Bye bye, Sedot Micah

It's been swell.  We've made a lot of memories together, and dont worry - my cement-dried skin won't let me forget you for at least another week.

End of the work day.  Tucker in the corner mixing mud.  Completed section of the mud wall to the left.
Posing with a pile of manure. just filthy.

My birthday present was the beginning of the rainy season.  To celebrate, and to leave our mark, Albert and I made a royal bird statue out of a pair of old rusty pliers, old rusty wire, and blunted saw blades.

Its late now and time for bed.  Best birthday ever.

This Is What a Memory Looks Like, by Albert

Back in Israel...

...Slingin mud over rubber tires to build a wall to surround a museum of Moroccan Jewry. I am not speaking so much Hebrew, but I did learn the words "botz" for mud and "m'cheel" for contains. There are three other volunteers (Georgia, Argentina, Hungary) on this here moshav near Beit Shemesh, last weekend we drove ATVs in the desert

dipping in (or attempting to) Yam HaMelach (The Salt Sea), eating Moroccan food, and sleeping out in abandoned Jordanian army barracks.

The next day in hitching to Ein Gedi (below) we picked up a tour of an old Hilton Hotel abandoned since the war

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Life is really great. Ive been listening to a lot of music, working real hard, eating well, and sleeping out under a huge sky nightly. Tomorrow is my birthday.

Turkish Farming

Greetings from Turkey! For a week I worked on a family organic farm in Basmakci, a very small town in nowhereland where I harvested peppers and tomatoes and from them made paste, picked beans and pickled things, wore a headscarf, learned the top 10 turkish pop songs by heart, and began saying "tamam" ("okay") with nearly as much frequency as the natives.

And tomorrow, the adventure of life whisks me away to Egypt.