People:
Lily
The second recipient of our People Page distinction is Lily, the
woman who first sold us our carpet in Selcuk, Turkey and ended up becoming our friend.
When we first met her we thought she seemed young, but she was certainly not a
newcomer to sales. She drove us to Ephesus on our second day in town and casually
mentioned that she had been taking people to the famous Roman ruins for 14 years; and most
people needed about 2 hours to see everything. We then guessed that maybe she was about 32
years old, figuring she started work at 18.
It turned out we were off quite a bit! Her first job was selling
round pieces of bread (Turkish pretzels) when she was 6 years old. Her family was quite
poor and needed her to help them with their income, so she did this before and after
school. She was able to continue going to school until she was 10 years old, when her
family told her she was "finished with school" and she needed to help them with
their family business, a Hotel/Pension. At that time she became a "bus tout" a
person who finds people at bus stations and tries to persuade them to go to their family's
Pension. She did this for 10 years, until she was 20, and her parents decided to rent out
their Pension--they were ready to retire. At this point Lily figured if women could make
carpets, why couldn't they sell them? She convinced a shop to hire her and then shortly
after was hired by the Outback Shop (one of
the owners was born in Australia) where she currently works.
And she has been doing very well. Lily, now 24, is the only woman
who sells carpets in all of Selcuk. We asked her how men treated her and she said they
were used to her by now. Her female friends don't understand how she could work at a
job where she has to lug heavy carpets and rugs around, and can't have nice manicured
finger nails. She also doesn't wear make-up "I'm selling carpets" she tells
those friends, "not myself!" She also is quite adept at handling her shop's very
large van, something which surprises many people as women drivers are not very common in
Selcuk, and women van drivers are even less so.
Lily is kept very busy selling kilims and carpets and is saving
her money to buy a computer. Her dream? To own a carpet shop of her own one day, of
course. Although her formal education stopped when she was 10, she speaks 7 languages
(English, German, French, Flemish, Turkish, Chinese, Italian) which she learned by
speaking with tourists and studying in her spare time. She hopes to visit friends in New
Zealand next year to practice her English "so it will get even better." We
thought it was pretty darn good already.
Lily loves electronics and checks her email on her office comuter
almost every day. She loves to practice writing and speaking English, so feel free to
email her at: lily.isik@turkey.com
