Istanbul, 2008

Sultanahmet Skyline

I am up hours before the sun speeding in a taxi to Ataturk Airport in Istanbul to assist Iraqi refugees who are headed to the country that I have voluntarily left behind.

Refugee: One who has crossed an international border and is unwilling or unable to return home because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

If I count the rednecks in America including some who have been in political office recently…nah, I probably still wouldn’t qualify as a refugee although I often feel like one.

So who are these Iraqi refugees and why are they leaving, and why are they headed to the USA?

They are Chaldean Christians, one of the world’s oldest religions, in existence since the first century. They constitute what remains of the original, non-Arabic population of the Middle East. All use Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ. Despite successive persecutions and constant pressures, Christianity has continued in Iraq since brought there allegedly by Thomas the Apostle.

Before the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Christians and Muslims lived together peacefully in Iraq. Chaldean Christians were mostly middle and upper class professionals. But as a result of the US-led surge the struggle with al-Qaeda moved to the city of Mosul, the home of Chaldean Christians. In misplaced anger towards the West, Muslims have increased demands for Chaldeans to convert. Death threats, the looting of homes and businesses, kidnappings, bombings, and murder have become increasingly commonplace. This past March the Chaldean archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho of Mosul was abducted and murdered. Numerous priests and deacons have been tortured and shot or beheaded. And at least 40 churches have been burned to the ground.

I am here today because the United States requires an American be present at the airport for a final identity check of all political and religious refugees headed to the United States. The job pays little and costs a night’s sleep, but I come at least once per week because it pulls me from my ant hill existence and lands me in an experience that is raw and real.

Fifty adults and children stand in line at the check out counters – next to 2 bags per person, each weighing a maximum of 23 kilos, containing all the belongings they will take with them into their new lives. They have waited for months, some for years for this day. It is 5 AM. They’ve been here since 2 AM after a 6-hour bus ride from various satellite cities throughout Turkey. They are excited like children the night before Christmas.

Sweden has taken in the most Iraqi refugees — 40,000 – while the United States, which had only taken 1,608 by the end of 2007, has implemented a program for receiving up to 15,000 Iraqi refugees by the end of 2008. Around 500,000 people have fled Bush’s new Iraq and its violence, mass abductions and economic meltdown and most of them have been Chaldean Christians.

Arim standing with his family of five says, “My life is in Iraq, my work as an English teacher. My home. My friends. But lately they are making it impossible for us to stay. When my daughter entered university to become a teacher like me, she was told to convert to Islam or she would be kidnapped and raped. It was then that we knew we had to go.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to convert to Islam?” I ask.

“We would never do that. Our fathers, our grandfathers, their fathers, for 2000 years we have been there. We will die before turning our backs on our ancestors, our faith.”

Arim and his family

After hours in the checkout line shuffling through all the documents, checking passport photos with faces, police letters, sponsor letters signed, the group is ready to go.

But wait. There’s a glitch.

Someone notices that the photo on a security letter for one of the young men does not match the photo on his identity card. A government bureaucrat hundreds of miles away in the Turkish capital of Ankara apparently transposed photos on the documents by accident. Calls are frantically made, but government offices are not open at this early hour. The International Office of Migration officer here with me tells the family that she is sorry. They will not be able to go.

The mother collapses to the floor, pressing her hands together in the universal sign of prayer and begs, “Please, please, help us. We have no money.” The officer looks away, there is nothing she can do. The woman’s sons and husband try to console her, veiling their own disappointment behind cultural machismo. The IOM employee continues trying to call offices that are not yet open. She cannot find a solution.

After at least an hour of pleading and crying and desperate attempts to talk the IOM officer into letting them go, the family concedes that their worst fears have come true. The other passengers look on with a mixture of pity and relief as the family shuffles out of the airport, the father and son holding up the mother by her elbows, daughters trailing behind, heads hung low.

