Sar El

The Reason I haven't posted is that for the last week we have been Volunteering through a program called Sar El in the Army. Sunday morning, we arrived at the military base (a secure, undisclosed location) where we donned our uniforms, as you can see in the photo above. We were also given sleeping bags, and sent to unpack. Shortly after, we started what we later learned is called a distance program - where the supervisors maintain a distance and give us a combination of volunteering and the army experience. That means that the first night we were told to be in bed at 10:30PM so that we could be awoken to run around and do push ups an hour later (and go through a sort of induction into the Sar El program). I really enjoyed it - I only could have hoped for two small changes. I would have liked some clarity regarding if we were on a "boot camp" type program and I wanted to know how our volunteering worked in the greater scope of things. What was all that work for. Though at times, one could have argued that we weren't working hard, but rather, hardly working.

And so, under the supervision and guidance of our Mefakdot (someone please correct that) Tal and Einat, we worked, worked out for being late among other things, and ate army food - lunch was my particular favorite meal. Above is a photo of Izy eating (photo taken using Color Accent on S90). At night we played backgammon, were gnawed on by bed bugs, and talked amongst ourselves about whether we should worry about being woken up again in the near future.

Mostly, I worked with Moshe - or as he referred to himself, "I Crazy Man". This is the tank that we outfitted to be put into the "igloo" a cold storage room which keeps the tanks ready for anything. We finally got to see this massive refrigerator the last day. Let's hope I don't get into trouble for sharing these state secrets.

So, our base was in the Negev. You can see the cracked parched earth in the photo above.

Whenever we were meeting with our supervisors we had to form a ח which took us a few days to come up with a system, we went in our number order, that allowed us to fall in quickly.  

It was a fantastic experience in the end.  Obviously there were times when we complained, apparently when we were woken up the first time I looked very annoyed, and so I became the indicator for our mefekdot after that as to how things were going.  I was actually mostly annoyed at the soldiers, which I had already asked to turn down their music.  An experience we should all go through at some point in our lives, if only to appreciate everything else.