Transitions and Turkey-part 1

In Yazili Canyon in south Turkey

There’s a blessing – or a curse – that says, ‘May you live in interesting times’ and I’d say these past five months have been … interesting.

Veeka skiing

The high point was getting a press trip for four days around southern Turkey “in the footsteps of Paul,” who was a local boy for that region and – of all the apostles – the one most fit for evangelizing Asia Minor. Seeing some of those mountain passes he had to tramp around on foot for weeks gave me a lot of respect for what it must have taken to evangelize the Anatolian Plateau.

The low point – well there’s been a bunch of those. As some may have heard, my Newsweek job ended Feb. 28, an 18-month-long stint of getting my articles on a national platform and getting paid nicely for doing it. They said it was the economy; they were laying off their contract writers, of which I was one. [Then I heard that the staff got 5% pay raises in early spring.] So, despite earning four journalism awards in 2022 plus making the print edition twice and getting generous amounts of hits on my stories, my time there has ended. I am grateful that I was able to finally be part of a magazine; something I’d never achieved in my five other jobs.

Phyllis Duin turns 95, surrounded by her children, grandchildren, various spouses and one great-grandchild.

Thus, my income dropped by three-quarters as of the beginning of March. Before that, it was nice being able to afford some new things; my laptop was seven years old and I was able to replace that, plus get some other purchases I’d been needing, ie decent tires for my car that allowed me to drive basically anywhere in the snow. Now I’m back to the scrimping and saving of the previous six years with one big difference: I am getting Social Security but that doesn’t do near the trick, as many of you know.

Also, I’ve discovered how weary I’d been with a FT job and a special-needs kid whose care falls completely on my shoulders. And at the end of January, Veeka and I both came down with Covid; my first time, her second. She bounced back; I took weeks to get over it. So, February was a lost month except for Veeka managing to get through a special needs course in skiing, after which she was able to ride a ski chair for the first time! Then in late March, I came down with shingles – aargh – which took a good six weeks to depart.

Veeka at our dining table at Lake Quinault Lodge.

Meanwhile, Veeka got her gall bladder removed in January. But she still had stomach pain. Finally in April, an emergency room CAT scan revealed a mass in her stomach (from her habit of gnawing on her hair) required stomach surgery to have it removed. We thought we could wait a few months, but the pain intensified to the point she was rushed into surgery in mid-May.

Well, I’ve learned more about laparoscopic and gastrointestinal surgery to last a lifetime. The original surgery seemed to go OK, but an infection set in, her temperature spiked and what was supposed to be four days in the hospital ended up being nine. She is trying to recover at home but we have already been back to the ER once. As for me, it was nine lost days in regards to work, as I was at her bedside. She’s been in a lot of pain – still is at this writing. So much of her life has been filled with some sort of pain.

Some family news: A bunch of us gathered at my mother’s place in mid-May to celebrate her 95th birthday. She lives a very quiet life but keeps in touch with her crazy kids, the oldest of whom (my brother Rob) just turned 70. Seems like yesterday when he was a 17-year-old winning golf matches. In April, Veeka turned 18, a milestone. And I too had a birthday, but it passed unnoticed as that was the day of Veeka’s surgery. (Although a kind friend had me over to dinner the next day and presented me with flowers and a birthday cake).

Veeka enjoying our cross-cultural visit to a Sikh gurdwara near Vancouver, BC. Head coverings and bare feet were required in the temple area.

Let’s see…the kitties we got last August are now full-grown furballs weighing just over 8 pounds each, whom we just love. Veeka and I have been on the road a little bit; winter break was spent seeing Washington state’s northwestern coast, which included a two-day stay at Lake Quinault’s luxurious lodge, which I’d never seen. A new mermaid museum we visited enroute ended up in my Seattle Times story on five unusual but educational places for kids to visit around the Pacific Northwest. It ran May 21. And for the second year in a row, the Times ran a story by me on May 28 listing eight unusual Pacific Northwest lodges. It was a very nice spread and took up two pages.

