A Weekend of Mud and Music

Thursday afternoon Abra, a Program Associate, asked us if we wanted to join her at a Bedouin village near Be’er Sheva for a weekend of Mud and Music. With a title like that how could we not go?!

After a night out in the desert hanging around a campfire and going stargazing up on the mountains, we headed to Be’er Sheva on a 10AM Egged bus (Egged is the main intercity bus company in Israel). We booked tickets the night before so we managed to have seats (I think that was the second time in my travels that I’ve had a seat on an Egged bus). First thing we did was head to the shuk (open market) for some deliciously fresh fruits and veggies (and olive oil and pita and some other delicious bread and hummus).

Buying some veggies at the shuk in Be'er Sheva

Filtration pits in their early stages

After we filled our bellies, we headed down to the Bedouin village, Qasr al-Sir, where we spent the afternoon helping out in the garden/future orchard. Some of us helped build stone walls around garden terraces, some helped collect stones and move dirt, and some helped to dig out the filtration pit (also called a recharge pit). Filtration pits are a simple technology used to replenish the groundwater supply. They are essentially small-scale dams designed to catch runoff. In the Negev, the rain comes only in the winter and because the land is so dry, most of the rain causes flash floods and runs down the side of the hills rather than filtering into the soil. The filtration pits catch the flood waters and holds it in reservoirs, which allows the water to sink slowly into the earth and recharge the groundwater, or, in the case of Qasr al-Sir, goes to supplying water for the fruit and olive orchard that they’re developing.

Hard at work building a terrace and a terrace wall

Sunset – and the subsequent quick onset of a chilly evening – ended our workday. We spent the next two hours in our tent, huddled around the campfire telling ghost stories, singing songs and eagerly awaiting what promised (and what was) a delicious meal. As the night got darker and the air became cooler, campfire socializing eventually evolved into a massage train and cuddle puddle (or ‘sifaking’ [pronounced ‘sha-fah-king] – a PWILD term for sitting in a manner that resembles the way sifaka lemurs sit. It is by far the most comfortable way to sit around a campfire when only one person has a camping chair. It’s also a great way to stay warm). When the fire was in its dying stages, we all hunkered down in our sleeping bags for what one of the colder evenings I have spent outside.

Our lodgings

At 8:30 the following morning we were woken up to a breakfast of fruit salad and rice porridge (a sweet rice dish that has a consistency between sticky rice and rice pudding). We then broke up into teams – some went to tree planting, others back to trench digging and wall building. I, on the other hand, was very happy to join the mud building team (after all, it was a ‘Mud and Music’ weekend, and we hadn’t seen much mud yet). We started by cutting straw down to 2-3” pieces and sifting the rocks out of the clay and sand. Then came the fun part: mixing the clay-sand-water mixture into mud. The convention seemed to be to work the components together using shovels, but, really, why use shovels when you have feet? I spent the next hour mucking around in a tub of mud in an effort to get a uniform mud mixture that could be used to patch up some of the holes in the building where they cooked our meals.

Hard at work moving stones and dirt

The Arava apricot tree!
! (meesh-mish) משמש

Mixing mud the right way

It's even better when it's a party

What all our mud-related fun (I mean...work) was for:
patching up the volunteer house

After a delicious lunch, I joined Abra to visit on the Bedouin families. The girl we were visiting apologized profusely that she could not offer me any tea because they were out of gas with which to heat the kettle. She insisted that Abra bring me back so that she could be a proper host and serve me tea.

Some Bedouin goats

On this note, I feel I should take a minute to explain why the tea could not be heated. Qasr al-Sir is a recently recognized Bedouin village, which means that the Israeli government has only recently granted this settlement legal status. The Bedouin are historically nomadic tribes known for herding animals. However, in the past few decades they have begun to settle in communities. The issue of Bedouin settlements has been complicated, to say the least. Many problems arise from disagreements of claims to land ownership. For the most part, the Israeli government does not recognize the large ranges of tribal lands as belonging to specific Bedouin tribes, whereas the Bedouins still see the land as theirs: “Although the State’s position is that lands in the Negev belong to the State and, as such, it is public land, some Bedouin maintain that the land belongs to them. Accordingly, the refuse to move elsewhere and they prevent others…from settling on the land they claim as their own.”[1]

Birdseye view of Qasr al-Sir

This problem is compacted by issues of illegal settlement. To a Bedouin who claims ownership of a plot of land, there are many benefits of settling outside “an established town” – free land, no constraints on construction, no governmental property taxes, to name a few – but it becomes “almost impossible to provide these [governmental and municipal] services to each Bedouin family that settles down illegally.” Unrecognized (‘illegal’) villages do not receive any municipal services from the government – no paved roads, no electricity, and no sewage treatment.[2] Because Qasr al-Sir has been recently recognized, it has received a paved road and its schools have been connected to the grid. With the exception of the volunteer house (which is furnished with solar panels), the rest of the quasi-shanty town village is still without electricity. (This was a very brief introduction to Bedouin issues in Israel. I hope to have a friend guest write a more detailed piece on Bedouin issues.)

The only proper way to travel on an Egged bus:
 on the floor and in the stairwell 

Around 3:30PM, the remaining Machon-ers packed up our belongings, said goodbye to our hosts, and walked to the bus stop. It should be noted that buses do not run on Shabbat in Israel, so our choices were to walk the 4 kilometers or to hitchhike. We decided to get a more authentic Israeli experience and hitched a ride to Dimona from a nice man in a large Jeep. (A few of the Machon-ers who left about an hour before us and decided to walk ended up a little too close to some train tracks and got caught by the police. They all had to present their passports. Apparently the policeman had a very difficult time believing that Americans, Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians were in fact traveling together.) After a relatively quick bus ride back to the kibbutz (not surprisingly, I didn’t have a seat, so spend the two hours laying on the floor between our backpacks and sleeping bags. It was actually one of the comfiest bus rides I’ve been on). We arrived just in time to be welcomed back to the meager meals of the Ketura cafeteria and to get started on the homework that we rightfully neglected.

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[1] Yahel, Havatzelet. “Land Disputes between the Negev Bedouin and Israel.” Israel Studies 11.2 (2006): 1-22.

[2] Athamny, Amny. “How physical conditions in Israel’s unrecognized villages affect children’s health.” NISPED-AJEEC. Accessed 3 March, 2013 from: http://vps.earlychildhoodmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ECM118_3_How-physical-conditions-in-Israel-unrecognised-villages_Amny-Athamny.pdf