Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 53
Taking the conference (back home) seriously
By Anca Ditroi & Bracha Hadar
This is the story of two Israeli women (Anca Ditroi and Bracha Hadar)
who flew from Berlin to Israel with Turkish Airlines with a stop in
Istanbul.
We left Berlin at 14.45. We were sitting together in the
aircraft, happy for the opportunity to talk over and digest so many
meetings, feelings and thoughts that we experienced during the
conference. We landed "too early", and had not yet finished talking
but were delighted to find out that we had a two-hour gap until the
next flight from Istanbul to Tel Aviv. On the way out of the aircraft
we were told by a Turkish Airlines' representative to go to gate 215. It
was so good to know that we did not have to search for the gate on the
board. We found the nearest coffee place to this gate and continued
talking. At the right time, we went to the gate and waited to board.
Something looked a bit strange – all the faces around us did not look
like people who fly to Israel. We became a bit apprehensive and
decided to find out. It was not easy to find an airport employee, but
when we found somebody, the man, with very broken English, told us:
"You missed your flight…".
We were in shock! There we were sitting, ten metres from
the gate, not hearing our names called and missed our connection
flight, while still being absorbed in the bubble of Berlin.
The immediate feeling nesting in us was that like a refugee, having no
land, and being given mercy by our hosts: the airport authorities and
the airline company.
Then we suddenly understood: we took it for granted that
German and Turkish time were alike, whereas in reality there was onehour
difference between German and Turkish time; that was the
missed hour of our missed flight.
This was reflected also unconsciously in the messages we
wrote to our Israeli group. One of the sentences one of us wrote was:
"We landed in Berlin…" This was… correct. Although our bodies
landed in Istanbul, our minds were still in Berlin. Unconsciously we
did not cross the time-boundaries of Berlin.
The employee with his broken English tried to tell us how to
find the connecting-flights desk. The only direction he and others
whom we asked could name was "straight". We were running in the
airport until we reached the Turkish Airline’s desk. There were two
women sitting behind the desk. We told them our story and one of