I was extremely tired, because jet lag was hitting me hard. I woke up this morning at 12:30 a.m., and could not go back to sleep. No lie. On the up-side, down to the lobby I went, for some stimulating cappuccino and conversation. Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, I got a total of around 15 hours of sleep. Something needed to give next time my head hit the pillow! Today, we had two items on our service agenda...and I was basically fighting zombie-dom. Perhaps that explains my facial expression in the bus pic. All that stuff in the back will be given away in our various service projects.
The first stop was at Schneider Children's Hospital, just outside Tel Aviv. There, we donned our Dr. Seuss "Cat in the Hat" hats, and handed out stuffed animals to the children there. It was a joy and delight to see their faces light up with pleasure, when it is plain they suffer so much physically. Here's what you don't hear about in the US news media. At these hospitals we are visiting, elbow-to-elbow are Jewish families, Muslim families and religion-unknown families, all getting along. Same goes for the hospital staff. The fact is that most people in Israel get along pretty well. It's a rather awesome country.
Ok, so, you can see from our ridiculous picture that we enjoyed being goodwill ambassadors for the Lord at Schneider's, although all those sick children were hard on our hearts.
Next, we had lunch in Rehovot, an agricultural area, at a restaurant where I had a fabulous mushroom dish. The food here is just glorious, and I will come home weighing less, because it is so doggone healthy. After lunch, we went to the Ledek Farm, which is in essence Israel's food bank. The produce grown there is on the tables of impoverished families within 48 hours. Our task for today was picking radishes. We picked radishes for over about 90 minutes. (Some of you are laughing at me, because you can just "see" this...)
We picked alongside a group of orthodox teenage Jewish girls, who were at the farm on a school trip. They were delightful to talk with and work alongside.
I must tell you that the biblical references to "the desert shall rejoice and blossom as a rose" (Isaiah 35:1) and "a land flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 3:17) really rang in my heart while harvesting. I have never seen such radishes. They looked more like beets! They were so large and numerous that I could stand, bent over and ripping out of the ground approximately 20 of them, without moving my feet. It was amazing. Furthermore, I did not see many pests on the radishes or on the foliage.
One final point, at the risk of over-Christianizing a simple harvest experience....
The farmers allowed the weeds to grow up with the plants. Unless we had known what the plants' foliage looked like, we would not have been able to locate or identify them, because of the proliferation of weeds. I don't know anything about gardening, but I guess it is possible the other plants (weeds) were strategically planted along with the radishes for some reason. There were an awful lot of them; I can tell you that.
After the "radishing" experience, we headed back to our Tel Aviv hotel. Most of the group went to dinner, but I had eaten such a large lunch and was so dusty and tired (sleep-deprived), I went straight to the room for clean-up, praying I would sleep a good 8 hours.
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