Today was our first full day in Israel. The morning was really tiring and quite frankly, I don’t actually remember all of it. But I do remember what I’m supposed to write about. This afternoon we drove for about 40 minutes to get to the city of Sderot, which is a little less than a mile away from the Gaza Strip. I thought that was crazy because we looked from the top of a hill and were able to see a lot of Gaza. Being that close to Gaza, in my opinion, is quite risky since it only takes 10-15 seconds after the warning siren for missiles from Gaza to hit Israel. That amount of time is barely long enough to move. You have to hear and process the sound of the alarm before you can move, and even then, you might not know what to do with yourself. Imagine 5 year old kids playing when the alarm goes off. They don’t know what to do, or maybe they do, but that would only be if their parents trained them. In my opinion, that’s sad. I cannot imagine what it would be like to train my kid to get into a bomb shelter at the age of five. That is exactly what some people in Sderot thought too. We visited a playground that had a huge caterpillar tunnel, that we soon found out was actually a bomb shelter. It was made so kids could play, and when the sound goes off, they can continue to play and not let their lives be majorly disturbed. After our short visit to the playground, we went to apartment buildings made from shipping containers. Yes, shipping containers, you know those huge metal ones with ridges that would go on a cargo boat? Yeah those. It was crazy. I’m not usually one totally invested in recycling, like my brother, but even I thought it was pretty neat.
So I’ll quickly summarize – and this was just the afternoon. We went to Sderot, a city by Gaza, and learned about the challenges of being so close; we went to a playground and experienced a creative way to respond to the danger; we played (duh, how can we not? We’re still kids too); and saw the container apartments – another creative solution. I guess that concludes my blog, and now I have a long bus ride to Jerusalem.