Turkish Reflections Part I

While on my trip to Germany, I did some writing. A three part series on my life on a military base and in Turkey in general. Here ... is Part 1.

Lately, I’ve been frustrated.

Frustrated that after covering all the couches as I normally do when leaving the house so that Scrubs doesn’t lay on the furniture, I ran back into the house for something only to find him laying on the one couch that wasn’t covered with a kitchen chair.

And the reason it wasn’t covered with a chair? Because it was covered with clean laundry! Loads and loads of it waiting for Hatice to help climb out from under it. And there sat my just –played-outside-muddy and shedding-like-crazy-lately doggie right smack in the middle of it.

Time to rewash all the clothes, right?

Not a chance.

Frustration regarding Scrubs intersects with my frustrations about … geez I don’t know how to say it.

It’s a combination of military life and the country of Turkey all rolled into one.

That being said, I am not sure it is actually Turkey as much it is not America. Or our military. And our military mixed with Turkish military?

I fear I’m not making sense.

Government-run organizations can frustrate everyone. But in our case, we have an extra layer of frustration because we are on a Turkish Base – not an American one.

Example of something that caused my blood to simmer?  Our PCS to the Azores. I promise you, if general citizens had to do as much as a military family to move, no one would move … ever! We’d all live in the house we were born in for our entire existence. I’m sure of it!

Keep in mind, that I’m only the “dependent.” Ninety percent of the work to move falls onto JB. His frustration is currently spewing. However, just the parts that I have to be responsible for drive me up a wall.

I had to take the boys to the dentist to make sure their teeth were good enough to go. Just one of a gazillion things, and truthfully, I was actually surprised they didn’t make Abigail go too. There’s so many things that don’t make sense that this would just be one of them.

We had to take Scrubs to the flight line to get him weighed in order to get him listed on our orders. But it was more difficult than that. We had to bring the kennel that he will be flying in with us. Knowing that the kennel is too large for the scale at the check-in desk, we brought him in separate from the kennel. The Turkish man at the security checkpoint told us that we’d have to put the dog in the kennel to get him weighed. (This is where military frustrations intersect with Turkish ones. I’m pretty sure communication factored into this event.) We tried to explain the too big of a kennel thing in half Turkish half English only to be shot down. So we put the kennel together, put Scrubs inside, got a luggage cart to carry it on and went up to the counter.

Only to be told at the front desk that he would have to be weighed separately. Please take the dog out of the kennel and take the kennel apart. It’s too big to fit on the belt.

Okay.

I won’t even get into the fact that you can’t even fly the rotator to the Azores. We’ll have to take commercial anyway. So this information is not needed and will not be used.

But. Okay.

A form of Cirque du Solei came to the Base the other day. Thirty minutes before I was supposed to meet friends for the show, JB called. Apparently our entire family had to have a meeting with someone from the “Exceptional Family Member Program” because of Abigail’s head issues. They waived the meeting due to mercy for mother with three tiny children and no Veronica and as a favor to JB I think. But I still had to get all three kids out and go up to the Clinic to sign some paperwork before the show started.

So I did. I got everyone ready to go thirty minutes earlier than expected. (No small feat when we have pants and underwear and jackets and shoes/socks times three and a dog to do furniture prevention with.) We piled into the van. Drove to the Clinic. Ran up to the front door – boys pushing Abigail in her stroller, trying to do all this and still meet my friends on time.

Only to be met at the front door of the clinic by an airman.

Did I have my ID?

I should have known better. Go somewhere on Base without your ID, and you can rest assured there will be an “exercise” that day at whatever building you are going to that requires you to show ID or even stay in or out of the building until the exercise (aka “practice for some fake event“) is over.

I didn’t have my ID. The airman asked me what I was there for. “I just need to run into my husband’s

office – Dr. K. – and sign some forms.”

There’s only three doctors. It’s a small Base. Surely this could slide.

It could not.

“I’m pretty sure you’ll need ID to sign the forms.”

