of meals shared, welcomed, and offered to me far outnumbered those from the town in my own home country.

Belonging sometimes arrives quietly, wrapped inside ordinary evenings — and once it arrives, you realise it had been coming toward you the whole time.