Now that I’ve finished cleaning the kitchen of our awesome Jerusalem apartment I finally have a minute to catch up on blogging. The last week has gone by incredibly fast, yet it also feels like forever since we were at Lotan. I really love the city – we are in an awesome neighborhood, and I really feel like I’m starting to know my way around. We do our grocery shopping in the shuk, where you can negotiate three giant pomegranates down to about six shekels ($1.50 US). There is a great night life on the streets off-shooting Yafo Street, and Beit Shmuel (where we live) is only a ten minute walk from both the Old City and Ben Yehuda Street. We’ve been keeping very busy between various volunteering projects that are taking us all over the city and beyond.
Every day we work in a different community garden, helping however we can. There is a community called the Garin Dvash (honey scouts) that are people around our age who have chosen to live communally, and they work with different neighborhoods to help gardening and ecology grow in the city. The first garden we went to was beautiful, and we met a few of the people who have plots in it while we were there. The next day, however, we had a much different experience. The Garin have a project in a very low income neighborhood, where they have several small plots of land in front of some apartment buildings. The people of the community haven’t stepped up at all in helping with their garden, and in fact they continue to trash the place by throwing their garbage out the windows of their homes (even after two hours of us picking up trash, we didn’t make a dent). It was frustrating because as we picked up garbage, the people watched us almost as though we were intruding – which we were. It felt very uncomfortable to enter someone’s neighborhood and pick up their trash for them, as if we were making a statement that they should try and be more clean like us. The point of the project is to give them land they can take ownership of and take care of, but if they aren’t wanting to get involved even after six months it makes me feel like why should people continue to go there and help them, or pick up their trash. If anything, they want a garden to be gifted to them, without any help from them required, so I didn’t feel the project was all that fair – why should I pick up someone else’s garbage if they aren’t willing to help?
Another project we are working on is very interesting. In Israel, many public city busses are segregated by the Orthodox Jews, who make the women enter from and sit in the back of the bus. A few years ago many laws were passed to forbid this segregation and discrimination, but there have been various levels of implementation on different routes. We are working with the Israel Religious Action Council as “Freedom Riders” meaning we are assigned various routes to ride busses and document if various regulations have been met, and if we witness any segregation. Last night we took a bus to Haifa, and the girls in my group were asked to go sit in the back. When my friends said no, they didn’t have to, the men were very upset and we could hear them talking about us the entire bus ride. The adventure to Haifa was very fun – we stayed with my friend Jomi in her apartment, went to the beach and swam in the Mediterranean in the morning, and then took several busses for more freedom riding; after taking the wrong bus for one leg, and then missing another bus we were hoping to report on, it was time to head home to Jerusalem. The day was long and stressful, but we got to see a lot of Israel from out the window, and learned about the bus system and various cities we had never been to.
I’m very excited for the next week of volunteering – we have many more fun projects coming up – and then after that is our break...but now it is time to go to bed!
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