Leap of Faith

שלום‎ and مرحبا ! 

Last spring, I began my quest for the unconventional, high-impact, post-college adventure, and now, one year later, I am writing to you from Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava Valley of southern Israel.  My home is running distance from Jordan, and a 30 minute drive from both the Jordanian and Egyptian border crossings.  There are big and beautiful desert mountains in my backyard, in which I like to frolic at all times of day and night.  In my immediate community, I co-habitate with Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Americans, one Finnish guy, a Brazilian, an Argentinian, a French woman, a South African, and a Canadian.  And in my larger community, we eat cucumbers and hummus together in the dining hall and put our laundry in a shared system.  There are families with beautiful children running around and giving out hugs, and soccer tournaments, and volunteers milking cows and working in the date orchard, and Shabbat dinners, and holiday celebrations, and camels.  But let me back up...


In between the Ecuador and Colorado trips I led with RLT (see post: Summertime), I applied for a couple more jobs: to help build a new National Park in Patagonia; to work on an eco-village in Panama; to be a math teacher at the Green School in Bali, Indonesia.  And then I applied for one more: an internship at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, an environmental, peace-building institute where forty 20-30 year-old Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, and Internationals come together to learn about and address regional environmental issues.  


I first learned about AIES from a mass email I got (note: mass emails may hold the key to help unlock your destiny!!) from the environmental organization at CMU called Sustainable Earth, promoting a summer program through Dickinson College to study scarce resources at the Institute. I had actually applied to the summer program (to which I was not accepted... as I missed the memo that it was targeted to professionals and not recent graduates) and then decided to revisit their website to see if they offered internships.  Turns out that they DO!, and the experience described on the website seemed to encompass many things I was looking for: it was international, environmental, agricultural, people-oriented, intellectually challenging, water-related, in a beautiful and natural location, not purely a desk job, etc.


So I applied, and a couple weeks later, I was offered the internship with the Center for Transboundary Water Management at AIES, to work with Clive Lipchin - an expert on water policy and management in Israel and the Middle East region.  I got my Visa and on September 11th I hopped on a plane (along with many Orthodox jews) to the holy land.


I arrived to this foreign place after a ten hour flight on which I did not sleep, in a new time zone seven hours ahead of New York, and without a cell phone or an understanding of the language.  I was exhausted and overwhelmed and nervous and lonely, and after a train ride from the airport to the bus station, and a five hour bus ride to the kibbutz on which the Institute is located, I reached my new home and practically burst into tears.  Well that's not exactly true. First we played ice breakers and met the program coordinators.  Then I couldn't remember anybody's name.  Then I entered my room. Then I smelled my room. Then I saw the nakedness of the walls and the ugly curtains.  Then I burst into tears.  


WHAT WAS I THINKING??! WHY did I decide to go so far away from everything I knew!!? WHAT ON EARTH was I doing here?!? I remember calling my mom on Skype and her telling me to take a shower, relax and go to sleep, and that when I woke up in the morning it would feel better.  Then I chatted online with a friend who had spent two years in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, and had just moved to Peru on a Fulbright scholarship a couple weeks earlier.  He assured me the same thing: the first couple days in a new country are a rough adjustment... it's normal to feel like you made THE BIGGEST MISTAKE OF YOUR LIFE.  But it gets better.


Aaaaand I hereby declare to you that it TOTALLY DOES.