“Where will they go?” I ask the IOM personel. “I don’t know, “ she says her face a blank mask, and turns back to processing the remaining 44 refugees.

They are checked through, documents combed repeatedly at checkpoint after checkpoint, and then the only remaining gateway is passport control where once approved, the refugees will be granted entry to the other side – the side of the airport full of glittering duty free shops and restaurants, a sort of paradise before getting on a plane to heaven. Even I, without an airplane ticket, am relegated to watching from outside the pearly gates.

One by one each passes through the barrier after saying goodbye to family and friends on the other side that wave them on. Only one elderly woman remains, melded to a young adult man, her tear racked face glued to his, bodies entwined as if to imprint a memory.

I’d been looking away all morning gulping down rising emotions and silently repeating the mantra: be professional Robin, be professional. But it’s useless now. The tears spill in a torrent and I gulp down sobs that rise up in my throat. I watch this mother saying goodbye to a son she will likely never see again.

My son is in America and I am in Turkey. She will go to America and her son will remain in Turkey.

They pull apart as her name is called over the loudspeaker, and the old woman goes through the gate that separates her new life from the old one, turning to gaze one last time into the eyes of her son. At that moment she scans the crowd behind the barrier and our eyes meet. Unbelievably, she returns to where I stand, reaches over the barrier and wraps her arms around me. We stand there, a woman whose name I do not know, whose language I do not speak, holding each other. And in this moment she knows me, and I know her.

And then she is gone along with the others to America.

Today is Thanksgiving, and I will eat turkey in Turkey with American friends. I will celebrate Thanksgiving as never before, grateful that I am free to be here because I am an American. And I vow to never, ever complain about filing my taxes again. (A vow I have admittedly broken since writing this article).

Postnote: The family that was turned away at the airport in this article, boarded a plane for America 6 days later.

How You Can Help:

Church World Service (CWS)
www.churchworldservice.org

Domestic & Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS)
Episcopal Migration Ministries
www.episcopalchurch.org/emm/

Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC)
www.ecdcinternational.org

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
www.hias.org

Bureau of Refugee Programs
Iowa Department of Human Services
www.dhs.state.ia.us/homepages/dhs/refugee

International Rescue Committee (IRC)
www.intrescom.org

Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service (LIRS)
www.lirs.org

U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI)
www.refugees.org

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)
www.usccb.org/mrs

World Relief (WR)
www.wr.org

Ganesha and Central Shopping Center share real estate

I love gnarly shiny Bangkok with its jarring juxtapositions. Vendors selling anything and everything you didn’t know you needed (vibrator anyone?) for miles and miles along potholed smelly sidewalks, next to towering air conditioned shopping malls, the likes of Terminal 21 – a play on a 5 story airport, each floor representing a different country. The ease of speeding from one gristly or glittery part of the city to another on the Sky Train. Thais holding smoking incense sticks at their heads while bowing to temples with golden Buddhas in the shadows of mega skyscrapers.

Billboard in Bangkok as seen from a sky train station

I ate a hurried meal of naan and curry on the street of Bangkok’s little Arabia, and watching the people pass by in the streets was like being on the film set of Arabian Nights – not entirely surprising considering both the Pakistani and Dubai embassies are located nearby.

Bangkok reminds me of Bombay in “Shantaram”, the book I am currently reading. It is the biggest, most bustling, economically alive melting pot of a city I’ve seen in the world. It’s good, bad, beautiful and ugly all stirred together. And it works.

I am here to get my visa renewed. Easy enough to speed to the Indonesian Embassy across the steamy city on the highly efficient and cooled sky train. And it was no surprise when I arrived at 1PM – the hour advertised on the Indonesian Embassy website that they open – that someone had pasted a piece of paper with the number ‘2′ over the ‘1′. So to kill time, I thumbed through hundreds of pirated movies and music at the nearby Phuntip Plaza – a 4 story shopping mall entirely dedicated to all things digital.

