Every day after evening prayers, there is a party called Oyak.
Actually, Oyak is the name of a building outside Taize, where they sell useful items such as snacks and toothbrushes, and soda which is about 10 times better than ours plus it comes in more attractive bottles. No one knows why it’s called Oyak but it is, (actually OYAK is the abbreviation for the armed forces pension fund in Turkey but…) and it makes for great conversational material such as, “Will I see you at OYAK tonight?” or “Want to go to OYAK now?”. Around the building there are some tables and benches, and behind the building there’s a field where Europeans whip our tails at soccer. There’s also some tents back there, but open tents, not the kind you sleep in. And every night after worship was done everyone would gather and there was music and dancing and cheap food and every so often you would run into someone who was either drunk or stoned and giggling uncontrollably.
Then there were the people who got drunk and sang “La Marsillaise” until 4am, but we won’t go into that now. These European people like THE WORST of our music. (yeah, I know that the Marsilliaise is French, I’m just seguing…) As far as I could tell the guitar players knew about 16 songs and they just kept playing them over and over and over.
At any given moment during the evening if you went down to Oyak you would be sure to find:
- Clapping games. There were a ton of clapping games, and it’s a great way to bond, I suppose. The chants to them were in all different languages, but the basic clapping stuff was the same. I must have learned 6 different ones that week. And one of the things about Taize is, no one is a stranger. You can randomly introduce yourself to people and randomly join in games with people from Lithuania or Poland or wherever. The bishop is standing there watching you teach German people the Chicken Dance. It was great.
- Other games. By this I mean ZipZap (which I am really really pathetic at, by the way) or the game where you go, “Hyah!” and make a slicing motion with your arms, or the Italian version of Twister, which interestingly enough one girl had to play with a guy who was about to be ordained as a Jesuit priest. That got kind of awkward.
- People over in the corner smoking something that was not cigarettes.
- Four or five different groups of people doing various songs or chanting. Everyone centered around the musicians, clapping, and if you were close you got a bench to sit or stand on. Around the periphery of the crowd would be groups or people dancing.
- Crazy American people obsessing over the Fanta bottles. Their soda is better than ours.
- Some guys with guitars singing Country Roads Take Me Home, among other songs. They also LOVED Hit The Road Jack and Land of 1000 Dances, probably because they require no lyrical memorization at all, the Backstreet Boys, and Lemon Tree, but not the version you’re thinking of, the one by Fool’s Garden that starts, “I’m sitting here in the boring room…”. They all knew all the lyrics to everything, too. People from Siberia knew more popular American music than I did.
I think that to understand Oyak you really have to be there, plus I’m tired, so to close here’s a video of Oyak: centering on people who don’t know each other, or if they do they met two days ago singing and dancing together, which is a pretty awesome experience.
At least until you got a headache from hearing Zombie for the twelfth time and went back to the tent to take aspirin.
For MORE OF THE OYAK EXPERIENCE visit youtube and type “taize oyak” into the search box.
This was taken while I was there so I might even be in the background somewhere…but I didn’t look closely enough to tell.
