School Doctor

I learned the other day we have a school doctor and I can go there whenever I want. Not that I ever want to go to the doctor . . . but Tolga wanted to take me to the hospital, which I thought was a little dramatic, so I agreed to go to the school doctor.

I knocked on the office door not sure whether the label said doctor or not, and not sure what the protocol was for showing up. The nurse and doctor where in the front room looking at a sheet of honey comb that someone had just brought as a gift for him from a nearby village. They welcomed me and shooed me into the second office to sit and have a chat. The doctor informed me, in English, that he has been a doctor for 25 years and doesn't perscribe antibiotics for every ailment. He must have treated many foreigners because he definitely addressed my foremost concerns. I told the doctor I had two problems. My eyelid was still infected, and my stomach was not happy.

He saw my eye right away when I took off my glasses and looked at it with his eye scope. He told me, "It is not bad. I have seen this many times and yours is not bad. It's not on the eye. I give you cream. You put on the door of your eye in the morning and the night."
"I've been using a cream"
"Yes, but I give you better cream. The eye will take the cream inside and clean the spot. If not, in one week, you must see an eye doctor and maybe they will do a small surgery."
"Surgery?!"
"Yes, but very small. Not bad. Just to clean the veins."
"Okay. My second problem is my stomach. It started hurting very bad on Thursday and . . ."
"Ah, yes." And he pulls out his handy-dandy scope and looks at my throat. "Ah yes. It's not bad. Many teachers tell me this in the beginning."
"Not my throat, my stomach."
"Oh! Sorry."

He then proceeded to prescribe me medicines that he insisted an infant could take, and a cream for my eye before he, the secretary and the pharmacist wished me a "Gec mic olsun" a phrase that sounds like "get Mitch Olson" but is a form of well wishing when one is sick or something bad has happened. It's an encouragement that "things will be better now."

Servants

In Turkey, there seem to be a lot of servants around. They are not called servants, but its the only word that seems to suit the job because we have no equivalent in the US. At my school, there are people that come and pick up my coffee cup (several times a day) to return the sink and wash. In the kitchen, a pot of tea is always available. After passing times, a person comes into the bathrooms and wipes down the counters and picks up the trash. After school, someone came buy to wash every teacher's board. While I was working, someone mopped under my feet.

Turkey 1
America 1 (see yesterday)

Yellow curbs

Where Minnesota becomes tiresome with its relentless regulations, Turkey is a country with inconsistent regulation. For example, in malls and parking lots there are usually security guards. In the mall entrance you have to pass through a metal detector, put your bag through a scanner, and sometimes be buzzed by the hand held scanner. The attendant in the parking garage today had an under carriage mirror and 3D goggles. The thing is, the seem to be scanning more out of curiosity rather than safety. The machines are always beeping, and no one is stopped.

It's kind of funny until you walk on sunny unmarked pavement and learn that you have little depth perception and that yellow paint smeared religiously as a national warning sign for a curb or curve or potential hazard has possibly prevented more accidents than I had ever imagined.