By Jamie Ewing
June, 2013
Let me start by getting this out in the open: I haven’t done much for this trip.
My fund raising is pitiful compared to my sister, her high-rolling friends and my bullying engineer cousin. I haven’t listened in on a single Go Help conference call. I’ve barely studied the logistics, rules, visas, distances, or routes for my nine countries. I haven’t suffered from FOMO (in case you don’t know what that is, read the previous blog entry), and I haven’t bought any supplies even though the temperature in Turkmenistan commonly reaches 110 degrees in July (I did research that).
My biggest accomplishment thus far is that I haven’t managed to sabotage my teammates by not getting my visas. I don’t think they would be too happy with me if we got to the Uzbekistan border and everyone was welcomed into the country except me. So at least I have that going for me. I have managed to follow instructions from my sister the team leader and mail in some forms on time. Yeah me.
So when I was asked to take on two tasks I was excited. Here was my chance to redeem myself. My chance to earn a seat in our Opel van.
Task one: Plan our route from Istanbul to Baku
Easy enough right? I know how to load up Google maps, move some dots around and read some reviews on TripAdvisor. So I fire up my internet machine, and what’s the first image that pops up on my home screen? A photo of a Turkish protestor being carried away after getting shot in the head with a canister of tear gas. That can’t be good. I’ve never seen a tear gas canister, but I imagine it’s about the size and weight of a full can of beer, and I’ve been hit in the head with a full can of beer. You don’t need to watch the Jackass video to know it hurts.
Our trip is still a month away. Maybe they are just protesting a minor issue that will quickly blow over. Maybe they want to go back to living in Constantinople. Maybe their government is secretly recording their phone calls and e-mails and lying about it while the fiscal arm is illegally targeting the opposition party for harassment and investigation. Oops…wrong country.
I dig a little deeper. Protestors comparing the prime minister to a dictator…blah blah blah. A park being turned into a shopping center…that sounds like an American problem. I’m quickly losing interest in this protest until my eyes glean the words “ban on alcohol sales.” The Turkish president recently signed into law a ban on alcohol sales from 10pm to 6am.
You can take away a man’s freedom. You can take away a man’s park. But I’ll be damned if you can take away his right to get drunk at 5am without a fight. That changes everything. I had slotted several hours a day for drinking and recovering from said drinks. I can’t foresee Love Valley with its penis shaped rocks being nearly as funny without some loud mouth soup. A mixture of panic and disappointment rises in my stomach until I see a Reuters photo of a protestor with a homemade gas mask made from a plastic bottle:
Is that man really wearing a plastic bottle for a gas mask, and an orange scarf that screams “please shoot your tear gas over here?” The guy on the right looks moderately cool with his swim goggles on, but a plastic bottle? At least he punched some breathing holes in the lid, which I’m sure are special holes that only allow oxygen, not gas in. And I’m sure the gas won’t be able to get in on the sides where he taped the bottle to his hair. That’s air tight, isn’t it?
I continue to stare at this picture until it dawns on me: He must be drunk! The only rational explanation for battling police with a street sign and the bottle from your afternoon apple juice is that you must be drunk. If bottle face can get liquored up and fight the police, surely we can locate some Turkish moonshine along our route.
As relief slowly washes over me, I go back to charting our course to Baku knowing that I have found at least one drinking buddy in Turkey and that our travel time has just been increased tenfold.
Task two: find a medical travel kit, preferably with sutures, staples and at least one sharp scalpel.
That makes sense. Give me a nice state-of-the-art medical kit, and I’m sure I can not only treat a mean sun burn or pick out the nastiest splinter but also whittle a fully functioning third arm out of my left calf muscle. My sister, on the other hand, blacks out after being bitten by a hamster, but that’s another story. (Actually, that’s all B.S. except the part about the hamster).
I’m as squeamish around blood as I am around roaches, and if you have ever seen me run like a 3-year-old girl from a roach, you know that’s not good. I’m being told that we won’t actually be using the medical kit, but instead, it’s to give to a doctor to use on us. What? Give to a doctor? Why doesn’t this “doctor” have his own medical tools? Why does he need to borrow a scalpel I bought off Amazon.com? Now I am picturing some guy rolling off his yak mat in the middle of the night and staggering over to me in his hash-induced stupor so that he can sew up my arm with a needle I only purchased because it was available for free shipping. Do I need to print off some Wiki pages on how to perform surgery and bring them with me as well? Maybe I should download the children’s song “Dry Bones” so that when this “doctor” is putting me back together, he will know that the neck bone is connected to the head bone (and why are we teaching kids to call the skull the “head bone”?)
Now I am realizing why I have not been tasked with more on this trip. After being assigned two simple jobs, I am not only convinced that if we get in a horrible accident, I will return home with my hand possibly attached to my head bone, but I will apparently also have to be sober the whole time. If I get injured, perhaps I can just tape a plastic bottle to my wound until 6am rolls around and I can get a drink.