His mother, Bonnie Walter, was on a flight to Turkey the next day after her son was diagnosed. She brought her son home to stay with her after about three weeks.
“It was life changing,” Bonnie Walter said. “Shocking.”
The doctor told Matthew Walter his prognosis was not looking good and that more than anything, he should be doing things to enjoy life right now. What Matthew Walter wanted more than anything was authentic Georgian food from his travelling years in Eastern Europe while he was teaching.
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One of Matthew Walter’s best friends from UC — Phil Kowalski, who also had moved to Istanbul — put out the call to social media, trying to find some way to bring his friend’s favorite food to Dayton.
That’s when the ambassador of Georgia in Washington, D.C. reached out to Kowalski to let him know he would be sending the head Georgian embassy chef, Ucha Mamoulashvili, his wife, and an embassy staffer to Dayton on May 30 to prepare a Georgian feast.
“There were such wonderful, warm emotions and words and feelings and deeds, I thought, people need to know this stuff is going on, too, in the middle of all this violence and quarantine,” Bonnie Walter said.
The chef who has prepared dinners for countless senators and other officials in the nation’s capital adapted to the Kettering kitchen to make the foods Matthew Walter had been raving about to his mother for years.
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“Matthew was so excited,” Bonnie Walter said. “That night he said going to bed felt like Christmas when he was a little kid, knowing the next day he was going to get authentic Georgian food … He was just thrilled, to put it mildly, to be experiencing something he probably won’t be able to experience again, inside of a miracle.”
The Georgian ambassador, in true 2020 fashion, video called from Washington, D.C. to join the meal and make sure Matthew Walter and the family was enjoying the feast.
“The group that came, (came) for somebody they didn’t even know,” Bonnie Walter said. “They are ambassadors of good will — wanting to reach out to an American who loves their country and their people and just putting some good into the world.”
Over the course of the long evening filled with Georgian wines, cheeses, breads, spices, meats and endless appetizers, Bonnie Walter said they talked about the meal they were sharing symbolizing more of what the world needs right now.
“To be quite honest, that was the thing that moved me as much as anything,” Bonnie Walter said. “When there’s been so much stress (in the world), just everyone on edge, and they still reached out with all of this going on. They still came up here.”
One of Matthew Walter’s influential Middle Eastern studies professors from UC, Lily Frierson, was also invited to join the dinner. Frierson shared a love of Turkish language and Turkish culture with Matthew Walter and Kowalski, as she also lived in Istanbul for a time while doing research.
In a note Frierson wrote as a tribute to the moving evening, she wrote in both English and Turkish, “All of you lovely people at Matt and Bonnie’s house today. I love you. You are gifts to the world.”
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