Last weekend I went to Beit Shemesh, which means House of the Sun in Hebrew. Beit Shemesh is the sister city of DC, and so the partnership hosted a group of MASA fellows from DC this weekend and showed us a good time. It was a lot of fun, and we met some really amazing people. Some favorites:

Beit Shemesh is half secular and half ultra-religious, which means tensions run high and there are incidents of clashing and violence. The partnership has a project that tries to address this problem by facilitating meetings and friendships between secular and ultra-orthodox women, and one of the women allowed her experience to be documented on film. We went to this woman’s house and watched the film, and then had the opportunity to ask questions to a panel of both religious and secular women who were involved in the project, as well as the founder of the organization. It was a special experience- we really saw an intimate view of these women’s lives and the ways in which their religious views interact with their experiences as wives and mothers. It was amazing how little each world knew about the other, and yet they lived so close! It really is like parallel worlds. It was heartwarming to see fears and barriers get broken down, and to feel like, despite the deep differences between these two groups of people, there is work being done to highlight the ways in which we are all human.

Another impression. The greater Beit Shemesh area (Mateh Yehuda) is a beautiful area. It is in the foothills of Jerusalem, where David killed Goliath, and area is covered with beautiful purple and red wildflowers, almond trees blooming with tiny delicate pink flowers, creeping grape vine, and olive trees nestled into 3,000 year old terraces. It was a glorious day, full of sunshine and clear skies, and we took a morning bike ride through a little moshav who’s name means “Early Morning Wind”. We went up and down the gentle hills, making frequent stops to learn about the wildflowers and the history of the area, and then made our way to a cave! That’s right, I went spelunking in Israel. The caves are hand carved out of chalk, and were used by Jews to hide from the Romans. Climbing in was a crazy experience- the passageways are so dark that the faintest of flashlights illuminated the place, and so narrow that you had to wriggle on your stomach at times and pull yourself forward with your elbows. Each time I would look ahead into the impossible darkness and feel that I would never make it through, that they would have to send cranes in to dig up this historic cave and save me, and then somehow I would find myself through! Each passageway would spill us out into a wide room, large enough for many people to stand in. The sides of the rooms had niches carved out for candles to rest, and to this day people keep candles there. To stand there with your tiny flashlight and chalk on your knees and try to comprehend what it would be like to live there- it’s impossible.

A cool story I want to share- a few weeks ago we visited Sde Eliyahu, a religious kibbutz, and one of the few in the country that still operates communally (there is a trend of privatization over the last few decades). They have one synagogue and one dining hall, one rabbi and one doctor. Everyone, from the Naot factory CEO to the dishwasher, gets paid the same salary, and people more or less do things based on interest as opposed to money. Almost everything they eat comes from their own gardens, which are completely organic. They were big innovators in organic in Israel, and people still flock to Sde Eliyahu to learn from Mario, the farm manager and man that made organic happen at the kibbutz. They do a lot of cool things, but the most marvelous is their barn owl initiative. Barn owls are really good for farmers because they eat all the rodents, and at Sde Eliyahu they built lots of little wooden houses to encourage the barn owls to nest and raise their young in the fields. However, Sde Eliyahu is right next to the Jordanian border, and in the Arabic culture barn owls are considered harbingers of death. When the barn owls fly across the border, they often get shot by scared Jordanian farmers. So Mario invited a bunch of Jordanian farmers to his farm to learn about how they stopped using chemicals and converted their farm to organic, and when they came he showed them how the owls were helping his gardens to flourish free from harm by rodents. Thus started a long lasting initiative between Jordanian and Israeli farmers to educate and protect these animals and promote a lower-chemical method of farming. Cool right?

Things have been good overall in all of my volunteer positions. The pace of life is slower here, and people work less, of which I have to continually remind myself. I’ve been volunteering in a local farm, and I am there for many hours a week but seem to do very little. There are a lot of coffee breaks, a lot of time resting in the shade while the men smoke cigarettes. I worry sometimes that I could be doing more to help, but everyone is so grateful to practice their English with me, and that is indeed why I am here. I tend to speak a mix of Hebrew and English a lot, and I hear the most interesting life stories. Today I talked for a long time with the farm guard, son of holocaust survivors and twice married, whose children from his first marriage still do not talk to him. There is a lot of pain here, and a lot of beauty as well, and I feel honored that so many people are interested in sharing it with me.

I am halfway through my program by now, with only 5 months left in this beautiful and frustrating country. It has been a struggle finding ways to be useful in Beit Shean, and comfortable in my group, and to accept the lack of control I have over so many aspects of my life as a volunteer on a program in a small town. But I am looking forward now, feeling excited about how far I have come in my Hebrew and the special niches I have carved out in the city, and ready to make the best of the second half of my program. This weekend will be spent at home, relaxing and eating good food. The sun is already strong here again, and it feels odd to look outside my window and see summer, and then read about all the snow in the States. Hope everyone is keeping warm!