I am also in Bangkok for my yearly physical exam at one of the world’s most medically advanced and inexpensive (by US standards) hospitals. Kings and queens and just about everyone else with even a little bit of money or means in Asia come to Bumrungrad for medical care. Today in the waiting room I met a pilot from Ethiopia, a woman from Bangladesh, and an American couple living in China. I saw women wearing black burkas with only eye slits sitting next to women in flirty, silk lace-edged veils, and men with table cloths on their heads and white pillboxes, some wearing white flowing gowns (and these weren’t hospital gowns), and I have no idea who and where all these people come from. But come they do.

See the story I wrote on this hospital in 2003. (Scroll a ways down on this blog roll).

I stood next to an older guy outside the elevator in the hospital who when I asked for directions to Building A, sounded like he was from Iowa, and then I noticed his name tag said Chief Executive Officer, Bumrungrad Hospital. Dennis Brown showed me the short cut to get to the next building over for my next appointment.

Next time I come to Bangkok I’m going to check out the Chulalongkorn Hospital where they have a snake farm out back.

With Love from Bangkok,
Robin

International Healthcare in Bangkok

Bumrungrad Hospital

Remember when nurses in the U.S. used to wear these cute hats?

multi-lingual elevator buttons

Words can take an us out of our heads and into our bodies…From intellect to full body sensuality

From my favorite blogstress, Daniel LaPorte:

“I want my day to feel like jazz.
I want kissing to feel like eating an orange off the tree from Tuscany.
I want my next success to feel like Adele must feel with her latest album.
I want my body to feel like a Jaguar in a new open field.
I want smiling to feel like mangoes.
I want my friendships to feel like sandalwood oil, and bowls of popcorn, and hand-knit, with Vodka mixers, served up in a red tent.
I want my nervous system to feel like The Buddha must have felt when he discovered The Middle Way.
I want my gigs to feel like Jimmy Page playing Kashmir, and Gaga doing a Born This Way finale, with some Leonard Cohen tenderness.
I want my neighborhood to feel like a new Jason Mraz song.
I want my integrity to feel like the Hope Diamond.
I want my money-making to feel like walking though a vineyard, surveying ripeness, a production of sun and earth for craft and pleasure.
I want my word to feel like gold bullion.
I want my laughter to feel like electric pineapple children.
I want the end of the day to feel like a happy quiet baby.
I want being of service to feel like a Squaw mixing herbs into healing paste for warriors.
I want my philanthropy to feel like a cosmic Queen on her best day.
I want my challenges to feel how Siddhartha felt when the left the kingdom.
I want my love to feel like a gorgeous secret that only he and I know. For eternity.
I want my writing to feel like Citrine, and Jack Kerouac with a fresh buzz on.
I want my ideas to feel like sunrise.”

Nice huh? Thanks Daniel LaPorte for sharing your yummy way with words.

After I moved to Istanbul in 2006, a Turk named Mehmet told me that one day the European Union would beg Turkey to join. That day may be soon. Turkey is booming in the midst of Europe’s current economic crisis, and Istanbul was recently named by the Financial Times as the #1 liveable city in the world.

In 2009, I moved to Bali. Three years later, I still consider Istanbul one of my “homes”. Last week I returned from a whirlwind business trip to Old Constantinople. Here are a few visual memories from my 10 days there.

Photos were shot with an iPhone 4.

Sunrise on the Bosphorus

Balat neighborhood

Turkish teapot in my apartment

the making of manti in Balat

durum and fresh juice for sale on Istiklal Cadessi

Trolley on Istiklal Cadessi, a 2 mile long pedestrian (mostly ) walkway in modern Istanbul

Turkish sweets

Olives and tea, quintessential Turkey

The view of Sultanahmet from Terrace Three

Been home less than 24 hours after flying half way around the globe – Turkey to Northern California – in time to get my mother to the doctor for Round #3 chemotherapy treatment. …So grateful for the ability to get around the planet with such speed. And for the knowing that the all the world is home.

