Stranded in Turkey in the times of Corona

Staying at home

I have lived in or visited ( for more than 3 days)  a total of 34 countries . I  have not counted any  period less nor transit trips nor repeat visits as some places were visited between 5 to 10 times a year.

It is almost like travelling has been my passion since the day I was born! I remember going for weekends to Beirut in the 60s Dakkar in the 70s or London in 2000s.. Yes when I reflect back it seems I led a charmed life - whatever that means –lucky breaks or tragedies.  

For the past 7 years my job required me to travel often to neighbouring countries or to Europe, Asia and North America for meetings, conferences and workshops. It was exciting but also exhausting yet provided an interesting background to my life in Libya during an active civil war. On my final business trip in March 2020, the Covid19 pandemic caught up with me and finally grounded me in Istanbul (Turkey). During seven years of a gruelling war, bombed airports, shelled cities, militia fights and you name it, I always managed to get home. No rockets ever completely stopped the Libyan spirit and our airports always stood back on their feet making up to the best of their abilities for gruelling international flight bans and serving  the Libyan travellers to the limited destinations left to them out of Libya. 

Basically the various Libyan companies operating flights ( Buraq, Libya Airways, Libya Wings, Afriqiyah, Rahila etc….) and even the air ambulance could only fly to : Amman, Alexandria, Khartoum, Nigeria, Tunis, Istanbul and a special foreign charter flight to Malta, + Jeddah during the Hajj season.  Following the Tripoli war of 2014, 99.9% of the world slapped visas on Libyan passport holders and from the above list only, Tunisia exempts us from visa requirement. Tunis and Istanbul became a hub for connecting flights.  Internal travel was also disrupted between Benghazi and Tripoli post April 2019 creating a virtual checkpoint in airspace disrupting lives and livelihoods, because one side of the country had the monopoly on flights to the Middle East while it still was able to fly to Tunis and the other side of the country could only go to Tunis and Istanbul otherwise it will be shot down by the fighter jets of the Libyan National Army operating in Benghazi.  Therefore a de-facto physical division of the country occurred.

Between 15 and 16 March regardless where your city is, if your airport destination was western Libya then you have a become a statistic in airports and countries all over the world. It was 19 March if your airport destination was in eastern Libya. The authorities in the west (I will call them Weststan) gave no initial warning of the land, sea and air closures, while those in the east (whom I will call Eaststan) where a little more lenient and sent a warning  4 days in advance. Neither had any strategy for dealing with the citizens who found themselves, penniless, homeless, paperless, stateless and isolated, during a worldwide pandemic . Classic botched up job no less!

I could not believe how I on earth I managed to find myself on the wrong side of the fence at this most important time in history!

Working from home

Since the plans to celebrate my upcoming freedom from employment and go on a long vacation were shelved due to the increased impact of the  Covid19 contagion, I had an alternative plan namely to enjoy social distancing with the 450 books and 300 magazines purchased in the last 6 years, learn hip-hop, unearth my mother’s cooking recipes and play chess with my dad. None of that happened, I found myself alone in Turkey, stuck at home in winter, struggling to remember how to operate the oven and make a meal with arthritic hands. In 30 days the number of people I spoke to in person can be counted on the fingers of one hand, including the cashier at the market. Thankfully I was able to speak to my father and some friends online . In the first 3 weeks I still had a job and some work to finish so I could pretend that I had a structure to my day and thing will improve and I could go home.

I registered with the Libyan Consulate and gave them my phone number so they could contact me when the repatriation flights start as I had decided to stay in my own place. If you take the accommodation they had started offering you have to give up your passport. Something I would never do considering how hard it is to get a Libyan passport in the current circumstances. Also how can you do social distancing if they would put me up with a total stranger in the same room?

My neighbours

It’s been a long journey from the 16^th of March (I won’t count the days before that as this was the last day I had seen an airport).  I have become accustomed to being a hermit, and so now find myself at a loss for words when I speak to others. The few times I went out for supplies I feared going near people. I had plans to start a distance learning course but did not have the discipline to do it because my energy was drained being angry at how did I get stuck here and I should be home helping and enduring  the war with my father. The prison I had chosen is in one of the housing compounds on the suburbs of Istanbul, mountainous, far away and isolated. The point was I did not want crowds. The highlight of my days became the daily passage of a herd of cows in the valley across my temporary refuge. There are 6 brown cows, 13 mixed colour and  3 brown ones. There are two shepherds. My favourite bull is a brown one with shortish horns. Sometimes I wave to them. On my two-week anniversary in detention I went out to replenish my supplies and enjoy a bicycle ride in the spring. The supermarket is a couple of kilometres away.  I was able to see the cows up close and was a bit afraid of my friend the bull. What if he attacked me? The shepherd looked at me with curiosity because I was singing loudly in the street. That day I bought a cactus and named him Bob. Bob is very low maintenance and won’t mind when I don’t feel like having a conversation.

My friend Bob

I want to go home and have been knocking at different doors, not leaving any stone unturned, but I don’t have any VIP pull, so I have reached the point of looking for pirate ships but I don’t know how to contact pirates! I am living in limbo: neither here nor there! 

It has been a month and  Libya has still not come up with any decent strategy to repatriate the  approximately 7000 citizens stranded abroad, 3000 of whom I was told are in Turkey. Turkey is a lovely country  in ordinary time, but these are extraordinary time and it is the 7th worst hit  Corona country in the world.  It is disheartening to  put the life of Libyan travellers at risk by keeping them prisoners with not choice but to also see the people who were here for a  two day meeting, or medical treatment, a vacation from the madness at home or studying or just passing by like me, be separated from their families, or unable to bury a dead with them, or not able to complete treatment because the hospitals discharged them as non essential treatment, or unable to continue their studies. So many stories intermingled with war, hate speech, sadness, feeling let down by your country and worried about what next as you cannot assess the change that is happening in the world when you are not staying in a familiar place. We are told we need to keep our immune system strong to fight the disease, how is that going to happen I wonder? The other day I looked at my luggage and found that the things of only  a month ago feel like another lifetime.