Family ties bind Egypt and Iowa for generations

In Cairo, Elizabeth Smith, Margaret Magill, Dot Turner and Ann Turner relax at a museum in Cairo.

Dot Turnbull hasn’t had to brush the dust off her shoes once she comes indoors for more than 40 years now — since she left the ancient, narrow and sandy streets of Assiut, a city crammed centuries ago between the Nile and the baking Egyptian desert. Or watched Africa’s steamy ball of a sun sink down below the river, shimmering in heat so palpable it is nearly visible to the naked eye. Or wakened to the staccato voice of the mu’azin, as the Muslim call to prayer cracks the morning stillness, compelling the faithful out of bed and onto their knees.

She’s 83 now and long retired to the perpetual breezes of the California coast, living in a retirement center where she has seven other former missionaries to Egypt as neighbors.

Her husband Bob ran a dairy project for 14 years at Assiut College, a boy’s secondary school. It was shut down in 1963, when the cattle — some pure bred Jersey cows shipped in Egypt to improve milk production by cross-breeding with native livestock — were sold to the university. The Turnbulls’ belongings were largely lost when the Six-Day War prohibited Dot’s return from furlough to pack for reassignment to Thailand in 1967 — including big-reel audiotapes of the children’s voices and photos of the five Turnbull babies, four of whom were born in Egypt. Only Janet was delivered in Iowa.

But her sister-in-law, Margaret Magill, wanted to see it all — the Egypt that means so much to their family. It took 50 years but she got there twice, so far.

The two women made the trip together three years ago, accompanied by their oldest daughters, Margaret’s Elizabeth, and Dot’s Ann. They were half of the Joining Hands contingent of Des Moines Presbytery, which is partnered with an Egyptian nation-wide coalition of Christians and Muslims in religious groups, non-governmental agencies and grassroots organizations. Collectively, the network is called Together for Family Development.

“People say Greece is where civilization was born … but in Egypt, there is antiquity,” says Margaret. Now 78 and retired, she lives on her farm in Atlantic, Iowa, where she rents land for grain cultivation rather than keeping the dairy and beef cattle, as well as pigs, she and her husband Tom raised for decades. “The story of (the Israelites) was always closer to Egypt than Greece … even though Roman emperors are mentioned in Scripture.

“ ‘Out of Egypt, I have called my Son.’ And the Joseph stories. The flooding of the Nile and the repetitive seasons of agriculture.”

So, she packed her bags, once in 2002 and again in 2005. She wanted to see where her four nieces and one nephew, Lee, lived when they weren’t piled into spare bedrooms during furloughs or semester breaks back in Iowa, peer into ancient tombs hollowed out of the hills, which doubled as huts for early Christian hermits in a city nearly as old as the faith itself, get the legendary caffeine high of Arabic coffee, potent enough to jolt the nervous systems of naïve Western tourists into hyper-vigilance, worship in a language thick with consonants that she doesn’t understand, sip tea with members of the church community that made her brother and sister-in-law feel at home for so many years and ponder Scripture in one of the earth’s oldest inhabited places — places where her nieces learned to walk and Moses did too, maybe even Jesus.

A Turner-Magill Family Portrait, circa 1980. Front row, from left: Bob Turnbull, Dorothy Magill Turnbull, Margaret Magill, Tom Magill and grandchildren, Megan and Sarah. Back Row: Lee Turnbull, Elizabeth Magill Smith, Val Smith, Nancy Turnbull, Ann Turnbull, Margo Magill and John Magill.

“Dot and my husband (who were brother and sister) grew up hearing about Egypt all of their lives,” she says, referring to the list of cousins and neighbors who at one time or another were planted as Presbyterian mission personnel in Egypt, nearly as thick as the Iowa corn.

Margaret Bell grew up in the Atlantic church, just like Dot. She taught at a school in Zagazig, Egypt, where tradition claims that the Hebrew nomads camped in the land of Goshen. She returned to Iowa every seven years on furlough and she taught the kids Arabic phrases. Beth Wilson, a neighbor, went too. Mary Frances Dawson, a cousin, taught in Cairo for 40 years. Family lore has it that archeologist Howard Carter invited her to see his newly unearthed tomb of King Tut before its contents were removed. Several more mission-related relatives were acquired when Dot’s father married again, late in life, to a woman whose daughters were missionaries in both Congo and Sudan.

