The Zionist Frontier

On Thursday, the Beersheva group had a group volunteer project at Ashelim, a place 40 minutes south of Beersheva, in the middle of the Negev desert. Literally the middle of nowhere. Ashelim is a tiny little student town, for students in the Negev, usually Ben Gurion university. The students go to university for free and live for free, but they literally built the town, the buildings, the electricity, the water, everything. The student who live there, a few dozen now, all do 10 hours of community service a week with kids who live in the south. Ariel Sharon visited there, it's a really incredible place. These people are young idealistic Zionists. They sort of remind of people today who want to be hippies, who wish it was still the 60s. These people are not religious, but they wish it was 1948 and they could settle the land, make the desert bloom. Still, they are awesome.

So what did we do? Some of us simply moved around sand, and other planted flowers and other helped set up electricity. But I was in the group that helped build a road, we placed the stones down, mixed cement and the spackled the cement between the stones. It was real work! For some reason, whenever I put a rake or shovel to sand, I feel like a Zionist. So this was really awesome. I especially enjoyed mixing the cement. While we were working, I decided to sing negro spirituals, like "When Israel was in Egypt's Land," which I thought was rather appropropriate. What's really cool about this place was also the fact that wherever you look, you don't see city, you see desert.