103. Lion’s Milk

I don’t know why it’s never occurred to me to write about the biggest impact of the pandemic on my life, but today, with a zoom call from Turkey, I’m reminded. My long-ago roommate, now teaching at a university in Ankara, and another Peace Corps friend from the time, who is now in Seattle, spent an hour this morning trading old stories—but mostly catching up on where we, our kids and grandkids are today. How we and our families are coping with the pandemic. Speculating on once again meeting in person in Ankara, Seattle, Portland, or somewhere on the East Coast. 

 

In April of 2020 I was slated to spend ten days in that Ankara university with the American Studies Department, talking about the Nez Perce and other Western Tribes, about the history and cultural lessons I’ve learned from books, notes, and Indian friends over the past 50 years. 

 

I had tickets, and gift copies of Alvin Josephy’s 500 Nations packed and ready to go, notes for talks, and a DVD or two that I might use in telling Turkish college students about another side of American history. Turks—and Germans, the French and others around the world—are sometimes more interested in these chapters in American history than we are. I’d get a chance to explore why.

 

And I would eat lamb kebabs, white cheese, fresh melons, baklava, lentil soup, and the olives that had once tasted bitter but grew sweet in my almost five years in Turkey, 1965-70. 

 

The covid crushed all of that. I was reminded today of how, when covid hit, we summarily changed important plans, how we hunkered down away from friends and family members—and of how we, over the course of a year, have learned new tricks, and can now visit across continents in real time. 

 

Still—the lentil soup I make is not the same as the ones I drank in Turkey (yes, in Turkish we “drink” soup rather than eat it). I can hear faintly, in my mind’s ear, the cries of Ankara street vendors and shared taxi drivers, and see in my mind’s eye the minarets of Istanbul and the shops in the covered bazaar.

 

I’ll maybe dream in Turkish again tonight, the words and pictures in my mind rolling back the 50 years, from a time when three new friends, one Turk and two Americans, discussed our futures over glasses of absinthe, the drink the Turks call raki, or “lion’s milk.”

 

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83. Waiting in line

Waiting in line

 

A few days ago Governor Brown opened the Oregon vaccination program up to all seniors over 65. On Wednesday at noon I heard that I should call the local health providers to get an appointment. I didn’t get to it until an email at 3:30 reminded me. I called and was told that I am on a wait list, with more drugs on the way. Last night we learned on TV news that Health Secretary Azar’s promise to release all vaccine reserves was a hollow pledge; the reserves had already been shipped. Today’s noon program on OPB says the state’s plan must retrench. Seniors get back in line.

 

Word of the local situation spread by email and word of mouth. The governor’s remarks also run out the public and private communications lines to health care providers, drugstores, and other pandemic response teams in a kind of gossip game fury, with teams A, B, and C wondering what it means for their hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes, counties. 

 

This kind of disjointed set of messages and actions has been part of the vaccine rollout from day one. It’s easy to blame the Trump administration for the glitches that sabotaged the promised “20 million injections before the New Year,” and that have followed with every step of the Covid Crisis. But….

 

Fifty-five years ago I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Turkish village. We had an impetigo outbreak and went to Turkish doctors to ask what we should do.

They loaded us up with purple medicine and sent us back to the village. Another time, my neighbor’s small son was kicked in the head by a donkey. Mom and I carried him to the main road and flagged a tractor pulling a wagonload of passengers. I held the boy as we bounced the 20 kilometers into the city, Diyarbakir, and then caught a horse drawn cab to the government hospital. The wound was swabbed with iodine, dusted with sulfa, and sewn with a staple. 

 

At some point in our dealings with local health authorities, a young doctor doing his military service lectured us on the differences between American health care and what he was doing. “I am responsible for the health of this city and state. We have to patch the wounds and prevent the spread of diseases as best we can with the whole community in mind,” he said. We don’t have the luxury of individualizing every outbreak and every procedure.”

 

There are times when individualism and competition are not the most efficient ways of getting a big job done.

 

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7. “1967"

It feels like 1967, and CONTRA-19 feels like Vietnam. No sounds of choppers and gunfire, but the sirens of ambulances and the humming of refrigerated trucks holding dead bodies. The bodies are older, but the body count is higher.

I left the US for my Peace Corps tour in Turkey in July in 1965—a month before Watts blew up. There had been indications—“Freedom Summer” in ’63 in the South; the Kennedy assassination; a Vietnam teach-in I’d gone to at Northwestern in the fall of ’64; racial incidents in Eastern cities in that same year. But I left Peace Corps training at Portland State University in June with a pocketful of Kennedy half-dollars, a few hundred Turkish words and phrases, and the idealism of a 22 year-old convert to peace and the Peace Corps.

I came back to a radically different US in the summer of 1967. Vietnam had moved from the background to the headlines. There were daily body counts, of our dead and General Westmoreland’s precise if fabricated statistics of the North Vietnamese dead. Dr. King had linked the Civil Rights movement to Vietnam in an April speech.

I took a Peace Corps staff job and lived at DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. Vietnam was on our minds as we focused our work lives on the rest of the world. The country was divided. “Hard hats” were the MAGA hats of the day. I and 100,000 others marched on the Pentagon in October.

The calendar turned. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April; D. C. erupted. We were curfewed as the city burned. In June Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

Today’s pandemic is the drumbeat of our lives, like Vietnam was in 1967. George Floyd’s killing and today’s riots feel like the spring of 1968.

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