Being Saturday night when we got back to Bethlehem from the Dead Sea, as soon as we got home & had dinner, we went out dancing all night which was really, really fun! For our final Sunday in the West Bank, many enjoyed time outside -- it feels like spring here -- and took a final walk to Nativity Square.
Our last couple days in Bethlehem were spent doing a lot of work to pull together our volunteer projects, meeting with Sami Awad one final time, doing final interviews for our research projects, visiting a permaculture village in Beit Sahour and enjoying an insane amount of laughs together with our Palestinian friends. Our final day started with the Holy Land Trust volunteer groups presenting all the research they had done. Then, we painted the wall, enjoyed pizza with Marwan & met with the two main characters in the documentary "Encounter Point" which is about the Bereaved Family Forum (an incredible organization which works to bring about reconciliation to both Palestinians and Isarelis who have lost people due to the conflict). We also had the the opportunity to do some olive wood shopping before our farewell dinner at The Tent Restaurant which was definitely bittersweet. We ended the evening with a video chat with Northland College in Wisconsin and had just enough time to pack before heading out of the West Bank the next morning.
Though we were most definitely sad to leave the West Bank and all our Palestinian friends, the Negev was definitely a beautiful place to travel to. We stayed on Kibbutz Lotan - an environmentally focused kibbutz, not to mention a small and super loving community. We were blessed to experience a Shabbat service, Shabbat dinner and a discussion the following day about the importance of taking time to rest. We also got to sit down a bunch of kibbutz members to talk about the community and hear a lecture from an environmental expert. In Lotan, we continued learning about various sustainable practices ranging from certain garden techniques & growing local organic food to an intense composting system and lots of recycled sculpture, walls and even houses. We have definitely seen a LOT of mud houses over the past couple weeks.
Though the desert is extremely dry, it is so, so beautiful with lots of sand dunes and a great view of Jordan's mountains. We also had beautiful, beautiful weather while in the south and were grateful to be out in nature. On our free day, the majority of the group got to enjoy some time snorkeling in the Red Sea which was a nice break for a fairly intense couple weeks academically. We also spent a day at Arava Institute which is a small school (30-40 students) focused on environmental studies on a nearby kibbutz. With them, we learned about several of their programs ranging from conservation, peace building and environmental leadership and developing and testing renewable energy resources such as solar panels and bio-digesters.
We are so grateful for everything Holy Land has been doing to help facilitate our travel and abroad experiences!!
-Heather
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