My friend has been having a difficult few weeks.
He and his mother and father live in a small house on a small piece of land near Antalya and they grow olives.
He has been waiting for a few weeks to have a cyst removed from his vocal chords and will have the surgery tomorrow.
His father had to have a mass removed from his lower abdomen last week (test results on which type of mass will be back this week) and after he had the surgery and was recovering the doctors found that he needed a bypass and that will be done in about two weeks.
His mother fainted on Saturday while she was working on their land and on Monday had an angiography. The doctors will decide next week whether she needs a bypass or a stent.
And all this is costing them almost nothing.
There is no danger that they might lose their little piece of land to pay for their medical treatment.
Their national insurance, for all three of them, is about $100 a month.
And then yesterday he asked me what was happening in the US. He'd heard something on the news about the government being closed down and wanted to know more about what was happening.
I couldn't think of a way to explain it to him.
Could you?