...and THIS is all i have to show for it.

People often ask me why a college graduate would want to work on a kibbutz. The truth is, my mom talked me into it. But besides that, I’m in a program called OTZMA, which brings North American young adults to Israel to do community service for ten months. I’m sponsored by the San Francisco Federation even though I’m actually from Napa Valley, but details evidently are not important when money is involved. But that’s another story for another day, and this is all about today:
Friday, 18 May 2007
05:45 – Wake up and stumble down the stairs from the roof of the Arava Institute dormitories. I’ve been sleeping on a queen-sized mattress up there a lot lately. It’s not that my volunteer accommodations aren’t good enough for me – actually, being on OTZMA has taught me to judge a room by its shelving space, so by those standards I’m living in a palace. But my air conditioner kind of reminds me of a jet engine because every few minutes it starts shaking and thundering until gusts of hot air puff out, plus it isn’t exactly flush with the wall so I’m always finding shrubbery all over my pillow. I figured, if I’ve already got the hot breeze and nature while I’m sleeping, I might as well enjoy the view of the mountains while I’m at it.
06:00 – Report to the dining hall.
06:10 – Ok, I lied. Report to the dining hall. Grab a cup of coffee in one hand and a piece of toast in the other. This is a significant detail for those of us cursed with lactose intolerance because Ketura may be the only place in the country (or even the world, for that matter) where an endless supply of soymilk is available at no cost to the consumer.
06:20 – Start setting up for breakfast. On a normal day I would now ignore my supervisor’s lecture about how I was supposed to be done setting up by now. But he’s out of town for the weekend, and I’m in charge.
06:30-09:00 – Breakfast shift conducted as usual. This involves a wide variety of tasks including (but not limited to): refilling salad buckets, shoving loaves of bread through the slicing machine, consuming as much coffee as humanly possible, using my weight to prevent suspicious chairs from floating away, and of course taste-testing every item we serve to check for freshness.
09:00-10:30 – Clean up the mess we just made. Bathrooms, tables, floors, food wagons, coffee machine, dishwasher – everything gets scrubbed raw in between meals. I could go on, but this sounds just as boring in writing as it does in real life. Let’s move on to more important things.
11:30-13:30 – Lunch! Friday lunch is really easy. It’s the only day of the week where the meal is completely self-serve, presumably because of some incident long ago when a volunteer was too tired from pub night and spilled a hot plate of meatballs on a child.
So, I’m just sitting behind the hot food wagons, answering various questions about the ingredients in the quiche and the whereabouts of the rest of the lasagna. One of the kitchen workers is milling around the coffee area, poking at an area where some hot water mixed with a mound of sugar and turned into some kind of sticky mess. I hear him bark, “The machine’s backed up and there’s no more thousand island dressing and someone dropped a contact in the instant coffee jar. Who’s in charge here?”
“I am,” I bellow with a wave of the hand. “Daniel, get the dressing. Annabel, help that woman with her contact. Isn’t anyone on the machine?”
I lean back with a smile and I gaze around the room, which is bursting with the vibrant smells of leftover salmon, fresh lemonade, and hungry kibbutznikim preparing for Shabbat. “That’s my dining hall,” I think to myself, a completely truthful declaration given the present circumstances. And that, my friends, is why a college graduate would want to work here.