Double or Nothing....

On nights when Melody and I actually sleep, we’re both having strange dreams.
From to bizarre to horrifying, they generally encompass our current situation. That is, being stuck in what we like to call Turk-a-tory. Before I go into the dreams, I’ll give en brief what’s going on. We’re stuck in Turkey. When we bought our tickets for Istanbul, our visas were “in the mail”. Within several days of being here, we went to the Libyan Embassy here in Istanbul and requested our visas be processed here, and they agreed. So, for a week, we were on the horn with Tripoli working out the details. Outside of the delays caused by the bureaucracy of the Libyan government, there have also been political events that have stalled us here. As you may know, Libya has convicted 4 Bulgarian nurses and 1 Palestinian doctor of infecting 400 Libyan children with the HIV virus during treatment at a Libyan medical center. 50 children have already died.
As it’s explained to us, these are children of poor, uneducated Libyan families. I personally am not a fan of explaining the feelings and emotions of persons who have/will lose children to AIDS by contextualizing it around educated or not educated. As the first person in my family to go to college, and also to have the luxury to pursue work outside of manual labor, I can tell you that the "uneducated" are not people who don’t know the difference between right and wrong, lack compassion, or have no value for human life. In Libya, it seems that the high court has found these nurses and doctor guilty of negligence, and I’ve been told that in Islam, it is the families right to decide the punishment. These families want execution. The children that are still dying of AIDS protest regularly for the death of those that infected t hem. After years of hearing conspiracy theory around Western intervention/imperialism/colonialism, I would imagine it’s impossible to tell these families that this was a horrible, horrible accident caused by equipment that no one knew was infected with the HIV virus. And in truth, the Cold War years saw the United States and many other Western countries funding coups, guerilla activities, and other acts to control countries we feared would fall to communism or act in a way that was otherwise not beneficial to Western interests. That said, I hate the idea that these people have been tortured during incarceration in Libya, and that there’s even a chance they’ll be executed.
In response to Libya’s refusal to send the nurses and doctor back to their home countries, which would certainly de-stabilize Libya with massive civic unrest, the United States has banned all Americans from going into Libya as tourists, and Libyan citizen can no longer obtain entry into the United States. Due to this political situation, Melody and I are stuck here in Turk-a-tory. The return date on our tickets home have passed, and we’re flat broke.
But, the deal also got sweeter. Instead of teaching English to people in the nationalized oil industry, we’ll be teaching English for Humanities at a graduate school in Tripoli.
Our Libyan friends called Wednesday and said they’ve applied for a golden, multi-entry work visas, which at this point is the only way into the country, and also difficult to obtain. So, Melody decided to take the rest of our cash to pay for our hotel until Sunday and roll the dice, double our nothing. We’ll let you know what happens….