The David Project is a class I'm taking in Israel Advocacy. Today we went on a full day trip to help us understand some of the things they're trying to teach us. Our school split up onto two buses and we basically did the same things except in different orders. Our first stop was in Giloh on a road overlooking the security fence that protects the Jews from the Palestinians living on the other side. Many people have a misconception about this fence which they call a wall even though only about 10% of it is a wall. Even though it was really foggy outside, we were still able to see the fence. A tour guide came onto our bus to talk about the fence for about a half hour.
Next, we went to help out some archaeologists by sifting through their finds.When the Dome of the Rock reopened to Muslims, they found that it wasn't large enough for everyone to fit, so what they did was, they dug out another entrance that was hidden almost two stories underground. The problem with this was, that the Dome of the Rock is located on a very large archaeological site so anything dug up around that area was filled with hundreds of years of artifacts, which they just dumped into a valley. These archaeologists decided to take that dirt, sift through it and see if they could find anything of interest. So far, they have found coins from every time period since the times of the prophets, weapons since the time of the Maccabees, jewelry, pottery, and many other things. They said that at least one coin was found almost every day. We worked in pairs to sift through buckets of dirt. I worked with my friend Eliana and we found a bunch of cool stuff. First we would pour the bucket of dirt into a sifter. Then we would rinse out the bucket and then rinse of the dirt so we could see the rocks or whatever else was underneath. We found metal, bones, glass, marble, and a bunch of other cool stones. The coolest thing we found was a large greenish piece of marble which they thought was from Italy.
Next, we went to the Mount of Olives. If you look at Mount of Olives from Jerusalem, you will see a very large amount of Arab houses with an Israeli flag sticking out of the middle of them. Towards the bottom of the mountain live about 80 Jewish families, there is also a cemetery filled with hundreds of famous Jews, but right in the middle, there is one Jewish apartment building with 8 families- the rest of the people who live there are Muslim. We visited that one house right in the middle of the Mount of Olives. There we learned about temple deniers, and the crazy things that they say to try to prove that they are right. We were also able to see an amazing view of the entire Jerusalem since we were at the top of the mountain which is parallel to the mountain that Jerusalem is on. We were actually able to see the Dome of the Rock from the other side, which is something I had never seen before.
Our next stop was a little further away in a city near Tel- Aviv. We went to a hospital to learn about Save A Child's Heart (SACH). SACH is an organization which brings in children who have heart diseases that their countries can not treat. Israel has the resources to perform these operations. 50% of the children come from Africa, 40% are Palestinans, and 10% is from the rest of the world. Each operation costs $10,000 and they get a lot of donations but not enough. The kids who flew in live in a house about 15 minutes away from the hospital before and after their operation for as short a time as possible so they could go home. We went to visit the kids who were staying there now. We met a 17 year old boy, 2 little boys, and a 10 year old girl. We colored with them and took pictures with them and we really had a good time.
We had a really long day today and now it's time to sign off. Shalom V'lehitraot!
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