(Just as an aside: Even Joining Hands’ mission co-worker, Nancy Jane Collins, is an Iowa native.)

“I was the one who knew about farming,” says Dot now, even though her husband had a master’s degree from Penn State in agriculture. “Bob was a preacher’s kid.”

She grew up in tiny Atlantic, surrounded by farmers — and lots of dairy and beef cattle. According to the 2000 census, Atlantic has about 7,000 residents. It is the county seat and has virtually an all-white population. Its summertime temperatures can hit 90 and it can drop to 10 below in the winter, when it isn’t unusual to get seven or eight inches of snow in one swoop. Atlantic is in southwest Iowa, about 90 miles from Des Moines, along an interstate that is bound on either side by fields of corn and cattle. This is how Dot ended up in Egypt.

Milo McFeeters brought three Jersey cows and a bull to Assiut College in 1928, recognizing that Egyptian clover, alfalfa and green corn fodder were perfect for dairy production, according to The History of the Presbyterian Experience in Egypt: 1950–2000 by Jack Lorimer, also a former Presbyterian missionary. When bred with native cattle, the Jerseys doubled milk production and gave farmers leeway to rotate crops, letting cotton-depleted soil rest while dairy cattle grazed. The bulls were bred in nearby villages through an extension program at the school.

The Turnbulls followed McFeeterses in Assiut, even shopping for cattle to ship to Egypt on their honeymoon and then traveling there by freighter, with the cattle nearby on the deck.

Margaret kept packing boxes. “I kind of felt as if when Dot chose a mission field,” she says, “well, we were support at home for her. A home base. When the kids came home for college, we’d have room for them. We’d manage their State-side affairs. And we prayed for them.” She also grew up near Atlantic and at Tarkio College got another dose of missiology.

Along with her mother-in-law, Margaret figured out how to ship homemade strawberry jam over 7,000 miles from Iowa to Assiut without shattering the jelly jars, how to stick packs of bubble gum in children’s sneakers as a surprise, pack off Sunday School materials so they’d arrive with creases or tears and gather all sizes of kids’ clothing, certain that something would fit one of the five blonde Turnbulls.

“It wasn’t possible for me to go to Egypt because of the requirements of the farm and, I guess, because of the hard-scrabble farmer’s life that we had. We rejoiced when Tom’s parents got to go for granddaughter’s Ann’s first birthday …

“But Dot and Bob and the kids were in our thoughts all the time,” she says. “Every single one of the kids spent time with us during their college years. Lee was here for two years in high school and graduated from Iowa State (ISU). Ann went to school in Ames for postgraduate work. Nancy attended ISU for two years. Carol went to Tarkio for a couple of years, as well as Ann. Janet spent time with us when she was in college. “Those years were fun years. Our kids were in their late teens. And the kids were all full of ideas, hopes and dreams. It was great fun.”

So, with those ties, Margaret lobbied hard for Des Moines Presbytery to work with Egypt when it signed on to Joining Hands in 2000. Since then the Iowans have offered quiet support to Together for Family Development, which is working legislatively to require Egyptian schools to be handicapped-accessible so that disabled children may be educated. Otherwise, they are consigned to poverty.

Margaret has traveled twice to Egypt as part of Joining Hands. She intends to go again, perhaps even getting to Assiut itself. Her daughter, Elizabeth Smith, will make her third trip in February to be part of a strategy session with Together for Family Development, which will be under way mid-month.

Margaret was able to visit Egypt with her husband, Tom, as a tourist in 1983. The couple made a brief stop after visiting the Turnbulls in Thailand.  She saw the desert and the pyramids. But she didn’t get to connect with the people who mattered to her most: the members of the church. On the train to Luxor, however, they did see a possible hint of home. The cattle in the fields, Tom pointed out, had black noses. Black noses are a trait of Jersey cows — maybe a remnant of Bob Turnbull’s breeding program.

Dot says her two oldest children still consider Egypt home. The others reserve that title for Thailand, where Dot and Bob served 21 years and even considered retiring. “Wherever I was, it was home,” she says now, then pauses for a second. “But I guess I think that Atlantic, Iowa, is still home.”