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| Picture of Kibbutz Ketura and its agricultural fields with the Red Mountains of Jordan in the distance. |
I have been at the Arava Institute for just over two weeks,
and what an incredible two weeks it has been!
I’ll admit it was somewhat of a culture shock when I first
arrived. After spending a month with a small groups that was mostly Jewish – shul
hopping every weekend, attending Jewish study classes on Monday nights, going
to different houses for Shabbat meals – and after spending a long weekend in
Jerusalem – where, in the old city, I saw black hatters and yeshiva boys
literally everywhere I turned – to arrive to the Institute where Jewish culture
wasn’t dominate was a bit of a shock. Even though I knew the structure of the
program I was to attend, I had somehow gotten it into my head that Israel meant
Jews all day, every day and suddenly found myself in a small community, of
which half the students are Arab.
But I should explain where I am! I am spending the semester
on a kibbutz in the Arava Valley in the south of Israel studying at the Arava
Institute for Environmental Studies (AIES). AIES was founded on the principle
that nature knows no borders; an environmental problem doesn’t stop at a
political boundary. In a region of the world that is riddled with political and
cultural conflict, a region that is already facing environmental challenges, it
is important to get people from all sides to overcome their political and
cultural differences and work together to address these shared problems. To
reach this goal, the student body, on average, is 1/3 Israeli, 1/3
Jordanian/Palestinian, and 1/3 international/North American (this semester
close to ½ of the student body is either Jordanian, Palestinian or Arab Israeli).
Classes focus on various environmental issues – from Water Management in the
Middle East and Alternative Energy Resources to the Basics of Organic Food
Production and the Biodiversity of Sand Dunes – and mandatory seminars focus on
environmental leadership and peace-building (more about these seminars in the
future).
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| Student Garden My patch is in the bottom left corner. I'm growing a lot of wheat so I can learn how to process flour! |
The academic structure is very different from a traditional
American university. For starters, because AIES is located in the middle of the
desert – i.e. just about as far away as you possibly can be from anything in
Israel – and because most of the professors don’t live on the kibbutz (much less
in the region), most classes are offered once a week (in a 3 hour block). For
the classes for which the professors live in the region, the classes are given
twice a week, but two days in a row (ex. Environmental Ethics is 1.5 hours on
Wednesday evening and 1.5 hours on Thursday morning). Students take between 4
and 6 classes, in addition to being required to attend the 3-hour weekly
peace-building seminar (the Environmental Leadership and Current Events
seminars are optional, but highly encouraged). This means that days can
sometimes be very intensive. For example, I have 8 hours of classes on Monday
and 6 hours of classes on Tuesday.
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| Biofuel Digester |
There is also a very hands-on approach to the learning here.
Several of the classes have a hands-on component (two of the classes have 4 day
field trips and the Basics of Organic Food Productions requires us to spend
roughly half of our class time working on our plots in the student garden). The
classes without this direct hands-on approach often focus on individual
projects. These can be anything from computer research on a topic of personal
interest relevant to the class to field research to building a prototype model
of a technology. The biofuel digester is an example of a past student project (the biofuel digester is a small system
that converts cow manure from the kibbutz’s dairy into natural gas. The
experiment was to test the feasibility of this technology in a desolate (and
very hot) desert environment to determine whether this could be a suitable technology
for use by Bedouin communities). None of the classes are reading intensive (I
think this has to do with the fact that most of the students are non-native
English speakers).
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| A few victorious Machon students after reaching the top of the mountain overlook. |
As far as the student body and the student life are
concerned, both are fantastic. Because we’re a group of about 40 people
(students, interns, and PAs) living together on a kibbutz in the middle of
nowhere, we’re practically on top of each other 24/7 so we’ve gotten to know
each other pretty quickly. Never have I met a group of individuals more genuinely
interested not only in sharing their own experiences, but also in learning
about – and learning from – other people’s experiences. In the past two weeks
we have established biweekly salsa dancing classes, a weekly interfaith group,
a semi-weekly yoga and meditation class, and a weekly Arabic class, each taught
by a different student. This is also a group that has drunk philosophy nights,
birthday-dance parties that include dance styles ranging from crazy dance-offs
to Danka (a traditional Palestinian dance) to belly dancing, and midnight
bonfires in the desert.
In short, it would be an understatement to say that I am
exuberantly happy that I chose to study here for my semester abroad; I truly can
not envision a more perfect program.
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| A casual afternoon at the Arava Institute (aka Purim preparations) |
