The Mata

This morning, my first working since I returned from Jerusalem, I spent in the Mata- the date tree plantation.

I'll write Mata in Hebrew:

מטע

I chose to do that because seeing it in Hebrew does justice to how mighty and biblical this plantation is.

The Mata is a good amount of kilometers from the kibbutz itself. To get there, you must drive over a medium-sized desert mountain (not Wadi Rum-size by any means, but big nonetheless) from which you can see the neat rows of 10-meter high date palms below, and, further in the distance, the no man's land mountains on the Jordanian border.

After driving over this Israeli mountain, the car drives over a large flat desert valley that, from a distance, appears to contain nothing other than a billboard which says (roughly translated), "60 KM an hour. Don't kill your vacation," and an occasional ibex hopping across the light tan rocks.

This route is usually driven before 7 AM, with the sun not quite in full force, in a van full of volunteers, kibbutzniks, and Thai migrant workers.

At the Mata itself, the giant trees are no less impressive. The first time I entered the plantation and saw the picking-trucks driving towards the towering trees as the sun rose over desert hills, I felt as if I were entering into some sort of epic Zionist film.

It was too aesthetic a scene for me to compare it to anything other than a movie. Viewed from a distance, it had the awesome power of the oil-fire scene in There Will Be Blood, the barn-raising scene in Witness, or the locust scene in Days of Heaven; it was a spectacular and cinematic display of the awesome forces at work in basic interactions between humans, technology, and nature.

The actual work a person does at the Mata is a different story.

Some people love it, but working there releases just about every neurosy I have.

Currently, the work being done is the pruning of the date buds. You stand on top of two shaky branches while trimming stems. First, you count the amount of stems and trim them down to a certain amount- on some heads, it's 40, and on some, it's 80. Then, you cut those stems until the stems have only 10 buds each on them.

Since the stems are so densely packed together, it's hard to hold them in a bunch as you count them. I'm not great at counting in the first place, but I'm particularly bad at counting thin stems while straddling the branches of a tall palm tree and holding a deadly pair of pruning clippers. I usually miss some stems or end up counting them twice because, while I'm holding one bunch in one hand and counting some others, some of the tightly held stems will pop out, and, since I'm trying to count the others, I won't notice. And so I'll count them later. Sometimes, they all pop out of my hand and I give up.

In addition to that, I have to do it while balancing myself on top of branches that break if you don't balance correctly on them. Usually, once I've balanced myself, the head of stems is directly in front of my face, which means I have to hold the pair of clippers in front of my face as well.

Sometimes, the branches start to break and I have to step down on to the truck.

When I told kibbutzniks that I didn't want to work in the Mata again, they all said, more or less, "Yeah, we understand, you're afraid of heights."

They have the right idea, but it's not the falling to the ground that scares me, I explained to some of them. It's all of the things that will hit me on the way down. The branches, which will likely hit my crotch. The metal platform from the truck, which will probably hit my butt as well as other body parts. And the clippers, which can cut through two inches of wood, and will probably hit my eye, or my throat, or my lung.

And, in addition to the danger, the cutting of the stems is boring, and I suck at it.

So I'm leaving the magnificent biblical scene behind. I'm a little sad that I won't be going there again. Riding towards the Mata to work, van full of Israelis, Germans, Americans and Thais, at the break of dawn, was thrilling and awesome in a casual and unchoreographed yet cinematic way that the jeep tour through the Sahara at Siwa never was and my planned jeep tour through Wadi Rum never will be.

