Dig Week Three (days 11-15)

Writing a week at a time seemed to work for week two, so I'll try it for week three and see what happens.

I quickly fell into a routine back at "the house," or if you prefer "base camp." I know I said on day four or five that I wanted to flip between the two, but that never happened. The plan was once they stopped using the big tools and went to the smaller ones (the ones I could maneuver) I would go back. I learned around day 20 my square never switched to the small tools, and I came to adore the people who stayed behind.

For the most part this week I rotated pottery from drying in the sun to bags and put more pottery out to dry. I aimed to do this after the sun came up around 5:30 AM, but before it got too hot. 

 I then took a spell inside labeling pottery with finicky pens.

One day I photographed pottery under Revital's guidance.

I also washed pottery with Ahlam and her mother, Fahrer, the Arab ladies.

Julie with one of the volunteers who left early.

The Arab ladies took to spoiling us. Though we didn't speak the same language, we would share fun pottery finds, dance around, and mostly laugh together. Laughing is so rare in our culture.

They also instituted our own Fruit Break after second breakfast. Each day they brought us a melon or watermelon and cut it up. We hung out together, just like they did at the dig site but our break was at 9:30 AM instead of noon.

Meanwhile, Sandy taught me the computer system called OCHRE that she designed and I was tasked with uploading pottery pictures -- in theory this would help them rap things up sooner. I was going home on July 27th no matter what, but the supervisors were sticking around longer to finish work.

Sandy was impressed by how quickly I picked up OCHRE. Took every bit of my fiber to not say "told you so."

The next day was more of the same. By now the  soil expert joined the team. He showed me his machine. I pretended to understand it. Each day people who stayed behind for one reason or another sifted through his soil samples as if they were miners hunting for specks of gold. I'm surprised I never did get a turn at that, but I was busy the whole time.

Day 13 was our heat wave -- reaching over 100 degrees. Instead of going for a walk that day I returned to the museum on the Kibbutz and soaked up its air conditioning and solitude. Normally I used that time to go for a walk.

The chef was in the hospital that week so meals were moved to different locations. A couple of times we dined in the school cafeteria with the students, which felt so un-American to me -- no background checks on us, just pure trust we were the good guys. Odd in a country with so many machine guns. At night we dined in the guest house, a further hike but with much better food. Fortunately the chef recovered and a new chef was brought on a few days later to help him make a full recovery.

On Thursday night while dining in the Guest House, we celebrated Sandy's birthday. As more often than not, she celebrates her birthday on a dig site surrounded by new friends, she has taken to playing the game of birthday paradox. The deal is, when at least 23 people are gathered, at least two will have the same birthday. In a room of 48 people, we had FIVE birthday pairs, and a birthday triplet. The most Sandy has ever encountered while playing this game. Turned out Julie was matched with Revital, and I was matched with Batami -- the pottery ladies we had been working with all month.

One frustration for Julie and I was that the volunteers who stayed back at the house (some for a day to recover, others for many days) took it as a vacation. One guy missed at least six dig days due to oversleeping, then didn't show up until lunchtime. As the older people part of us wanted to shake these kids (some of whom were older than us), but opted for passive-aggressively reminding them we DO work from 5 AM until after they come back at 1:30 PM. We were just paying volunteers. It was the job of the paid staff to manage the volunteers, we did not have that kind of power, nor did we want it.

I was having the feeling that people think we did nothing all day. The hardest working volunteer came down at 6 and spread the word that we don't do much all day. True we did not lift heavy equipment, but I did feel as if we were pulling our weight in other ways. Julie would start at 4:15 am by setting up first breakfast.

This is also when I noticed what a revolving door this dig site was. People came for a couple of weeks at the beginning or the end. They left early because of things happening at home. They started later because of life at home. Why was I there for all four weeks other than I made a commitment and honored it?

Feelings were hurt in the third week.