Hey there…

Where in the world am I now?

Home. Really home. With my parents in Northern California. As you may have surmised from last month’s blog, I am with my mother who is undergoing chemotherapy.

photo shot last week while driving down Columbus Street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco

With the soundtrack of Bonanaza, Walton Mountain reruns, and the preaching of Dr. Phil droning in the background – my father is an avid TV watcher – I am mining notes that comprise the story of my search for home.

Sometimes an experience I’d forgotten surfaces. Here’s one found today, circa 2004, San Francisco.

GATED COMMUNITIES AND HOMELESS DINNERS – San Francisco 2004

An old friend from my Tahoe days visits me in San Francisco. We haven’t spoken in over 4 months, pre-Brazil.

“Karen” has a new condo in the East Bay with a private lake, a tennis court, and “it’s in a gated community,” she adds with emphasis.

“What are you afraid of?” I ask, genuinely perplexed. After all, she lives in a suburban town the likes of Mayberry.

“Are you joking? Haven’t you been watching the news?” she says. “Didn’t you hear about that guy who was killed at the Giants game and what about that woman who disappeared last week in Oakland?”

“Yes, I heard. Repeatedly until finally I turned off the TV. Don’t watch the news,” I plead. “They bombard you with the occasional horrific event, and because that’s all you hear, you begin to believe it is the norm and live in fear that you will be next.”

Karen looks at me oddly.

___________

I accepted an invitation for one of Marc Bruno’s monthly dinners in North Beach for the homeless. Bocce Cafe donates the space and much of the food. Other restaurants like the North Beach Cafe and Washington Park Bar and Grill prepare desserts, salads, bread, and drinks. The purpose of these meals Marc says is to give the homeless a feeling of community by sitting down to dinner with their neighbors.

And so tonight I am dining with people I normally see emerging from a blanket on a street corner.

They are memorializing Punky who died last week at age 28 of liver failure. A tall lanky man stands and introduces himself as Macaroni and talks about what a kind soul Punky was and how he was the kind of guy who would do anything for anyone. He adds that they are all going to miss him, “but hey, he is in a better place now.” Then one after another they share how Punky touched their lives.

It is not all that clear who is homeless here tonight and who is not. I am mindful of small talk like, “So where do you live?”

It’s a fine line between us.

I sometimes worry about how I’ll pay for my apartment. (ok so it’s a luxurious worry).
My newly divorced friend has been looking for a job for 6 weeks.
An ex boyfriend buys an SUV so that he can sleep in it if ever he should lose his home.

After the dishes have been cleared, Macaroni stands to announce that he and Dougie need 35 cents each for cab fare. A man at the next table says, “Do what I do and sneak on the back of the bus.” A woman dressed in ski cap and layers of clothes says, “Or look on the ground for a bus pass.”

We, neighbors all, walk to our homes – some under roofs and others under the stars.

Coit Tower towers over North Beach and Telegraph Hill in 2004

Every now and then I read a blog that makes me want to rise up, fist in the air, and shout, “Yeah!” Like the one below by Danielle LaPorte.

Perhaps this particular blog resonated with me tonight because I am finally making good on my promise to write every single day no matter what. I’m not talking emails or journaling here. I’m talking a minimum of 1 hour per day writing The Book. I’ve been editing the first draft today and dang! What an amazing decade.

I am home now with my parents in Northern California. Today we attended my mother’s first oncology appointment. When the nurse called us into his office, I snapped close my laptop where I had been speed reading about gentle natural methods for restoring a body to its healthy pre- cancer prognosis.

No I learned when I asked him, the doctor does not use (nor believe in) an alternative/complementary approach. His is a singular aggressive fight against any renegade cancer cells that may have escaped that little gray mass they removed from my mother’s ovary. The chemicals are so toxic, they will not only kill the bad guys but many of the good ones that make my mother the radiant, vital, sweet woman that she is. This just screams out against everything I believe in – a life lived well – lovingly, joyfully, gracefully, mindfully, proactively, preventively, spiritually whole. My dream of a holistic team of support for my mother is not gonna happen.

