SermonsWinter Storm Alexa

Shoveling with a Squeegee

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This is Maurice and me.

Hi kids!

Kathy, Maurice and I worked pretty hard yesterday.  The people from EAPPI told us they were going to help clear the snow away from Qurtuba School and the nearby Samidoon kindergarten so the children could get to their classes next day and invited us to help.  So Maurice and Kathy and I went over yesterday to do that.  Our friend Hamed and his daughter Rama also came.

IMG_9494Like I said in my last post,  it doesn’t really snow here, so there weren’t snow shovels for people to buy.  Hamed tried to buy some regular shovels, but they had all been bought so he could only buy hoes and pick axes.  We cleared a path to the kindergarten and to the toilets behind the kindergarten.  It would have been a lot faster with a snow shovel!IMG_9491IMG_9492Then we started cleaning the schoolyard at Qurtuba School. I thought we would never get all the snow in the whole yard cleaned up!  We were using brooms and squeegees to push the snow to the sides as well as the hoes and the shovels. IMG_9507Kathy was really glad to take over on a squeegee, because her back was getting sore. She worked on pushing melting snow down a drain as the sun began to melt it.  After we were done, the schoolyard looked like this:IMG_9508Then Maurice and Kathy and I all went out to lunch with the EAPPI people and Hamed and Rama to the Royal Kingdom restaurant.  It was yummy!

Hurray! We’re in Hebron again!

Hi kids!

Kathy and I got into Jerusalem on Tuesday, but she had a headache on Wednesday, so we didn’t get to Hebron until Thursday. We were sad that we onlyIMG_9468 got to work with Bob Holmes for one day! We worked with Bob during the Second Intifada ten years ago.  He is a lot of fun, but he doesn’t like eating fruits or vegetables.  He’s really afraid of pomegranates.  But we miss him already.  Sniff Sniff.

Right before Kathy and I arrived, Winter Storm Alexa hit Israel and Palestine and all the countries around them with a LOT of snow and rain. In Hebron, which is about 3,000 feet up, there was a lot of snow–like there is in Rochester during a couple bad days of blizzards, but no one here has snow plows or snow shovels. So it caused a lot of buildings and parts of buildings to fall down.  Kathy and I will take some more pictures of that.

IMG_9470When we got here, several days after the blizzard ended there was still snow on the steps leading up from the women’s apartment to the roof.  It keeps melting, so there’s always a little river running down the stairs, and we have to keep squeegeeing the water outside the door down the next flight of stairs because it collects into a little pond about 3″ deep outside our front door.

And it’s pretty cold inside the house.  The downstairs apartment where the office is has a gas heater and an electric heaterIMG_9474 going, so it’s not too bad, but Kathy’s room is really, really cold. The little electric heater doesn’t help a lot.  It only warms the part of your body that’s right next it.  Kathy is always grateful to her mother-in-law Terri for giving her that black and gray wool dress that is too warm to wear anywhere that has central heating, so it is perfect to wear for winters in Hebron. In fact, she almost never takes it off.  She wishes she could wear two pairs of wool socks with her shoes.  Unicorns, of course have magic fur, so we’re fine in the cold or the heat, but we try not to be annoying about it.

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