Notes from the MIddle East

Arriving
It has not yet sunk into me that I am in Israel. After all that uncertainty, reaching Israel was a big deal after 28 hours of travel. The flight was delayed in Jordan. For a 45 minute flight we had to wait for 4 hours. We felt that we could have even walked the distance instead of waiting. We reached and waited and waited in a queue for the immigration. A young lady was at the slow moving counter. She asked the regular questions: Where are you going? Is this the first visit? How long are you going to stay? Where will you be staying? Are your friends Israeli nationals? What is the purpose of your visit? We patiently answered and got out of it and waited for our luggage. It also arrived like the delayed flight slow and steady. The baggage belt spat out our bags that came sliding down. We picked it up and went to the immigration, Our Pappa Bear, Pastor Frans was eagerly waiting for us. We gave him a tight hug of relief and got into the car. He said, “it is a two hour drive”. We sat down and decided to enjoy the ride.

Not having slept for about 24 hours was getting to me. I was trying to sleep in the car but could not avoid seeing the beautiful hills and mounds. They all seemed to me like some strategic lookouts. On our way we crossed several villages. They looked like Muslim villages with prominent mosques with minarets. Frans told us that that was Palestine. The villages were surrounded by walls that were any where between 10 ft in some places to about 25 feet high in other places. It looked like walled villages. They were supposed to stop the Palestenians from getting across to Israel.

As we drove by, I really wanted to sleep but the signboards kept me awake. It said Jerusalem, Tiberias, Nazareth and so on. Now I was slowly waking up to it. It was the road to the real Nazareth and not the one in Pennsylvania or the one in Northern Tamil Nadu. We drove by Galilee and reached the northern part of the country. Passed by the orange plantations, the olive trees still pregnant with olives and orchards of avocado. Finally we arrived in Nes Ammim. We met with Annemarie our Dutch god mother and gave her a quick update about the trip and went for dinner.