Today, our group visited the Kalia Kibbutz. קליה(Kalia) is an acronym for
״קם לתחייה ים המות״
Translating to “the dead is being resurrected״. While we were there we interviewed the citizens of the kibbutz. I interviewed Lisa. Lisa was born in Philadelphia. She never saw herself starting a beautiful kibbutz with her friends and becoming an Israeli, but when she was 14, Lisa and her family moved to Israel. She barely knew any Hebrew, but fell in love with Israel. She was inspired by Zionism and decided that she wanted to go to the army to solidify herself as an Israeli citizen. While Lisa was in the army, the Yom Kippur war broke out. She said that although this war was so horrible, because of the war, she made bonds with her friends in the army that could not be broken. After her service in the army, she knew that she wanted to stay in Israel and wanted her children to be raised in Israel. Lisa and 8 of her friends took advantage of government policies that encouraged people to start kibbutzim. They decided to establish a kibbutz right near the Dead Sea because of how beautiful it was. The way Lisa described it was that she got to start her own little utopia with her best friends. As I mentioned earlier, she never imagined in her wildest dreams that she would even live in a kibbutz – never mind start one. As a kid she thought that kibbutzim were weird and were distant from society. However, because of the lifetime friends that she acquired in the army, the idea that she could start a village with her friends/family mad a lot of sense to her and an opportunity that she could not give up. The land that they decided to build the kibbutz on was beautiful, but completely dead. There was nothing. The soil was so salty that it was almost impossible for anything to live there. Not to mention that neither her nor her friends had any ideaof how to start a kibbutz. They created laws as a community and as time went on, some of these laws were adjusted. For example, at the beginning everyone in the kibbutz was kkgiven the same exact things for the week: soap, food, dog food, cat food, and water. Although everyone was living equally, the community realized that some people didn’t have dogs/cats and the dog/cat food was useless to them. Instead of giving certain goods to people each week, they gave a certain amount of money to people each week so that people could have options on what they spend their money and there wasn’t a one size fits all standard. Everyone was equal but also had a sense of individualism because no one had the exact same goods that their neighbors had. After many years of planting trees, things started to grow. Lisa said that one night, while she was sleeping, she woke up to the noise of birds chirping. She woke up her husband and was so exhilarated to hear these birds. She forgot what they sounded like. There were no birds that came to the kibbutz because nothing was there, but now there were bushes, and grass, and trees, and a loving community. After this kibbutz started to grow and more people started to join, people started to notice that the Dead Sea was slowly drying up. Lisa, her husband, and another couple from the kibbutz decided that they couldn’t let the Dead Sea die. She realized that Israel had talked about saving the Dead Sea for so long but never really did anything about it. “They (politicians) need to put their political egos aside and work with Jordan to make peace in the world”. She has her own course of action and is trying to raise awareness of the issue of the Dead Sea to get something done. Lisa is a leader in so many ways. She came to Israel, knew very little Hebrew, and still decided to serve in the army. Lisa is a leader. She started her own kibbutz with 8 of her fiends in an area that was completely dead and abandoned. Now over 120 people live in this beautiful kibbutz and live very happily. Lisa is a leader. She is now working to try to save the Dead Sea and to raise awareness about how much water the Dead Sea is losing. Lisa has been a leader her whole life and continues to be leader and someone everyone can look up to.