I.
On the first day of passionfruit harvesting, one of the Thai workers turned away from me and toward the plume of smoke to the North. "Eidan! Eidan! Gaza! Gaza!" He pointed.
Then (still facing away from me) he opened his pants and relieved himself in the direction of Khan Younis. With the numbers of Thai laborers who were killed or kidnapped, I'm not sure if the two actions were unrelated.
II.
The volunteers live in the houses of evacuated families; allowing us to stay here helps save their community.
Another volunteer saw me washing dishes and thanked me for the work. I said I was happy to do it, because now I can tell everyone back in the States that after October 7, I cleaned the kitchen of a displaced family; "everyone will call me a hero of Israel!" We laughed a bit.
(I've already been called a hero of Israel a few times and I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's the exact phrase I heard a news anchor use for dead soldiers. On the other hand, I am a little heroic. On the third hand, there are apparently lots of similarly heroic people, I meet a few new ones every day. On the fourth hand, if I think they are heroes I should think I'm one too.)
III.
One evening, Daniel, the farmer I've been harvesting for, organized a barbecue for the volunteers. We spent a couple of hours cooking and a few more eating and talking.
I took some of the star fruit that were too brown for retail but still good to eat and blended them. I added juice from a sour variety of oranges that grow on a tree by the house I'm staying in, and Daniel supplied a splash of tequila. My first cocktail was a great success.
IV.
Most of the volunteers are young national-religious men who are about to be drafted. Sometimes we are joined by secular women who were just released from service and are now (I think) working security working in the flower plantation on the Moshav. When people ask me about it, I've described their interactions as "two different species of aliens trying to talk for the first time." It's really quite funny, and they are very open and curious.
If there's an alien here though, it's me. I'm lucky that I don't really feel that way.
V.
Iyar is a 19-year old volunteer who was one of the first to arrive in Talmei Yosef. She's interested in permaculture and her eyes lit up when I asked her to tell me more about it.
This coming Shabbat, she's leaving Talmei Yosef and going to her home in the North to see her two brothers, who are being released from their reservist duties this week. She told me it's the first time the whole family will be together since the start of the war.
Then she apologized for the mess on her porch, and explained that when she got here there was almost nobody left in the Moshav, but when they saw a young girl coming to volunteer by herself they all stepped up to supply her apartment - and in the end brought her way more things than she needed. I hadn't noticed the mess.
Israelis have the tendency to decorate themselves with titles. Everyone at my work is an expert. All of the volunteering since the 7Oct are hero and there are so many other examples. It’s a cultural thing that actually does very good to the individual and makes him/her want to justify their new title. So yes, you are a hero in so many ways :-)
On your way to becoming an agronomist:)