Görüşürüz, Kütahya — What Remains After the Training?
Almost three years after my last visit, I found myself returning to Kütahya, a city that had somehow remained unusually vivid in my memory despite the many places I had travelled to since. The circumstances were different this time. On my previous visit, I had arrived with another large delegation; this time, I was returning after months of coordinating the READ project through screens, emails, course drafts, coordination meetings, visa follow-ups and the inevitable WhatsApp messages that begin politely and, as deadlines approach, gradually become: “Any update, please?”
From the doorstep of Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu to DPU’s Konukevi, our journey took almost ten hours by air and road. By the time we finally reached the university’s guesthouse at Kütahya Dumlupınar University’s Evliya Çelebi Campus, it was around one o’clock in the morning. At that hour, even the most enthusiastic project team begins to appreciate a bed more than an itinerary, but Kaan Can Akbaba from the DPU team was waiting to receive us warmly, and that small gesture made the late-night arrival feel less like the end of an exhausting journey and more like returning somewhere familiar.
From Virtual Meetings to Face-to-Face
The following day was largely about resting, recovering and preparing for what promised to be an intensive week, but by Monday afternoon the real reunion had begun. For months, many members of the READ consortium had existed in my daily life mainly as names on email threads, faces inside Zoom rectangles, contributors to shared documents and occasionally the people responsible for making a deadline feel considerably closer than the calendar suggested. Suddenly, those same people were sitting beside me on a bus, walking through Kütahya Bazaar and having the kinds of conversations that never quite find their way onto a formal meeting agenda.
Professor Paola from the University of Cassino approached me as we stopped near the bazaar and prepared to explore the city on foot, and that simple encounter captured something I would notice repeatedly throughout the week: people I already knew professionally were becoming people I actually knew. A few minutes walking together, sharing a meal or sitting beside someone on a bus can sometimes accomplish what several carefully scheduled virtual meetings cannot.
Our guide that afternoon was Ali Samet, who quickly revealed a talent that, as far as I know, appears nowhere in his official job description. Ali was so good at guiding us through Kütahya, explaining places, telling stories and keeping the group entertained that I jokingly told him he deserved to become the second person from Kütahya to receive UNESCO recognition after Mehmet Gürsoy. The joke stayed with us for much of the trip, especially as Ali became increasingly comfortable in his unofficial position as tour guide, local historian and cultural ambassador.
Meeting Mehmet Gürsoy himself later made the joke even better. Gürsoy, recognised for his mastery of traditional çini craftsmanship, has devoted decades to an art form deeply associated with Kütahya. Surrounded by beautifully crafted ceramics, we listened to him speak about his work, his passion and the tradition he has helped preserve. The tulips, delicate floral patterns and distinctive Kütahya blues seemed to carry the identity of the city in miniature, reminding me that heritage does not survive simply because it is old; it survives because people continue to practise it, teach it and give it meaning.
By evening, the wider DPU team had gathered to welcome us for a reception and dinner. After months of experiencing the consortium largely through the language of work packages, deliverables, deadlines and shared folders, it was refreshing to see it instead as a room full of people laughing, introducing themselves properly and discovering one another beyond institutional titles. The Rector welcomed us, while Dilcu, DPU’s project coordinator, colleagues from the host institution and I offered brief remarks. Oktay was there too, an Erasmus+ expert who had trained us during my previous visit almost three years earlier, giving the evening a pleasant sense of continuity: some faces were new, others familiar, but together we were now carrying a project that had moved decisively from planning toward implementation.
From Training to Capabilities
The formal Training of Trainers programme opened the following morning in the Rectorate Senate Chamber, after which we moved into several days of intensive learning, demonstration and discussion. The programme brought together pedagogical training, curriculum development, classroom management, assessment methods, digital teaching tools, Bologna Process principles, ECTS-compatible course design and live module demonstrations, all intended to prepare partner institutions to deliver the renewable-energy and energy-entrepreneurship courses developed through READ.
Together with Abdiwahab, Dilcu and I paid a courtesy visit to the Rector’s Office, where we conveyed warm greetings from my Rector, Dr. Abdikarim Mohamed Ahmed, together with a gift sent on his behalf. The presented goft was a dhiil, a traditional Somali vessel closely associated with hospitality, pastoral life and cultural heritage, while Kütahya’s own identity was reflected through the exchange of its distinctive ceramics. What might otherwise have been a routine courtesy call became something more memorable, a Somali cultural symbol meeting Kütahya craftsmanship, and greetings travelling from one university community in Mogadishu to another in Türkiye.
