Culture of Chai

I never got around to posting a lot of thoughts about my first trip to Turkey, here's one of them:

Of course there were many cultural differences to be found, but I've been thinking a lot lately about chai. In some parts of the world chai is a milk/tea/spice drink, but in Turkish it is simply the word for tea. After every meal they sit and have hot chai. I was only there in the winter, so I don't know if that's just a cold weather thing or an all the time thing. I suspect it's the latter.*

* It is, in fact, the latter. I was very happy to find this time around that chai has nothing to do with the weather at all. It's just as popular in May as it was back in January.

What strikes me about being a chai culture is what it represents. Why would anyone sit around after a meal (and we're talking all three meals of the day here) just to have tea? To sit and visit, of course! Relationships are highly valued there, so sitting and talking is a great way to spend more of your time.

It's not that relationships aren't important in America, but we seem to have something we value even more: efficiency. Most of us don't sit around and visit after a meal because we don't have time for it. There are just too many other important things to do with the time. At my house the process of eating dinner together might not take more than ten or fifteen minutes. I know others are so busy that they often don't have time to sit and eat at all - it might simply be grabbing something from a drive through and eating in the car on the way to somewhere else.

In trying to invest in international students at Northwest, I've found that the most important issue is simply spending time together. Sure it's great to help meet a need like providing furniture or a ride to WalMart. But then what? Is that the end, or is it a means to something more?

Maybe this is so intuitive to others that it's laughable to even post this. But while we're so busy trying to squeeze the most out of our time, we too have this same cry for relationships. It's almost as if we have competing desires, between being productive and connecting with people. Unfortunately our schedules are packed with important commitments which usually mean we have to sacrifice the relationships first.

I'm realizing more and more that I need to trim some responsibilities from my plate so I have more time with people. And even when I am around people, I need to make a greater effort to actually connect with them, and not simply be "around" people.

A second trip to Turkey has simply reinforced this truth.