ברוכים הבאים! - Bruchim Habaim! - Welcome!

ברוכים הבאים!

Welcome to my blog - a catalogue of my two months in Israel (and BH beyond too) which I spent on a kibbutz in Israel.

Firstly, a few disclaimers:
1) Everything you read here is entirely truthful: outrageous or outlandish as some of it may sound. It's a different world out there. Really.
2) This blog does not seek to cause harm or offence, merely to tell it how it really was/is, as I saw/see it happening.
3) This blog does not seek to provide a political/racial/religious standpoint or opinion. It is literally just a retelling of the experience(s) I had/will have as a volunteer in Eretz Yisrael. Don't read too much into it, metaphorically or allegorically.

Now that's over with, a further introduction:

'The Mitnadevet' ('female volunteer' in Hebrew), as I came to be known, began this journey in July 2009, uncertain, unprepared and unaware of what was going to go down. To be honest, I didn't have a burning desire to farm the land or G-d knows what, mostly I just really liked the idea of spending as much time as possible in Israel (with comparitively little cost) but also for the experience itself, which I'd never had and wanted to try it before continuing my humdrum little life back in London, and writing it up in the 'Book of Experiences' in my head. I believed that my summer on kibbutz would be calm and peaceful, allowing me a lot of time to read all the books which I'd been consistently accumulating throughout my degree, to relax after a stressful final year and also to get that pesky novel out of my head/scraps of paper and onto the computer screen, finally.

None of this actually happened.

Because when I got to kibbutz, I realised that, everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people. And animals. Cows, cats, farm animals, lizards and petrukim (cockroaches). And as such, I was just another one of the new crowd, taking up space wherever I went, literally just another 'Mitnadevet' amongst the mitnadvim ('volunteers'). And people don't take kindly to mitnadvim taking a book out in the Cheder Ochel - communal dining room - at mealtimes, or disappearing off to their (shared) room to write stuff up. Instead, we would all spend our leisure time together, talking, drinking, smoking and more. And time, which had been so slow-paced and quiet otherwise on the kibbutz, would suddenly have sped-up and run out from nowhere, and it would be bed time., as work was in 4 hours.

So I didn't get round to doing any of the things that I envisaged I would.

But I did so much more! How could I have expected that, at the beginning of those fateful two months I would, in time, experience the honour of cutting twenty goats' toenails? Or learning how to make different types of cheeses? Or even that I would be able to fuel, sustain and contribute to an explosive trilingual argument? Did I know at the time I arrived at the kibbutz, that in the next two months I would almost die by drowning, get my nose pierced or that I potentially would want to change my entire (carefully finetuned, hard-earned and highly detailed) life plans?

To answer my own questions, I reply a big resounding 'No'.

It was never all cakes and sweet stuff (apart from one Shabbat, when it was literally all cakes and sweet stuff), and at times the whole experience was downright horrible, soul-destroying, upsetting and even highly ohysically painful. But it was the single most funnest, most illuminating and thrilling experience I've had in my entire life.

And so I welcome you to read the edited (for personal reasons) version of my kibbutz life.

Sincerely yours,

The Mitnadevet