Arafat
I want to leave here. I want to go to the house in Bagcilar. Sometimes there are fires. If one place catches fire the whole neighborhood could burn down. That’s why I don’t want to stay.
At weddings, when there’s a fight, kids get crushed. Because I’m among them they crush me too. When there’s a wedding, someone annoys someone and a fight breaks out. It’s a nice neighborhood, but the fights are very bad. Sometimes we fight with friends, but we make up again. Sometimes when our friends fight, we separate. Sometimes when kids come here from Cömertkent, our friends beat them up. We beat them up.
I do it too.
We’d played a game with them. We won, and played another game. We won again, and played the others for cokes, but lost and didn’t give the cokes. They came to the park and asked for the cokes. Then we had a fight with them. But that was a long time ago. We had a fight. We’d beat them up if they came around here. Then we made peace. We played a game.
Even though, when we’re fighting we enjoy hitting the other children, we don’t like it when they hit us. Friends come, but they complain. When you are from Küba, you look and act bigger. When you go places, people don’t dare to bother you.
‘I’ll beat you up’ he says, ‘I’m from Küba. If you mess with me, I have a lot of people behind me.’
We went to Comertkent once. At our school there was a teahcer. He brought us to the volleyball court. Children were playing football there. There were three people from our neighborhood. The kids were like monkeys, jumping around everywhere. They beat us. This Onur I was talking about, he was about fifteen. There were three of us, we went with the schoolteacher. He took the girls and left. We were going to follow them. We had toy swords. The kids tried to take our swords away, but we didn’t let them. More people came up behind them, and we ran away. In their neighborhood they’re big and in our neighborhood we’re big.