back in town

After my longest absence from this here blog thing, I return with photographs from my parents' epic visit to Israel, if you dare to click the link!

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I was riding the bus for quite some time, standing in fact due to the high number of passengers. I kept ducking to look outside, hoping to see a sign or even an intersecting road, in order to check my location. Would I ever see another sign of humanity in this never-ending sea of sand dunes and rocky hills? To my right was yellow sand and stone, to my left were the tall peaks of Jordan, and there we were, on route 90, going south.

I finally see the sign, I press the red button to alert the driver of my descent from the bus, I grab my stuff, and I approach the big blue gate. After dusk, Kibbutz Ketura did not look like very much from its entrance, but as Alana brought me deeper and deeper into the campus, I saw that they had turned a piece of desert land into an oasis with flowers of every color and very mature and healthy looking trees. Now, if you've ever seen a kibbutz in the Negev before, you may not be too surprised; surely it's beautiful, but this story is not unique just yet.

Alana studies at the Arava Institute, an academic center in the middle of the desert that provides courses, a masters program, and conducts some very interesting environmental and desert studies research. The research and the commitment to educating an international audience about environmental threats and solutions is beautiful, but even more beautiful was the makeup of the student body at the institute.

I had Shabbat dinner with a girl from Ramallah last weekend.

I'm guessing that few people can say that sentence and mean what it says, but I am very honored to e one of the people who can. Students at the Arava institute come from the US, Latin America, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Europe, down the road at some other kibbutzim, and I think we get the point. Living in a small housing complex, Israeli Jews, American Jews, Palestinians, and Jordanians hang out and learn together, discuss all kinds of different perspectives and insights, and find so much common ground on their dedication to the environment that the political issues seem to disappear in this tiny bubble in the middle of nowhere.

It was a really fun weekend, and I met plenty of cool people studying at the institute and living on the kibbutz. I left my jacket, so I'll have to go back, even though I was planning on it anyway. It felt really great to see peace and cooperation breathe so much life in the Negev.

--Avraham