Kibbutz Life

I'm in another world now. It's called Kibbutz Neot Semadar (sometimes spelled "Smadar"). Since I've been here, I've spent my time washing dishes, cleaning, and working in a factory that makes organic juices and candies. And when I haven't been doing that, I've been reading, writing (in my pocket-sized journal), slowly but not too enthusiastically thinking about what else I'm going to do on this trip and in the rest of my life, and occasionally hanging out with other volunteers and kibbutzniks, but many people here keep to themselves when they're relaxing.
The kibbutznik who was assigned to explain the place to me called it a place for people who think about themselves. So far, that's been true.
He also described it as a place where people do not do drugs. So far, that has not been true.
I recently witnessed a group of middle-aged kibbutznik men playing guitars and singing "Let My People Go" in English and in Hebrew. They were practicing it before singing it at the Seder (which is tonight). He told a story to introduce it (which I have translated, probably inaccurately): "When the blacks were slaves in America, they sang this song. They were working so hard, and suffering, and they prayed for a Moses to save them. Today, we pray for a Moses to come to us... But where is this Moses? He is inside all of us."
The kibbutz is visually pretty amazing and beautiful. It's built in an Oasis in the Arava desert. The Arava is a mountainous section of the Negev which resembles the Southwestern US, but minus the cacti. It's not as intimidatingly stark as the Sinai or as awesome as Wadi Rum (where I still haven't been yet) but it's still a very cool landscape to see.
This desert landscape surrounds an oasis full of date palms, colorful flowers (mostly magenta and red), trees with light gray trunks and thin green leaves, and a big lake. The ground throughout is covered in black irrigation pipes and is a shade lighter than Jerusalem stone. Most buildings here are short and rectangular- regular Israeli architecture. But two tall fairy castles stand out from the rest: the "Arts Center" is a pink and blue building with wavy walls, a small courtyard, and a central tower, and the children's school is landmarked by a yellow and blue upside down triangle on a pole that is the size of a water tower.
The kibbutz is very large and I explored it on the first few days, blown away by the cool-ness of the place. But its original effect wore off, as I imagine the effect of living near any visually awesome place would. I imagine that if I lived next to the pyramids of Giza, I would become genuinely bored of them. I'm not bored with this place, but I found that, after day 3, I stopped wandering around and stuck to the path between my house and the dining hall.
I started reading Justine by Lawrence Durrell. It's about Alexandria, which is why I picked it up. It's written in a very flowery, late modernist style. It was written in the late '50s. It's part of a quartet of four novels, and the next two are the same story as Justine, but from different perspectives. I decided to read just the beginning and the end. I may read the whole thing some day, but the beginning and the end were good for now. He refers to the chamsa as a "child hand print" and he refers to a kibbutz as a "work camp in Palestine." In the end of the book, Justine's kibbutz has turned her into a "peasant."
I put down Justine and started reading The Beach by Alex Garland. It's an easy and quick read. It has no amazingly written sentences, but it's just insightful enough to keep me thinking. It's an action book, but it's not The DaVinci Code. Books like The DaVinci Code are actually almost impossible for me to read, not because I think I'm too good to read them (I like Harry Potter) but because they're so action-oriented, they make me wish I were watching a movie instead.
The Beach is strangely like this kibbutz. It's a place cut off from the rest of the world, where people do simple jobs to sustain themselves. People aren't as fantical about protecting it from outsiders, but this place does do a sufficient job of preventing itself from being discovered. If it were a member of the Kibbutz Program Center, and were a kibbutz to which foreign volunteers could be assigned at random, I think it actually might get ruined.
I found Neot Semadar on the WWOOF website. They clearly want to attract the "organic farm" crowd and they do a good job of it.
Isaac, the kibbutznik in charge of "orienting" me told me, "You can stay for Passover, but our Passover here is special." I said, "OK." Since then, I've told others that I was staying and they've said, "Oh. Do you know that Passover is special here?"
As far as I know, special just means that they have meetings and do some folk dances, and the kibbutzniks don't do the same jobs as usual (of course, for a volunteer, that won't make a difference, really). But they seem almost protective of the "special-ness." After celebrating Passover at the Seders, I might go to Jerusalem for the rest of the holiday.
I'll try to make small updates from here on... I hope to keep them all interesting as well as travel-related, without too much excessive rambling.

A bit of summary

It occurred to me that this blog hasn't quite succeeded as a travel blog up to this point. Nobody can quite keep track of where I am and where I've been based on reading it. I feel that, if I am to succeed from now on at updating it, it will become more of a memory blog. An impressionist blog.
It's always been hard for me to summarize. Actually, no- it's hard for me to get myself to summarize. Because it's just plain not my instinct to summarize. It's my instinct to dwell and expand upon little things. That, like many instinct, is both helpful and harmful.



