Those aren’t shepherds

Wednesday, 6 March Today’s walk is 32 km (20 miles), starting at the provincial border between Urfa and Diyarbakır, and ending at the village of Tokaçlı. The temperature is 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), and the crosswind so strong the bus is shuddering...

Do you have any information?

Tuesday, 5 March The day after moving to Diyarbakır, I hop a mini-bus back to Siverek to begin the three daylong legs of my walk toward Diyarbakir. The plains now are windswept, the winds high. As I start my walk out of Siverek, a group of about eight 10-year-old boys...

Bat out of hell

Friday, 1 March I start walking again. I leave Urfa like a bat out of hell. My first thought—Oh shit! I want to finish this up by the middle of April and I still have one-third of the country to cross without injuring myself! I pull a calculator out of my pocket. How...

Crying into my tahini

The next day, before resuming my walk, I went downstairs to the hotel’s breakfast buffet. I took a seat next to the window. A cold rain was beating against the glass. I was happy to see on the buffet a big bowl of tahini, an oily spread made from pressed sesame seeds....

Stumbling into a refugee camp

Arriving home at Mustafa’s each day had meant I ended the day with a warm, home-cooked meal and a hot shower in a spacious bathroom, but all good things must come to an end. Mustafa’s inlaws needed their apartment back. They lived in Kilis, a city adjacent to the...