Oh crazy Israel! Rachel Johnson returns to the kibbutz where she and Boris worked
Almost 30 years ago I was a pale-skinned, fair-haired teenage girl visiting Israel for the first time with her even paler-skinned and fairer-haired older brother.
We'd come to work as volunteers at a kibbutz north of the Sea of Galilee, on the green banks of the Jordan river, just below the volcanic pointy hills of the Golan Heights and a few miles from Syria.
We arrived at the kibbutz in the blasting heat of July. 'Warm breeze,' I wrote in my diary at the time. 'Smell of blossom ... and latrines.' Soon after arrival, we were assigned our work sections. I had the Augean task of 'male sanitation'.
Boris was bundled into the communal kitchen, which catered and cleared up after kibbutz Kfar Hanassi's 600 members and volunteers who dined together three times a day on yogurt, houmous, eggs, houmous, yogurt and tomatoes (that's all I remember eating at every meal, anyway).
There could not have been worse gigs for pampered, pale-faced public-school spawn. With industrial dishwashers going all the time, it was hotter than Hades in the kitchens and as for me, I took one look at the stomach-churning male loos and felt so desperate that I was forced to play the 'shiksa' (ie non-Jewish blonde female) card in this country of gun-toting, camouflage-clad, tough, gorgeous, dark-haired Israeli sabras. (Israeli girls are known as sabras after the prickly pear fruit of the cactus that grows all over the Middle East.) Phew. For some reason, it worked.
Instead of loos, I worked in a factory making irrigation valves, which was still no picnic, as my diary records: 'As it was Shabbat [the Sabbath] we closed early, but as a penance for this I was ordered to sweep and scrub the factory floor, which was bloody exhausting.'
After a few weeks, I moved to picking fruit, and then, after striking up a friendship with an attractive shepherd called David, I was promoted to being a shepherdess.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2305291/Holidays-Israel-Rachel-Johnson-returns-land-brother-Boris-kibbutz-workers.html#ixzz2QCYaC83z
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Thought it may be enticing .
