A long walk over a big hill

So we were supposed to have satellite Internet the whole time we were
in the village but things did not go as planned in that department.
Today 2 of K's brothers were leaving to go home so we walked them to
the ferry in hopes of using the Internet in another brother, mehmets
village. We took the scenic route which involved climbing the
"mountain" as everyone in the village calls it. It's actually a huge
grassy, rocky plateau that looks like it will be small and goes on for
miles. The villages take the animals to graze.

We walked over rockiness until I got pretty whiny but the views were beyond amazing.
We walked around the edge for a while--some of the photos show the
villages and Euphrates river below.

The really rocky photo shows theancient sheep path, literally that we walked down to get off the
plateau.

And one photo shows a spring with rock bowls, probably also
ancient, and no I didn't drink out of it but K and his brothers did.

While coming down the side we found a page from a girls diary that was
so sad. She was thirteen and I thought it would be usual teenage
angst, maybe about boys--but things are very different here. Kahraman
translated for me--she says she has the worst luck in the world, she
loves studying and school and wants to have a career and she is
appealing to god and whoever for help as her family won't let her go
to high school. It was dated last November and she vows to be first in
her class. I almost cried, I take so much of what I have for granted.

The crazy part is that she is K's brothers student in the village we
walked to. He says that she is the best in her class and will talk to
her father about sending her to school. It's difficult as kids have to
board at high school and can't come home often--also one mother
proudly told me that she didn't educate any of her 12 kids and as a
result they are all still living here in the village. The educated
ones tend to leave.

Of course, the electricity was out in the village where we hoped to
use the Internet. So instead we ate and napped and headed to a picnic
with K's sisters Sofia and Melek in an abandoned house that Sofia used
to live in near the oil well that is either owned by her family or
they own the land. All photos of that are on the regular camera however.