(I didn’t.)

Okay. So I’d run back to the van to get my ID. At least it was in the van and not at home. But before I did, I’d tell this man that he’d have to watch my three kids. No way I was going to navigate the parking lot an extra two times with all three kids. So I sat the boys against a side wall; I parked Abigail’s stroller. I told them to be good, but truthfully, I didn’t really care if they were. “You’ll have to watch them,” I said and turned to jog out to the van before the young airman could say anything in reply.

Oh. And get this. That “Exceptional  Family Member” program I wrote about up above? Well, it was determined that Abigail needed physical therapy for her flat head/neck muscle issues. So we met with the therapists at the end of last year. They came to the house. We did all the paperwork. We got everything set up.

And then, the Turkish government reached a stand-off with American military in regards to contractors working on Base. The therapist on Base was a contractor. That means she is not military, and she gets paid through a separate employer. The Turkish government has decided that they are no longer going to renew the contracts of these employees. Not unless the employer agrees to pay 30% to the government for Turkish taxes.

That’s not going to happen.

So anyone whose license expires in January can’t work anymore. At least until this all gets worked out. Next month it will be all the February people. And so on. Abigail’s therapist was one of these lucky people. So now she is here. She knows how to help Abigail. But she can’t. Because of these contract disputes. We go weeks without a therapy session.

So they sent Abigail’s therapist to the Azores and brought a military therapist from Germany to Incirlik for a week. This man can see Abigail. I’m still not exactly sure why, but I think it’s because he is military. Anyways, he comes to the house with another gal. We had a wonderful home visit at which point it was determined that Abigail really didn’t need therapy anymore. Because she was rolling all over the place, her neck was getting stronger and she was nearly developmentally exactly where she should be.

But the U.S. military would require us to still log visits until we could get the paperwork changed. The paper I signed was a legal document. And we can’t change the paperwork until Abigail’s therapist returns in a month.

This new therapist has to come to the house again later in the week to meet requirements for his trip over to Turkey. He has to do a two hour visit with a little girl who doesn’t need his help. He was incredibly nice. He played with Abigail and the boys. I watched The Australian Open and made cupcakes for Elijah’s birthday party all the while thinking: What a waste for this guy. What a waste for the money of taxpayers.

He actually told me later that this ranked as his top one or two home visits ever. So, I guess that means that he wasn’t too bored playing with three little kids and watching their mom make cupcakes and seeing Djokovic advance to the finals.

(Did I mention that the during the course of this meeting we took Scrubs out to play Frisbee? The boys ran ahead of me into the house and locked … me … out. Thank goodness the therapist was holding Abigail or I might have really panicked. Our lock bolts three times. You can spin it around for what seems like an eternity and not get the door unlocked. So I was concerned. Elijah tried to help. No go. I told him to get his brother. Isaac was a great listener, and I talked him through returning us into the home without too much drama. About four minutes of “Oh crud. I’m going to have to call JB at work,” but otherwise, nothing much to speak of.)

Note to self: keep sliding glass door unlocked in back.

Double note to self: Scrubby knows how to open sliding glass door unless it is locked.

Triple note to self: Try to figure out some other option to prevent lockage outage in the futurage while still preventing Scrubbage from unwanted outage.

Other quick things. We just got our “permanent car pass” for the Base. Nineteen months after first setting foot on this Base, we now have a pass. Granted it accidentally has a picture of me by the name “John” and “Wendi” looks awfully male-like. But we have it. In order to get it, we were told that both JB and I had to go to the office and do the paperwork together. So, we got all three kids there and waited in line an hour only to see JB do all the paperwork by himself.

“Do you need my wife?” he asked the man working.

“No. Just you.”

Deep breaths Wendi. At least they let you put cartoons on the television in the waiting room while you waited.

So Turkey … frustrations. There’s more, but I fear this post has already run away from me. Tune in tomorrow when I will attempt to sound less unhappy and more positive and come up with a moral of the story that leaves us all seeing the glass as half full.