Münir Akın, a Turk of Kurdish origin, has been living in Lithuania for four years. During this time, he has almost completed his psychotherapy studies, lived in Rukla for a year, where he taught migrant children, and has been working with children fleeing the war in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Münir first came to Lithuania a decade ago, for a few days of a seminar for teachers.
“I am a history teacher. I first worked in a village in the east of Turkey. Then I moved to Istanbul. I worked there for more than 10 years. And then I decided to move here. My partner is Lithuanian. We were thinking of living in Istanbul. Since I was getting interested in psychotherapy, I was looking for a place to study in Istanbul, but I didn’t find one that met my criteria. Then I found the Gestalt Institute in Vilnius, and I started learning Lithuanian before starting my studies,” he says.
Münir started learning Lithuanian when he was already in his forties. He says it was challenging, but helped him understand Lithuanians better.
“At the beginning, I doubted whether I could do it. But I wanted to learn about the people. Language is like a curtain. If you pull it back, what would you find? It drew me in. I started listening to LRT RADIO back in Istanbul every day. I understand everything when I read, but grammar is still a challenge for me,” the man says in Lithuanian.
After completing the first year of psychotherapy course, Münir returned to teaching. For three years now, he has been working as an English teacher at Gravitas Schola, a school for Ukrainian children who have fled the war in Vilnius.
Children remain children
Münir teaches 8th and 9th graders and now has one class of 4th graders. The teachers at Gravitas Schola are mostly Ukrainian, but there are also some Lithuanians who teach Lithuanian language.
According to the man, teaching children who fled the war is not much different from working with other children.
“This phenomenon is also interesting to me – how children in any situation can be just children. They live in a very different world. If they have not experienced [war] intensely and personally, they can easily distance themselves. Of course, things can come back later, they remember,” the teacher says.
Münir says that being a foreigner helps him when teaching migrant children because he has more empathy. However, he stresses that his main role is to be their educator, not their psychologist.
“Too much empathy is also risky because learning is hard and you have to put in effort. And if you want to give something, you have to be tough. If I had to give up my rules or my pedagogical experience when working with refugee children, it would be useless,” he explains. “They are children, they need to learn. I am a teacher.”
Teaching migrants
Before the Ukrainian school, Münir worked at the Foreigner’s Registration Centre in Rukla when the first wave of irregular migrants arrived in Lithuania in 2021. Münir’s friend then set up a teaching project for refugee children, and he taught them maths.
“I was there four days a week. At first, I drove from Vilnius to Rukla every day. But then I thought it would be easier to find an apartment there. I lived there until the end of the year when I returned to Vilnius,” the teacher recalls.
At that time, around 120 children of school age were living in Rukla. Most of them were Kurds and Arabs from Iraq, as well as Sri Lankans.
“I was able to teach maths up to grade 9. I can honestly say that my level of maths was not very high,” Münir smiles. “But their level was not high either, and there were many children who had never been to school, even at the age of 8 or 9.”
The man says that it was difficult to see the children living in a small fenced-off area that they could not leave for almost a year.
“It was too much. Who needs to be afraid of such children? Rukla is a very isolated place. But this is politics. In the end, Rukla was quietly dismantled. The camp no longer exists. They all fled to other countries,” he notes.
Therapy could be a trap
According to Münir, studying psychotherapy has also helped his pedagogical work. He also admits that he sees himself working as a psychotherapist rather than a teacher in the future.
“About eight years ago, I found a book by Alfred Adler in the library. Reading it, I realised that this was my place. I needed to be a psychotherapist, not a teacher. I need meaning and I need to study. I started reading dozens of books in my search. I was hooked, I couldn’t stop,” he recalls.
Initially interested in psychoanalysis, he later turned to Gestalt therapy.
“Psychoanalysis seems more interesting at first, but it is not deep. After ten books, I realised that it lacks depth,” he says, adding that psychoanalysis focuses too much on childhood, and “you don’t have to blame everything on what happened twenty years ago”.
According to Münir, however, no method is perfect. He is happy to help people, he says, but for some, psychotherapy can also be a trap.
“If it helps people, great. But not always. For some, psychotherapy is a trap. They cannot get out of the psychotherapy space. They get stuck and may even fall into depression,” the man notes
Nevertheless, Münir believes that everyone should try psychotherapy because it is a way of getting to know oneself. Between one and six months of counselling is enough for most, he adds.
“You go to therapy; you get what you need. Then you go and live,” he says.
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