Sitting together in the Rector’s office also gave us an opportunity to reflect on how the relationship between our universities has continued to grow and on the important role DPU is playing within the READ project. I appreciated the moment precisely because it went beyond formalities; the dhiil and Kütahya ceramics became small symbols of a larger relationship, one built through academic cooperation, shared learning and the trust that develops when institutions continue showing up for one another. In a week dominated by training schedules and project deliverables, it was a useful reminder that some of the most valuable outcomes of international cooperation are not always captured in a work plan.
Those discussions mattered because development projects can become remarkably efficient at producing documents. We create curricula, frameworks, strategies, indicators, toolkits and reports and, on especially productive days, reports explaining other reports. Yet the real questions begin only when those documents leave the shared folder and enter an actual university classroom: can lecturers teach the material effectively, can institutions integrate it into existing programmes rather than treating it as a temporary project output, can students challenge what they learn and connect it with the realities of their own countries, and will any of it remain once the funding period ends?
Those questions became far more tangible when we left the classroom and travelled to Dost Enerji’s Işıklar Rüzgâr Enerji Santrali — Işıklar RES — in Gediz, Kütahya. Standing close to the turbines and learning how the facility operates transformed conversations about renewable-energy systems from diagrams and presentations into something physical. We could see how wind is converted into electricity, discuss how generation is monitored and managed, and better understand how renewable-energy infrastructure contributes to a wider power system.
Standing there, I inevitably began thinking about Somalia. We often speak about Somalia’s enormous renewable-energy potential, particularly in solar and wind, but “potential” is one of those words that can become dangerously comfortable when repeated too often, because eventually it begins to sound almost like an achievement.
It is not. Potential becomes meaningful only when it is converted into institutions, skills, investment, infrastructure and implementation. A wind turbine standing in Gediz is technology, but a university capable of teaching the science behind it, producing researchers who can improve it, preparing professionals who can operate it and adapting that knowledge to local realities represents something far more consequential: capability. For me, that distinction captures much of what READ should ultimately be about.
Aizanoi and a Different Meaning of “Long-Term”
Kütahya also gave us a very different classroom when we travelled to Aizanoi, the ancient city in Çavdarhisar. Its archaeological landscape includes the Temple of Zeus and the remarkable theatre-stadium complex, making the site one of the most memorable cultural stops of the week.
Walking through Aizanoi after spending several days discussing the future of energy, education and technology produced an interesting sense of perspective. We were debating what universities and energy systems might look like ten or twenty years from now while standing among structures that had survived for nearly two millennia.
Development projects frequently describe three years as “long-term.” Ancient cities disagree. The contrast stayed with me because sustainability can sound abstract when written into a project proposal, but history has a way of forcing a more demanding question, what are we building that will still matter after the project itself is forgotten?
The Conversations Between the Sessions
When I look back at the week, I realise that my favourite part was probably not any single lecture, presentation or site visit. It was what happened between them: the conversations on buses, the exchanges over çay, the discussions after dinner, the jokes while walking through the city and those moments when institutional titles became less important than understanding the person sitting opposite you.
I wanted to hear how colleagues felt their institutions were benefiting from READ, whether we were genuinely investing in the capacity of staff and students, whether mobility opportunities could create value beyond individual travel, where new research collaborations might emerge and whether the courses we were developing would still be taught after the project itself had become an archived folder somewhere. Those informal conversations rarely appear prominently in project reports, yet they reveal a great deal about whether a partnership is merely functioning administratively or developing the trust required to survive beyond the grant period.
Visa access was one reminder of how unequal international mobility can still be. Most participants eventually made it to Kütahya, but three could not, despite the preparation behind their participation. For many African academics, international mobility can still involve additional travel, costs, embassy appointments and uncertainty long before the academic journey itself begins. It is a small line in a project report, but a significant missed opportunity for the individual.
Fortunately, these heavier conversations were balanced by Kütahya’s equally serious determination to ensure that nobody went hungry. There was köfte, döner, sütlaç, ayran, soup and what sometimes appeared to be an inexhaustible national reserve of çay, while breakfast confronted us each morning with enough varieties of cheese to suggest that academic capacity-building may have an overlooked dairy component.
