Out of Town

I will be one of the lead teachers for a conflict resolution/leadership summer camp in Vermont for the next couple of weeks, so I won't be able to write my normal Monday blog until August.

So, here goes a couple of weeks of incredible Vermont beauty!!!

Oh, and interfaith conflict resolution work with Israeli high-schoolers is going to be amazing to!!!

A Visitor!!!

My friend Dorien is here, visiting from Tanzania!!!

I love moving around and getting to know new places and people, I really do. But, having a friend here who has known me for years, and especially a friend from Tanzania, is like coming in from the cold and being wrapped in a warm blanket. I love all of my warm blanket friendships.

One highlight, so far, of Dorien's visit has been touring the Rish Lakish olive oil press and tasting different olive oils! The family who produces the olive oil harvests the olives from their farm and do all of the processing themselves.

They have also toured quite a bit around Tanzania since their daughter (a professional olive oil taster) lived and worked in Bagamoyo (near Dar es Salaam) for years! They even decorate part of their reception with a kanga!

Another highlight has been food! Arabic restaurants serve the most incredible plethora of salads! I don't know if you can see them all, but there are 15 salads on that table. There was a cauliflower salad that was my favorite and we both found the hummus particularly good with a slight eggy taste that I think comes from the chickpeas.

Yesterday we had a Dead Sea day which included a visit to Massada, Ein Gedi, and the Dead Sea!

For the last couple of years Dorien has been learning Hebrew and I have been learning Dutch as a sort of language exchange. Last year I got to visit her in the Netherlands and this year she has visited me here. As part of our ongoing exchange we are reading through the first chapter of Prince Caspian in Hebrew. Dorien then translates it into Dutch and I see if I can tell whether the Dutch translation is basically accurate or not. It's such fun! איזה כיך! Welk plezier!

I only have few more days before Dorien heads back to Tanzania and I head back to finishing my final paper. This has been such a wonderful and needed distraction from the grind of school!

A Royal Affair

I am successfully making my way through the long list of finals and events that I listed out a couple of weeks ago. I only have one more final to write!!! I also have a friend visiting me from Tanzania and she arrives on Wednesday!

This last week I finished up The Friendship Games! It was a very interesting experience and it provided me with a lot of food for thought about language barriers, long term affects of such initiatives, the role of music in this event, and many other things! I loved getting to be in the desert for a week and am already missing the arid heat.

The final day of the tournament we took the players on a brief tour of Jerusalem. I was on the bus with the Germans and Lithuanians, so we took them to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre first, assuming that they have a stronger Christian background than Jewish or Muslim. That was when it happened, we had to make way for royalty!!!

In a narrow street outside the church, security personnel and policemen asked us to stand off to the side and not move. They didn't tell us why but within a minute, from around the corner, Prince William suddenly appeared! I stood merely 5 feet from him as he passed. We then had to make our way around the church without getting in the way of his entourage.

I've never been a huge fan of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but it was fun sharing the space with a future king for a bit.

Oh, final note: some reporters came from the States to cover the games and they interviewed me for a podcast which you can listen to: HERE.