Matt in the Middle East: Building the Village in Yachini

I was in Yachini for the past two days helping to build the new student village there. Yachini out west somewhere, near Sderot. The village was established 2 years ago, but was mostly barebones, caravans and a moadon. So we set to work making it look like a real village.

There were about 200 students there from all over the country, so we split into groups, each one working on a different part of the village. Some were planting trees, others were making the pathways between the caravans and laying down stones, sand and grass.

The first day, my group was in charge of building sitting areas out of old tires, dirt, rocks and plastic bottles (they're big on recycling, we made a compost heap later on too). One of this specific village's goals was to be completely accessible for people with disabilities and there are a few who already live there. So we built a rubber track around the outskirts so that the students in wheelchairs would be able to get to every part of the village.

The second day we finished making the sitting areas by covering the tires with mud-cement and decorated them with glass from broken bottles. Then we went to help finish the main stairs leading from the lower part of the village to the upper part. Another group had been building them and we first brought huge stones and laid them alongside and then used more mud-cement to hold them in place and decorated it with more glass and tiles. One of the things I like about these villages is that instead of trying to remake the landscape as what we might want it to be, we try to work with the environment and build within it not against it.

After we were done working yesterday, Natan Sharansky came and spoke to us. It was pretty amazing. He told us about how he thought the Ayalim Student movement were the heirs to the original pioneers and he told us a little of his personal story. I didn't really know anything about him other than the fact that he was a prisoner of Zion in the USSR, but after hearing about his being arrested for demanding visas for Soviet Jews to go to Israel and spending over a year in jail in solitary confinement in a cell about 2 meters by 2 meters but still finding a way to celebrate Yom Ha'Atzmaut with the other prisoners to drive the guards crazy.

It's pretty impressive and it was also pretty cool that this Israeli student sitting next to me, after Sharansky was finished speak, turned to me and said, "I can't believe it. I didn't think we'd actually get to see him." The look in his eyes when he said it showed how much it meant to him to hear him speak and was the epitome of the Ayalim movement, students keeping the Zionist vision alive.