That is, unless … Can I be on your team Mom?

The aforementioned blog by Danielle LaPorte, Read it at www.WhiteHotTruth.com

(refer to this when in doubt, or sick & tired.)

“I’m all for mental health days. And gentleness. And I think the world should take the month of December off. And for the love of God, a 4 day work week would revolutionize the collective human spirit and thusly, healthcare. But this pep talk isn’t about taking it easy, this is about another form of self care: doing whatever it takes.

Here goes…

Just got dumped? Lace up your runners and move your body.
Under the weather? Go in to work any way, wearing your favorite sweater.
Up to your earrings in deadlines? Go cheer on your friend. Show up at the bake sale. Call your mother.
Crying before show time? Put some tea bags on your eyes. Say a prayer. Enter stage left.

Pull an all-nighter. Turn up the volume. Go hard. Go harder.
Re-prioritize your aches and pains.
Infuse your sensitivities with courage.
Tell fear to fuck right the fuck off.
Devote to Done.

There are soul-justified reasons to cancel. There are times to stop. This isn’t one of them. Keep going. Show up. Decide to be one of those people who pull it off.

Do what you say you’re going to do.
Don’t let us down.
Decide to rise.

Why decide to rise? Not for the reasons you might think. In fact, these are the reasons that will make you sick and tired:

Do not rise out of obligation. Do not rise because of feared consequences. Do not rise because you think being tough makes you smarter (it doesn’t.)

Decide to rise because you want to expand — your being, your life, your possibilities.

Decide to rise to explore your place in the universe.

Decide to rise because super powers are meant to be activated and applied to real life.

On the other side of deciding to rise is illumination, ecstasy, insight. And the angel of your strength is there waiting, smiling, applauding, with a goblet of endorphins for you. When you transcend circumstances you get special privileges. Like the deep knowing that life wants you to win, evidence that you are indeed amazing, and irrefutable proof that your mind chooses what matters.

Decide to rise.”

Thank you Danielle LaPorte!
www.WhiteHotTruth.com

Robin juicing daily in the Bay Area, California

San Francisco

Bali

Istanbul

I recently read an article online called “Parents of the Third Culture: Where to Retire When All the World is Home”.
http://www.expatharem.com/2011/04/27/parents-of-the-third-culture-where-to-retire-when-all-the-world-is-home/

It got me thinking. I’ve been moving and living abroad in over a dozen countries on 6 continents for over a decade to learn who is moving where and why for articles and a book I was writing about expat life – and ultimately, to find my own way home.

I’m often asked what qualities are on my Where are the best places on the planet to be an expatriate list. Here’s the short one: Geographically beautiful, within an hour of the sea, pleasant year round weather, a community where art and culture and architecture are valued, where colors are bright, where music and dance are an integral part of life, a cost of living significantly lower than that of the United States, within an hour of an international airport, a warm, loving, inclusive, progressive community with a world view, low crime rate, excellent, affordable healthcare with an emphasis on holistic health care, and where good healthy food grows easily and abundantly.

I would learn that most countries don’t allow foreigners to earn money legally, so my list grew to include a place where I could work. I had discovered in Turkey the most hospitable, inclusive people I’d met anywhere on the planet – and the most misaligned, thanks to a movie called “Orient Express”. I dreamed that if Westerners lived even briefly in real homes in real neighborhoods in Turkey, they might go home to report that muslims do not actually sprout horns and that we are in fact, more alike, than different. Maybe, my dream went, the undeclared war that my country had engaged in against all things Muslim, might begin to seem, well, nonsensical. And so Oneworld ltd was born and grew to include 7 apartments which I now rent out to global travelers passing through Turkey.

