Cue moans and groans. Okay, in all seriousness, today was
really fun. Except for the fact that I woke up at 2am and couldn’t go back to
sleep before we left at 4:30, the early morning was nice and cool and everyone
seemed to be in high spirits as we left. The hike to the site after the bus ride
was a surprise, but it didn’t seem bad at all. In fact, hiking through tall
grass with the sun rising over the Israeli hills around us was pretty great. When
we got to the site, we got our assignments. I volunteered to join some group
that seemed to be doing something important, only to discover that we were
clearing a trail to the soon-to-be-created latrine. Glamorous, yes I know. It
was actually really neat – we used hoes (I forgot the Hebrew word – sounded like
“toeya”) to move rocks and weeds, and our hands to pull out the giant stalks of
thorny brush (hooray for work gloves), and overall made a pretty b.a. trail.
Despite the fact that I was the only girl – the other girl left after a few
minutes – it was a good ol’ time and hard work in the early morning cool was
not a bad way to start off the day.
Buuuuut then it got hot. Fortunately after Miki (one of the people in charge) ran out of
things for me and Jesse (new friend) to do, I helped Shua (co-director) out with breakfast, which was way
awesome because we were in the shade and playing with food. I cracked nine
dozen eggs to start out. Let me just repeat that – NINE DOZEN EGGS. I cracked
one hundred and eight eggs into a giant freaking bowl and mixed them. Let me
tell you, trying to dig up every single yolk to break it is not an easy task in
a bowl that contains over a hundred eggs. My hands smelled like raw egg for the
rest of the morning. Yummy. My other Trinity student friend Sara and I rolled
out the breakfast mats under the breakfast tree, and we all helped out as much
as possible before we finally ate. It was a great breakfast. The entire group
clumped under the tree on the mats and ate together, and Seth (a square supervisor in the synagogue, I believe) had to tell us his life story (as punishment for protesting this tradition).
One of the Druze men who was helping clear rocks in the synagogue area told us
about the Druze tradition, with Shua translating. It was fascinating. Then
there was more work. I can’t remember everything I did, because it feels like
ages ago and I’ve napped since then. The morning went on for about a million
years. I remember there was a lesson with Shua about elevations, there was
piling bags of dirt from last year’s village squares, there was the maddening task of untangling a spool of rope and cutting skeins from it, there was unloading bags of dirt from the village squares (Josh found a scorpion, which was exciting, and Chad and I flipped out over a FREAKING ENORMOUS lizard, which was even more exciting), and there was so much sunscreen and drinking of water.
Overall a pretty solid day. Everyone in my room napped and got woken up by a knock on our door as the lecture outside in the courtyard was starting. Awkward. I'm sitting in the said courtyard right now with Andrej, Alaina, Irene, and Megan, who discovered I am blogging and wanted to be mentioned. They're cool people. Andrej is entertaining us with stories of his fumbles with the English language (he's Slovakian).
On another note, I'm sick. I've had a sore throat for a couple of days now, and today I also got attacked by a few more symptoms of the common cold. Pretty miserable, considering I'm having a hard time sleeping and also didn't bring any medicine. Irene gave me some lozenges and vitamin C, so that was nice, and hopefully I'll be better tomorrow, just in time for another round of dust in my lungs. In case this sounds too pessimistic...never fear, I am having a lot of fun. It's super good times here in Huqoq.
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