Well I am now in Israel. At this moment I am in the St Margarets Hostel in Nazareth and tomorrow afternoon about 70 children will arrive from across Israel for their Summer holiday youth camp. For the last two days I have been getting acclimatised to the country and seeing some of the sights, so a bit of a tourist start. I've stayed at Jericho, passing through several checkpoints on the way. Jericho is now quite a quiet place but was once a significant holiday destination, and the hotel we stayed in was wonderful, and had a great pool. The weather was so hot. Stepping outside was like opening an oven door.
On our first full day here we went to the dead sea for a bit of floating and smelly mud, and the place where the dead see scrolls, as well as some praying and getting to know my team; Will, Graeme and Cat who are a married couple from Wales, Fran and Matt who are both from Yeadon but hadn't met until now, and me and Rachel, who are also from Leeds and go to the same church. It's a really interesting team, lots of talent and really nice people.
Yesterday we had a 5am start to walk through the desert. The desert wasn't what I expected at all. actually a lot hasn't been what I expected, I thought there would be towns unchanged for 2000 years, that Jerusalem would be a tightly wound net of little alleys full of markets and that the desert would be flat plains full of sand and nothing else. In reality nothing much lasts unchanged for 2000 years, Jerusalem in a metropolis of modern roads and the desert is hills, mountains and valleys of rocks with the occasional stream and quite a lot of greenery.
The desert walk ended at a Greek orthodox monastery who are well known for their hospitality, so we were welcomed in and offered a much needed drink of some pleasant cordial. The monastery is built into the wall of a steep valley cut away by the winter streams and is a beautiful place. after meeting one of the monks we walked up the far side of the valley and returned to our taxis. The walk had been tiring and hot and one of our team was very ill on the way. But it was an adventure. I was wrecked for the rest of the day, so when we went on to see Bethlehem's churches It was all going over my head.
Today we split into our teams, about twenty of us headed for Jerusalem, and me and my team headed for Nazareth, where we have arrived in the most beautiful building. The chaos/children's work starts tomorrow afternoon and will be practically non-stop from 8:30 to 10:00 till Friday, and then it will start again on Monday with a different age group.
The strangest experience of today was the drive to Nazareth, going through a security check and a soldier gets on the bus, just to have a look around. "hello" he says, (though his face says "don't mess"), "hello" we say back and take a quick glance at his AK47. He gets off the bus and we carry on. Several hours later on the balcony of St Margarets overlooking Nazareth city I thought to myself, how would I have felt if someone had got on a Leeds bus with a machine gun. Imagine the panic. But here I accept it as a normal part of Israel life, and so does everyone else.
The main prayer points at the moment are that the teams would get on well, the children on the summer camps would be able to get here, and that the members of the Jerusalem team who are sick would recover.
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