Update on our trip to Izmir

Well, I am sitting in our apartment in Istanbul once again. The boys are tucked into bed, and Jon and the band are on the European side of Istanbul for a concert tonight at a nightclub. For obvious reasons, the boys and I are skipping this show. Actually, I would have loved to be there, but oh well. The show doesn't even start till 10:30 pm...so I am sure they won't be home until at least 3 am!

Last Sunday we loaded up the van and drove 9 hours to the city of Izmir. We stayed in a host home. The men had the top level of this house, the women the second level, and our family was in a little unit outside of the house. The levels of the house were also like separate apartments. In our unit, Jon and I had a mattress on the floor of a bedroom, and the boys had bunk beds in a room to themselves. We had a mini kitchen, but no fridge, and a room with a toilet and shower together (this is common in Turkey). The bathroom was very clean, and that pleased me! Basically, I looked at it as a place to sleep. It was about 100 degrees in Izmir and of course no air conditioning made sleeping difficult. We did leave our window open in our bedroom, but our curtain rod kept falling, so most nights we just left the curtain off and hoped no one peeked in! We had our first concert on Monday night. It was in a town that has no church and no believers in it. They had a new amphitheater that we were playing in, so new that they didn't even have electrical power until a few hours before the show. We got there for set up and people were still working in it! There was no shade to be found and we were working on set up in the hot sun for hours. This was the first of 3 concerts we were doing this week that were set up with the city council. I think this was new for TACO as well. We had about 200 people show up to the concert (this was what we call a closed concert, which means we don't actually talk about Jesus from the stage) and everyone really seemed to enjoy the music. We handed out lyrics in Turkish and also had a "fan club" sheet that people could sign up on. This is basically a way to get contact info for people who would be interested in attending other concerts. The city was suppose to feed us dinner after the show, and put us up in their new hotel and feed us breakfast. Well, when we got there we were told that the hotel is not finished, it has no power or beds. Okay, at least we still had this other house to stay in. After the concert there was a little scuffle with the police. Someone had complained to them about the lyrics of the songs containing the name Jesus. That is when it seems like accusations started flying at us. Apparently we were promising people jobs, collecting names and addresses so we could send out New Testements, and praying with minors. Now, this is a country that you are legally suppose to be able to worship how ever you want, but it is against the law to try to convert a minor. We were told this at the beginning of the tour, and if someone did actually pray with a minor, I am not sure. Needless to say, our dinner was canceled. The next morning we got up and had a phone call from the city where that night we were suppose to do a concert...they had gotten a phone call from the city from the night before. They canceled us because they had "electrical problems". We decided to use that day to go to the next town where we were scheduled for the next night and do promotion. The town didn't have any time to put up the poster we had sent them. After waiting for about 2 hours to get permission to do this (and having to answer questions about the other concert and reassure them that we were not passing out Bibles we started going store to store asking to hang posters. After about an hour of this and hearing lots of people say how excited they were to come watch, we got a phone call...yep we were canceled! AHHHHHH!!!!!! I don't think I really ever heard an official reason for it. So, with our tails tucked between our legs we went back to our house and decided what to do. Of course through all this there was lots of prayer going on. We decided to take the night and set up a acoustic concert in Izmir (where we were having a show Thursday night at a church) along the water front of the Aegean Sea. It was beautiful there! We had lots of people sitting around to listen and we handed out lots of flyers. The concert Thursday night was great. I did see a few guys come that we had met the night before. But after reading through some of the stuff we had, they decided to leave. bummer. I think it was mostly church people there, but it was great to be able to encourage them. They really enjoyed it. Then Friday morning we loaded up the van again, drove 9 hours back to Istanbul, to drop the boys and I off...and now they are doing the nightclub tonight!

Tomorrow is our first official day off. I know Jon will want to sleep in, and then I am hoping we will go back to the European side of Istanbul to do some site seeing! We have been here 2 weeks now, and have not had time to do that!

There is a concert Sunday, and then I think on Tuesday we head back down past Izmir to Selcuk (I might be spelling that wrong!) to do more concerts. Next week I will also get to visit Ephesus! yippee! I hope that catches you up on things. Please keep praying for this country! We love you guys!