We did a weekend run up to Canada to report on Sikh Heritage Month (a story ran here in Spokane FAVs), and Veeka loved seeing all these folks dressed in Punjabi garb not to mention the free meals at the gurdwaras that we visited. We then spent spring break down in southeastern Oregon, in an area known as the Oregon Outback because of its remoteness. But there were nice surprises; we celebrated Easter at a church service at the county fairgrounds where a free lunch was available for all plus a 3,000-egg Easter egg hunt in the snow. We sampled two hot springs in the area, hiked a crazy route in a desert ravine known as Crack in the Ground (a bit too much snow for our taste) marveled at unexpectedly lovely scenery and the thousands of livestock everywhere. I was there to do a piece on how Oregon is becoming a major stargazing destination in a time when dark sky parks and reserves are booming in popularity. Oregon’s bid to throw three whole counties into the mix would make it the largest in the world. Fortunately, Outside magazine was very interested in this and they ran my article soon after I got back.

And now Turkey – I’d been offered a press trip there last year on the seven churches mentioned in Revelation, but couldn’t arrange childcare on such short notice. Then Turkey’s earthquakes happened in February, and they reached out again to see if I’d come on another trip, also on the seven churches. I knew other journalists had written that story a zillion times, so I asked if they could come up with another theme, ie following where St. Paul trod. And they accepted my idea! Then it was waiting two months while they figured out a date and I looked for childcare which I happily found (for a price, of course). Before Veeka arrived, I used to do such free trips (India, Greece, Jamaica, Curaçao, Nevis/St. Kitts, Spain, Jordan, Iceland) all the time, so I was dying to get back in the groove as it were.

We had no idea that Crack in the Ground would be filled with so much snow…

And so I took an 11-hour flight direct from Seattle – which passed quickly because I was given a business class ticket free of charge (!) which has happened only one other time in my life. It was lovely to actually lay down and catch a few winks. When I disembarked in Istanbul, I got this we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore-Dorothy sensation as it was not the same place I’d flown to in 2004, when I first visited Turkey. Turns out the new zillion-Euro airport that opened in 2019 and, judging from all the unhappy comments, hasn’t fixed its major problems in the intervening four years. If you land at one of the outlying gates (and all U.S. passengers apparently do), you have a gargantuan walk – close to a mile – to the domestic gates – which is where I needed to go, as I was changing planes to end up in Adana on the south coast. There were no trains you could catch to get to other terminals, so you had to hoof it. I can’t imagine doing that trek with lots of luggage or kids. It just boggles my mind that “the world’s largest airport” would not have trams like at Dallas/Fort Worth.

To make matters worse, there were no help or information desks to help us through this maze. So I was wandering through the concourse in the mid-afternoon (my plane arrived late as all my Turkish Airlines flights did) incredibly jet-lagged and trying to figure out which passport control I go through to transfer to a domestic flight. I finally found one hapless employee who spoke English; I pitied a visiting African who was screaming at the same employee in French and the employee didn’t understand a word of it. Will say how I really appreciated how so many signs all over Turkey were in English and Turkish. If you didn’t know English, you were out of luck. When I finally arrived at my gate, I was sweaty and … found out the airport internet didn’t work because you require a verification code to be sent to your phone which, like Godot, never arrives.

Veeka enjoying the horses in central Oregon.

Anyway, I finally got onto my domestic flight and found myself in a middle seat next to a Russian who’s working on Turkey’s first nuclear power plant located not far from where I was staying (in the city of Mersin). We got along quite well – fortunately the Russian spoke decent English as I’ve forgotten all my Russian – and he was happy to be in Turkey because at least he doesn’t have to deal with Putin, he said. I’d forgotten how so many Russians have taken refuge in Turkey. When we landed, all us international passengers had our luggage in another terminal; my friendship with the Russian helped at this point, as he made sure I found my suitcase. Fortunately, my driver with the Turkish tourism office was waiting outside this second terminal, so I fell into the car, exhausted, was driven an hour to a very nice hotel where I collapsed.

A second blog post will describe the rest of my journey …