Week Seven Review

The lack of posts this week has been more due to my fear of not attending social gatherings than anything else. A lot of things have been continuing to happen and I fear that missing out would be more than just a lost opportunity, but a slight to the invitee. I plan on posting a few more than none this week. As long as I don't accidentally eat peanuts again...

On Saturday after returning from a game of wheelchair basketball, we decided to stop for some ice cream. Asking for a sample of one flavour and deciding he liked it, my friend handed it to me to try. It was only after I bit through the first peanut that I realized this might not have been the best idea. In the end, I didn't die. Nor did I use any preventative measures. Maybe my parents have been hiding this secret from me, to keep down my access to low cost protein. I plan on testing this hypothesis soon by trying to eat my way out of a collapsing tunnel of peanut butter.

Wheel chair basketball was really great. One of our Palestinian friends coaches a team and he showed us the basics. We played four on four for about two hours and scored four baskets combined. We sucked. But it was tons of fun!

Before that, on Friday, we went to a Palestinian home in the mountain to help out and get a good meal. We worked to clear away grass and weeds from the trees before digging small troughs to catch the water. It was a full day that included home-made fruit leather, a fantastic meal, some cards (with commercial break that included getting water dumped on my head), stories about Bethlehem, poor theological arguments and some tank shell casings that we left from the last invasion.

Sunday involved going into Jerusalem to visit the Holocaust Museum. We left at 12:30pm and arrived there at 3:30pm, including a 40 minute wait at the walking checkpoint. We only had an hour and a half to explore but it was still a very powerful experience. I did not know that Warsaw was such a major point of Jewish deaths in the holocaust. At one point there was a man beside me in his soldier uniform, who could not have been older than 20. As we both looked at an emotionally-capturing recreation of the Warsaw ghetto, he started to cry.

This short line took us 40 minutes, on a Sunday. I have
heard that the waits can be two to three hours.