Anyway, I'm going to try to summarize my trip.



With Birthright, I was in a group of about 40 people. I hope to keep in touch with them. I'm often uncomfortable in groups of that size. I can handle bigger groups and smaller ones, but a group of that size just takes me a long time to adjust to. Plus, when I travel in groups, it's harder for me to focus on where I am. Being constantly dropped and picked up sometimes makes me focus more on things like what time we're going to eat than the places we're at... but at the same time, when you're with a group, you're rarely alone and you rarely get lost and you're rarely anywhere long enough for it to get boring.



And we weren't anywhere long enough for it to get boring. We started off at a desert kibbutz called Masabai Sadeh. It had cute, tiny stucco-roof houses, bicycles, animals, gardens, and art made out of junk. I didn't get to meet any of the inhabitants, but they didn't seem too friendly.



In the Negev desert, we also saw the grave and house of David Ben-Gurion and went on a night time hike. The guide, Ran, told us to think about how Abraham walked through this same desert. I thought about that, and it was pretty awesome. I understood why people rave about the desert at night. Being totally in the dark is always cool, but being in the dark in the desert, where there are no trees for the moon to hide behind and no plants to rustle, is a different experience from anything I've known. There was also a unique dark blue in the sky. The dry wind is also pretty unique.

I thought about how people like Abrahah, Jacob, and Lawrence of Arabia may have found themselves in this very spot, and I felt more like them, while at the same time realizing just how different a life a person would lead living in the desert.

I had a conversation with Justin, a guy on the trip. He confessed that, since he lives in New Mexico, the Negev isn't much of a new thing to him. I told him I understood. I quoted Omar Sharif in Lawrence: "No Arab loves the desert. We like water and green trees." If that's true, then I'm a bit of an Arab myself. The desert has its thrills, but the potential for desolation, desperation, and poverty has always been very palpable to me.

We then moved on to Masada and Ein Gedi at the Dead Sea. It rained. Masada was cloudy, which gave the "sunrise" a dufferent quality to it. The cloudy view was nonetheless impressive. At the Dead Sea, more rain came. Some people floated in the cold muddy water but I chickened out. Mudfalls filled the mountains at Ein Gedi. Apparently some people died that day. I hope to go back to the Dead Sea on a better day.

After that, we spent a night in Tel Aviv. It was a Monday and it was cold. I went to an Irish pub- the first of several I would find in Israel. Irish pubs there are very much like Irish pubs in America- asymmetrical, wooden, and with lots of Guinness. Israeli ones just play up the Irish-ness a bit more. Pictures of James Joyce and bouzoukis line the walls, and that sort of thing.

Then I went to Mike's Place. It's owned by Canadians with dual citizenship. Then a friend named Josh and I lead a search for drunken felafel. Coming from America, where drunken pizza walks are possible in any small city, we expected this endeavour to be a cinch in the so-called party capital of Israel. But the search proved to be in vain. Josh and I hoped to go on more successful drunk walks together later on the trip, but it unfortunately never happened.

When I returned to Tel Aviv later on my own, I realized that this first incident was just another example of the city's horrible urban planning. Tel Aviv has several main drags, but none of them are parallel to each other or to the ocean. Some cities have main drags with smaller streets between them. In Tel Aviv, everything criss-crosses everything, like a plate of spaghetti that's suddenly cut off by the ocean.

The next day in Tel Aviv, we met some friendly soldiers in Rabin Square. I got my picture taken in front of the S'licha ("sorry") wall. It was one of the most moving memorials I've seen anywhere. Ran had us sing "Imagine." Later on, when Ran asked for feedback on his activities, several people said they felt weird singing the song because "Imagine there's no countries" runs contrary to the idea of Israel. I figured Ran just chose it because it's about peace, and that's the idea behind Rabin Square. I realized that I agree with John Lennon. Singing the song was indeed awkward, not because of its meaning, but because of the Israelis who walked by. I figured they must be used to this sort of thing, though.

I will continue later (hopeuflly not too much later) because right now I have to catch an overnight train from Luxor to Cairo. I'm not looking forward to it.