Then came the porcelain and çini gifts, carrying the tulip motifs, intricate floral patterns and beautiful shades of blue that had gradually become part of how I remembered Kütahya. Receiving ceramics is, of course, a pleasure; travelling internationally with them introduces a different emotional experience, because admiration for craftsmanship is quickly accompanied by the question of whether airport baggage handlers have received the same briefing on cultural preservation.
Fajr, Odunpazarı and the Kütahya Beyond the Programme
One of the quieter and more memorable moments came early on Friday morning when my brother Ali invited us to pray Fajr at Kütahya Ulu Camii, one of the city’s most important historic mosques. At around 5:30 in the morning, the streets were quiet, the city felt completely different before sunrise and, after prayer, we sat down for hot soup. Somewhere during my travels in Türkiye, I stopped questioning the logic of soup for breakfast; some traditions become easier to appreciate simply by participating in them.
Our travels also took us to Eskişehir, where we spent time in Odunpazarı, the historic central district and municipality known for its preserved Ottoman-era houses, narrow streets and rich cultural heritage. It is the kind of place where history has not been separated completely from everyday urban life, and wandering through its streets offered another reminder that cities can modernise without abandoning every visible connection to their past.
Eskişehir has also developed a slightly mysterious relationship with Turkish coffee in my personal travel history, because the only times I seem to drink Turkish coffee are when I am there. This has now happened twice, which is probably still insufficient evidence to establish causality, so further research may be required. This time, Ali also ordered another coffee for me, which was delicious and only strengthened my suspicion that travelling through Türkiye requires almost as much attention to beverages as it does to landmarks.
By the final day, the programme was approaching its formal conclusion. We visited university facilities and technology centres, met professors whose first instinct seemed always to be to welcome us warmly and offer another glass of çay, and eventually arrived at the familiar rituals that conclude international programmes: reflections, certificates, gifts, commitments and the inevitable group photographs.
What Remains After the Training?
The PowerPoint presentations will eventually disappear into folders, name badges will be discarded and even certificates may ultimately find their way into drawers. What matters is whether lecturers change the way they teach, whether departments adopt courses and continue delivering them, whether a research idea first discussed over tea eventually becomes a publication, whether participants transfer knowledge to colleagues who never travelled to Kütahya and whether students who may never hear about this particular workshop nevertheless receive a better education because it happened.
On our final evening, Captain Ali, Abdiwahabey and I sat over authentic Turkish food and ayran chatting about history, culture and life. At some point, the conversation reached kokoreç, ko-ko-retch. I had formed one understanding of what it might be before consulting Google; Google offered a somewhat different interpretation, so further field research remains necessary before I issue any definitive culinary assessment.
Somewhere between discussing pending reports and the next READ deliverables, we also arrived at another ambitious idea: “Ay Wallahi Döner” in Mogadishu, lol!. Although opening a döner restaurant appears nowhere in the READ proposal, work packages or official list of deliverables, Ali and I agreed that some commitments are worth pursuing anyway, especially when they involve Turkish heritage, delicious food and a proper döner.
I have now travelled through several cities in Türkiye, yet many of my strongest memories of the country continue to return to Kütahya. Perhaps it is the ceramics and those familiar blues, the seemingly endless glasses of çay, the early-morning walk to Ulu Camii, the food or simply the warmth with which people repeatedly opened their offices, classrooms and tables to us. More likely, it is because Kütahya is no longer simply somewhere I once visited; I have now had the privilege of returning.
Returning changes your relationship with a place. Streets become slightly more familiar, acquaintances become friends and experiences from one visit begin connecting with another until a city becomes something more than another location on an itinerary. So, when it was time to leave once again, “goodbye” did not quite capture what I wanted to say. Görüşürüz felt closer, see you again.
The training may have ended in Kütahya, but its real value will be determined elsewhere—in the classrooms where these courses are taught, in the universities that institutionalise them, in the research relationships that continue, in the students whose capabilities grow and in the professional friendships that survive long after everyone has returned home. Projects may begin with proposals, budgets, work packages and deliverables, but their lasting value is ultimately carried by people, institutions and what those people choose to build with the opportunities placed before them.
And perhaps that is the simplest answer to the question I carried away from Kütahya, What remains after the training is what we are capable of building because it happened.