14 September 2006

The next day we spent the morning at the hospital in Nahariya, a town right on the Mediterranean and only a few miles from Lebanon. Aside from being an impressive hospital, with detailed protocol for biological and chemical attacks, the place sustained a direct hit form a katyusha missile during the war. Visiting the room which was hit was an eerie experience, seeing the damaged room and the further damage caused by the shrapnel encased in the missile. The hospital also contains an entire underground operations center, complete with operating rooms and roads for ambulances to enter. I remember reading about this in a Hebrew class several years ago, and now we were touring a place, potentially hermetically sealed during an attack, that looked like a bunker more suitable for Poland.
We went back to the moshav for a quick few hours of work, double bagging the bananas on the edges of the plantation ahead of the winter and its strong winds. We finished work and got a quick tour of the moshav – this was a village dating back to the days of the Talmud, which eventually became an Arab Muslim village, and then became a moshav for Yemenite immigrants. We saw some of the Arab stone homes and the mosque, before leaving our beloved banana plantation alongside a shooting range, cow shed and the Lebanese border just beyond the hills to our north.
We got tours of a family's bomb shelter as well as one of the moshav's municipal shelters, both of which were depressing as anything. The sirens (or bombs) would sound and the family (including a 9-month pregnant daughter) had only a few seconds to walk along a narrow path into a cramped shelter with no electricity and definitely no air conditioning. They did this every half-hour to 4 hours for an entire month.
After that we went for lunch at a dairy café in Nahariya, feasting on excellent food and evaluating the trip. We all agreed this type of mission was essential to continue and started brainstorming how to get more buy-in from the DC community. Then it was off to the Magen David Adom (Red Shield of David, Israel's Red Cross) clinic in Acco to donate blood. Having never given blood, I was incredibly nervous, as I also hate needles. After some persuasion from the other participants, I decided to suck it up and do it. The volunteer was a 17-year old who had lived in Puerto Rico and Ohio, and as such had a perfect American accent when speaking English. The blood-letter was an attractive dyed blond who turned out to be much older than originally expected. While they swooned over the older men in the group, they were even more so when they realized I was using my National ID instead of a US passport as identification and that I was a new immigrant. The pain was definitely there as they drew blood, but in the end it was of course worth it.
Back to the hotel to pack and drive down to Jerusalem.