As I write this I am sitting in the dingy little Eilat bus station, waiting for the night bus to take me back to Tel Aviv for work in the SACH house at 9. It slipped my mind (once again) that Thursday night in Israel is really the first night of the weekend and since all public transport stops at around 3 pm tomorrow, this night bus will probably be packed and I haven’t yet purchased a ticket. No problem though, the Egged lines will always let you on, you just may be lying in the aisle using your backpack as a pillow (note: I did end up getting a seat, and slept like a baby all the way to Tel Aviv :-).
What am I doing in Eilat at midnight, you ask? Returning from the 4th annual Arava Alumni Peace and Environment Network (AAPEN) conference, that’s what! The conference was held in Aqaba, Jordan, and so once again I made an all too brief pop-over into the Hashemite Kingdom, riding down from Tel Aviv with a good many friends from last semester and an assortment of alumni from the last 12 years of the Machon. As we stopped in Sde Boqer and then Ketura, we picked up even more current and former students, and by the time we got to the border the bus was abuzz with excited chatter as old friends re-united and new friends hit it off. Luckily, we pulled into the border just ahead of a busload of Brazilians, and got through it in just over an hour. We were picked up by a new bus on the other side and driven to the Days Inn Aqaba, which really could have been a Days Inn anywhere, only they served Hummus, Foul, and Labaneh with dinner. Waiting for us at the hotel were many of the Palestinian and Jordanian students, past and present, who made it down for the conference. Yesterday night there was a brief introduction to the meeting schedule and then we were turned loose into the city, some finding coffee shops, some beaches and some liquor stores (yes, alcohol is sold in Aqaba, likely for the same reason that IDF shirts are sold in the Arab quarter of Old Jerusalem- rhymes with honey).
The next morning, after a slightly groggy breakfast, we went down to the conference room and were woken up by a stirring speech on environmental leadership from Alon Tal, famous Israeli environmental lawyer and activist, and also co-founder of the Machon Arava. Following that was a talk from Alan Weismann, author of the book The World Without Us, which essentially describes what would happen to global ecosystems if humans were to all suddenly disappear. This thought experiment led to a brief foray into the always touchy topic of population control, and how it can ethically be achieved without coercion, unequal treatment, and with cultural sensitivity. This, incidentally, is what Weismann’s next book will be about.
Then we got down to business. You see, it turns out that at a time when NGOs all over the world are suffering from the general economic downturn, the Machon is thriving. With more students than ever before, more donors than ever before and maybe more projects germinating than it is sane to handle, the Institute is looking to strengthen its alumni network as well, and is looking to get a large grant for a large transboundary project for the near future. So we sat down and brainstormed all sorts of potential projects, from environmental education to shared nature reserves to major infrastructure projects to cultural and artistic gatherings. One of the major issues with doing transboundary projects with Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians, is travel. Since Palestinians must have permits to travel to Israel, and these permits take a whole lot of concerted effort to obtain (anyone who’s dealt with the Israeli Ministry of the interior will know that this institution is stubborn and nasty at the best of times, to even the most upstanding of Israeli citizens and benign foreigners). On top of that, it is illegal for Israelis to travel to most places in the West Bank.
Ilana Meallem, that wonderful alumni I posted about earlier, has proposed a potential solution, which apparently has been waiting to crystallize in the peace and environment community for quite some time – basically a retreat in a neutral territory, one that Israelis can go to and for which Palestinians and Jordanians don’t need permits. This kind of location apparently exists somewhere along the Dead Sea, and the plan is to turn it into a kind of Eco-Village and peace centre. I hope I can be around to see it become a reality. After this we heard about some projects going on in the region, the most interesting of which is the Biodigester project, a health and environment initiative aiming to help poor Palestinian and Bedouin communities. Most of these people have large herds of goats and flocks of sheep, their main source of income, but from these herds and flocks comes quite a bit of waste, much of which is burned for fuel or essentially left around, both of which are public health hazards and waste problems. With a Biodigester, a low-tech, low cost technology, the manure can be digested anaerobically to form methane gas, a clean burning fuel for cooking and heating, and the remainder of the waste, after minimal treatment, can be used as fertilizer. This solution is good for the health and sustainability of these communities.
I unfortunately had to cut out from the conference after dinner and before the movie, since the border closes at 8 pm and I needed to be back to Azor for 9 tomorrow morning, having gotten only two days off from Save a Child’s Heart to go. I’m really looking forward to being back though, I’m becoming quite fond of the children currently in the house. More about this in the next couple days…
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