I had just spent the last ten days working as a volunteer in a hospital for Syrian bomb victims. I had spent all my recent days standing next to a doctor's couch, pouring iodine and antiseptic serum into wounds, holding down ends of bandage strips, opening package after package of gauze, and most of all, hugging patients tight and holding hands of those who were screaming and crying while having their shrapnel wounds cleaned.
I had gladly and gratefully accepted the kindness of a refugee family who hosted me for all this time, letting me stay in their home, greeting me with cheerful " Ahlan wa sahlan" and glasses of sweetened mate tea every night after work. All of this satisfied my urge to do something, anything, something more than just sharing the endless stream of disastrous news coming out of Syria.
I had had visions of sitting behind my traumatized friend and wrapping my arms around his chest before I came. But I didn't know that I would be doing this, every day, for another man, painfully skinny and half delirious from constant pain and medication, who suffered so terribly during those bandage changes that he almost broke my heart and I felt rattled and shaken the first days after work. I developed a special relationship to those patients who I held and comforted and one of them told the nurse that her pain is less when I am near her. So, even though I was standing up all day and saw injuries and degrees of starvation no one ever wants to see, it was also gratifying because I was the lightening rod for some of their pain which ran through my body and left, relieving them of it to a certain degree. I was charged from Ramadan, from 30 days of prayer, and it helped.
Now it was over and I was walking down this shady alley of Urfa, one of the oldest cities on earth. I was staying in the house of a friend, another family of refugees. Her parents were sleeping on the roof while I slept on a mattress on the cleanswept stone floor.
Then she came home,very late,and told me the reason for the great delay was that her colleague had been beaten up by a Turk who hated Syrian immigrants. Tensions seem to run high, in this part of Turkey, with the growing number of Syrian refugees. We are all waiting for the end of this war. How much longer , nobody knows. And it is getting more complicated day by day.
This morning I awoke, feeling I had slept way into the day. It was hot and somewhat humid, and I could hear my friend's mother sloshing water into that inner little yard this house had which was in the middle between the windows of the two rooms, the blue door and the little tract leading to the bathroom. Her mom was scrubbing the floor and I was guiltily lazing in my bed. It was not even 9am.
But then, I had been up at 6am the day before, hoping they would take me along to Akcakale, to watch her NGO distributing food boxes to the camps. Alas, no, the Hungarian manager explained to me, that I should have applied for a permit to ride in their vehicle a week ago, as security was very high and they did not want me to get kidnapped by the Islamic state of Iraq and Sham,the terrorist group that was beheading hapless journalists whose countries weren't prepared to buy them out for millions of dollars. I knew that ISIS was known to nip across the border at Tal Abyad and grab whoever did not look sufficiently Arabic, and sometimes they would grab a Syrian NGO worker too. Disappointed though not without a touch of relief at being spared any possible encounters with islamist kidnappers/rapists/beheaders, I resigned myself to hanging around the NGO office for the day. I did not even know where I was in town, and I did not trust GPS to work as efficiently as in Iran ( where people could be under constant supervision this way, I suppose)
So I awoke to the sound of water being sloshed and scrubbed around the yard in front of my window. My friend's mom knocked on my door and brought me a tray with a glass of water and a small cup of Arabic coffee which is almost as thick as soup and leaves part of the cup filled with black- brown coffee grounds after drinking the liquid part.
This day I would cast my reservations about GPS locations aside and venture into town to explore more of the ancient sun bathed stones, and maybe eat a bit of baklava that was famous here. Turkey has a number of very sweet, very sticky, oily pastries that grow on you, as a ritual of consuming a regular dose of comfort food.
I had now come to know some of Syrian home cooking, and this family cooked a dish exactly the same way as the family from Qaritayn in Reyhanli: molokheya braised in oil with garlic and shreds of chicken. I loved the strong tangy taste of this vegetable and was convinced that their version of the plant compared to what I knew was the equivalent of a mountain herb compared to a limp greenhouse plant that had lost all its original aroma . It had this unmistakable taste that Annia Ciezadlo whose Day of Honey I was reading compared to the taste of the earth near an old pond, and it tasted even better with a squirt of juice from a squeezed lemon.
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