Kirmizi_ada

It’s Ramadan, but the director of the high school where I am teaching English puts out plates of jelly donuts in all the classrooms anyway. I eat one, and immediately feel like a composite mug-shot of the Bavarian Interior Minister and Agustus Gloop. A fourteen year-old girl in my class tells me not to stress out about it; she doesn’t mind. She says fasting is not that bad this year anyway: "It’s chill. This one time, Ramadan was in the summer, and you had to wait till 9pm to eat. That was killer."

I ask my class how many years now they’ve fasted, and whether it gets easier every year. The consensus is that the first three days are always hard, and then you spend the rest of the time getting stoked for Şeker Bayramı, the big holiday at Ramadan’s end, when you put on all the new clothes you bought and eat everything in a ten-block radius. Until then, Playstation, shopping, and re-watching White Chicks will have to suffice for staving off the hunger.

—What do you do when you get really really hungry?
—Chat on the Internet.

—Is there anything you like a lot about fasting?
—Yes, God WANTS us to do it, so that’s cool,

says a fifteen year-old who is planning to be a stewardess and nurtures an uncommon fondness for Apollo Creed in Rocky IV. At a totally boring point in my lesson, she pulls a blue scarf out of her purse and wraps it around her head.

With a universally teenage tone of stoic self-protection, one kid talks about how, if he passes his English exam in November, he gets to go to university; if he fails it, he’ll be stuck in vocational school:

—Do you want to stay in Berlin after you finish school?
—No, there’s nothing for me here. Maybe in Turkey, or New Jersey.

He wants Wlad, the only kid in the class who isn’t fasting, to travel around the world with him after they get out of school. But Wlad says he doesn’t want to leave Berlin’s Wedding district—ever. He jokes about how he goes over to all of his Muslim friends’ houses before sundown and picks at all the food while their moms and sisters are cooking. The future stewardess slugs him in the chest.

It is almost unanimous that the homework tonight should be to make a vocabulary list based on a Fifty Cent song, so now I’m off to iTunes. On second thought, I should probably try playing Jill Scott’s “Family Reunion” for them instead.

And maybe no jelly donut tomorrow, but I’m not going to stress out about it.

DEMNÄCHST: Slow, slow, quick, quick…