First Interview Results

Today, I went onto my first interview. After getting together with Shirley last night to refine our interview questions, I woke up ready to 'rock n roll'. I headed back to Amsterdam Oost with a small portion of our class.

Once I got to the market, I split off and headed off to my interview. I arrived slightly before 10a, and my interviewee was sitting in the same place she had been sitting at yesterday. Before I approached her, I took a mental note of what she was wearing. Again, she wore a headscarf, the same one as yesterday. Her attire seemed to go along with the black sheer headscarf, mostly dressed in dark. From what I could tell she was wearing black pants and a brown top with some sort of black top over it. Her make-up looked very similar to that of yesterday. She looked well put together.

I approached the counter, reintroducing myself. She told me her name but I would prefer to keep it a secret to mask her identity just in respect of her. Before I began the interview, I went through an explanation of who I was and why I am in Amsterdam. After all the information, I asked her if she would mind if I interviewed her while electronically recording her, and she agreed. So the interview began. First thing I noticed was that her English wasn't that great, leaving with a barrier to many of my questions. She answered them to her best ability but sometimes I would have to rephrase the question so that it could be answered with a yes or no.

From her answers, I learned that she is 21 years old. She lives in Amsterdam Oost and is working full time for her brother at his shop while he is on vacation. Usually she only works part-time and helps around her parents house. She let me know that she was of Turkish decent yet she was born here in Amsterdam.

As the questions progressed, she made me feel as though her choice to wear a hijab was a result of her family lifestyle as well as her religion. My interviewee explained (I think) to me that growing up she had seen her mother and grandmother wear a hijab in public so she grew up knowing that she would wear one too. An interesting thing she told me was that if her elders hadn't worn one then she probably wouldn't have worn one. From this statement, it made me feel that her choice to originally wear one was based on her families traditions more than based on the Koran's 'instructions'.

Another interesting topic was where she wears her hijab. The interviewee told me that when she is around just her girl-friends then she doesn't cover her hair but when she is around male friends, she always wears a hijab. This kind of confused me by combining the traditions of home, religion and culture into one. From this, I feel like the choice to wear a hijab is originally based on religion but then society lays down some rules about it. Kind of a complex influence, it could be said.

Moving onto the political and social questions. The interviewee really had nothing to say about this topic. She said that she felt like a normal citizen in Amsterdam with equal rights and opportunities. She said that she has non-Muslim friends as well. She does say that the rules the government is making are unfair yet didn't seem like she was actively doing something about it.

Based on this interview, I felt that maybe the issue isn't as controversial as the media has made it out to be. But, before I make that conclusion, I must seek more resources!!!

From here, the next step is to do more interviews and possibly speak to someone from Mama or MSLM.

After the interview, I met up with Shirley again. We walked together over the Zeeberg neighborhood. We walked up and down one street because we were running out of time before class. While we were walking around we stopped by a coat shop. Inside the coat shop was a young Muslim woman who was helping another customer. We waited till she was done and approached her to see if she would be interested in doing an interview with us at a later time. She said that she didn't speak English well enough to answer our questions, but said that if we could translate them into Dutch that she would happily correspond with us over email. Maybe we can get Esmee to translate it for us when she returns...hmm I will go talk to Mirjam about this tomorrow.

I feel like progress is going well.