Feb 15th
Modi'in, Israel
The flight to Israel was good. It was a direct flight, 10 hours long but I had my favorite window seat and the middle seat next to me was empty. To the right of me in the two aisles were two air rangers who were very nice. But the flight was very rocky when we were flying over the Atlantic. Even the Rangers were disturbed. But we made it and my entire luggage too.
It was a real pain trying to handle all that stuff. In the Tel Aviv airport they gave me free luggage carts, which was nice, but you can’t take them through the train turnstiles. And this made it very difficult to carry three checked bags and two carry ons, my sleeping bag, and my purse! But I got it all on the train. And a nice man helped me carry it through the Modi’in train station.
A couple of the Shin-shins (Israeli volunteers) picked me up and took me to the farm. I must say I was a bit nervous when driving with them because they were all speaking Hebrew and I felt like I didn’t know what was going on. If they were students or what. But once I arrived to the Eco-Dome and met my fellow students all was well.
In my program there is a really nice group of people. Yigal and Naomi are my instructors. Mike and Beth are from the first Eco Israel program. Then Allie, Brett, Renaya, Seth, Julian, and Paige (my roommate) complete the group.
The first few days were spent with many various orientation activities to get to know each other and the farm. We learned about our chores and the daily maintenance of the farm.
But the farm is amazing. Basically it is broken up into three parts. The Eco-Israel (my area), Israeli Shin-shin's area, and Kindergarten areas. In one given day there can average about 60 people on the farm even though my program only has about 9. The Shin-shins are participating in a year's service before they go into the army and the kindergartens are two classes one secular and one religious so they have lots of people coming and going. There's also a community garden for some of the families in Modi'in.