Three years later, Istanbul’s soaring cost of living, bleak winters, and spiritual polarization (one it seems is either a fundamentalist Muslim or an atheist in Turkey, with very little in between), and lack of environmental awareness and concern, resulted in new additions to my list: spiritual, conscious, alternative, environmentally proactive – and led me back to Bali.

Thanks to the internet, a Turkish manager and assorted “assistants” on the ground, I run a business in Turkey from a lumbung in the tropics of Bali.

One of the many things I have learned over the past 10 years, is that expat havens have a growth trajectory. Take St. Tropez for example. Expat havens begin as bohemian artists’ enclaves. Word gets out and within a few years (barring a bomb or ongoing political unrest), the masses arrive, followed by the developers, prices escalate, and the qualities that initially drew foreigners in the first place disappear. The bohemian early adoptors move on to the next best as-yet-unknown place, and the old expat havens become high priced made-to-order-for-tourists parodies of their former selves.

Many of the locales in which I have lived have already peaked on this trajectory – San Francisco, Paris, Buenos Aires, Buzios (Brazil), Deia (Mallorca, Spain)…There are others coming up from behind and they include Istanbul and Bali…

Yep, my antennae are up and quivering. Next best place? Shhhhhhh!

An office of my own

I was blissfully going through emails in my lumbong across the garden from my house in Bali this morning, when I read a friend’s newsletter. That was the first I heard about the recent “random shooting” in Arizona.

I love not being fed the news on a regular basis. It lets me believe that the world is overall, a pretty safe place.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t experience a few of my own OMG events.

Yesterday when speeding along on my motor scooter down a bumpy country road, rice paddies whizzing by, I saw a plate-sized spider inching his way to my left hand on the handlebar. I screamed (which must have looked strange had anyone been watching) and veered to the side of the road leaping from the bike to await the spider’s departure. I don’t know what I would have done had that spider reached my hand before I managed to stop.

“How Safe Do You Feel” is a treatise on living our lives like they might be changed drastically, or end, at any moment.

Thanks Peggy for this latest scream of consciousness.
http://www.screamsofconsciousness.com.

Robin

Gate to my home

November 1, 2010

Yet another amazing dinner at our Write & Sell That Book Now! workshop

We had 14 students and the instructor, Joanna Penn, was AMAZING in every sense of the word. Each of us walked away from the workshop pregnant with cutting edge information about how to get our books out of our heads and out into the world. The Kumara Sakti Resort was sumptuous and accommodating, and the Oneworld Retreat staff professional and organized.

This was my first experience in teaching a class. The creativity session I taught was an experiential exercise on accessing the subconscious and writing from a place that is deep and authentic in order to discover one’s unique message. My course served as a counterbalance to Joanna’s left-brained, info-packed approach.

After our “Write and Sell That Book Now!” workshop, I attended the annual Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, and then holed up in a hotel with a friend visiting from New York. After she returned to the USA, I began the hunt for a new home in Ubud.

My house perched below Sayan Ridge has been feeling less and less secure as the rain saturated earth around it has begun to slide down to the Agung River below. I’d been wanting to move closer to town anyway, so I’ve looked at house after house and have finally found one which I will move into December 10. Thanks to several dear friends I’ve had amazing homes to stay in from a beach house in southern Bali, to a seaside palace on Bali’s northern shore, to an extra bedroom in a friend’s bungalow in central Ubud.

It will be amazing to finally park myself in one place for at least 9 months and unpack everything for the first time since May. That’s 6 months of living out of suitcases!

Back to the workshop. Here’s a recent blog Joanna Penn wrote about our “Write and Sell That Book Now!” workshop. http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2010/10/20/international-speaking-lessons-learned-from-a-multi-day-retreat-in-ubud-bali/

I’ll be posting photos and some of the highlights and tips gleaned for the workshop soon. Until then!

Love, love
Robin

early morning on Echo Beach, Bali, 10/10