10th entry Driving through Turkey on our way home.

20 -21 June, 1978

In my journal I don't have anything written about our experiences in Turkey, other than the word "Turkey", but I remember what happened from the article I published at age 15.
One night while we were camping in our green tent on the Turkish hills, I had a belt next to my pillow. My father had a gun under his pillow and my older brother had a stick. I smile about the memory about the belt. What was I thinking? Was I going to fight off an army of Turks with the whip of a leather belt? We had heard stories of foreigners being stoned to death from trucks loaded with stones. One night as we were camping, we heard a truck pull up to a stop in the distance, and a group of men speaking in Turkish. My father sat with his gun ready to spring in to action to defend us. I remember praying a lot that fateful hour. I kept praying that God would make the men go away. After what seemed like a long time, the men drove off.
On June 23 we took a ferry to Istanbul where we stayed for two days. At one paricular restaurant I remember being able to look out over a body of water looking into Asia, being in Europe. The Turkish mountain roads were scary. They curved around the mountains without any fencing on the sides of the road. One time my father had had a little too much wine, and insisted on driving on the mountain roads. That was a road trip covered in constant prayers from me. We were able to see Mount Ararat in the distance, where Noah's Ark is mentioned in the Bible to have come to rest. Toward the end of our time in Turkey, we camped on a farm where a man was raising sheep. We fell in love with one particular friendly sheep. He would greet us every morning, and my brothers and I would pet the sheep. The sheppard did not understand a word of what we said, but we were able to communicate to him in broken turkish that we LOVED his sheep. We were REALLY sorry for those spoken words, because the next day he had slaughtered his sheep, and given us a huge leg from it. We had to graciously thank him, after our parents explained to us that our love for the sheep was interpreted as we love sheep meat. We all just wanted to cry. Of course we had no way to cook the meat, and the four of us kids certainly did not want to eat the mutton. All these memories are taken from my article I wrote in 1982 based on my experience being there. My 1978 journal left out a great amount of detail.