The return to Ezuz

We returned to Ezuz last week to work with a different family than last time. This family, Celia and Dror, along with their friend Doron, founded the settlement itself. Ezuz is a funny little village - started out as a military outpost along the Egyptian border so as to establish ongoing presence of the IDF in the Negev Desert and to guard the Sinai peninsula and such (when Sinai was occupied by Israel). Later, in the mid 1980s, it was settled by 'pioneering' civilian individuals (Celia, Dror, and Doron) committed to making it their own little outpost rural home.

Now, nearly 30 years later, Ezuz has about 16 families (give or take), and is still as yet unrecognized as an official settlement by the Israeli government. Being an unrecognized or unsanctioned settlement is a predicament that is relatively rare for ethnically Jewish Israelis, but an unfortunate de facto policy that the government has toward most Bedouin villages in the Negev Desert. There is one busline that runs there (picks people up at 6am and drops off people at at 8:30pm), and buses for kids to go to public schools in other towns, but there is no state-funded real infrastructure. In that respect, it's unusual.

The residents of Ezuz are a fun bunch of friendly misanthropes, who by and large seem to think that their tiny settlement, surrounded by miles and miles of open space on all sides, is "too crowded" for their liking now. At least that's what our old hosts (Avi and Tamar) and our new hosts (Celia and Dror) believe. Aside from lots of dust, sun, and flies (and still an outpost of patrolling soldiers), there are actually several working artists in the town (apparently the main economic 'driver' aside from tourism). The town itself looks (to quote from my journal last time around) "sort of like a pirate and gypsy town...something out of my kid dreams." The local architecture consists mainly of the following: converted train cabooses, converted tractor trailer containers, and converted old public transportation buses. Most other structures are made out of or covered with local mud. We now live in an old shipping container with doors and windows, kitchen and bathroom, in the "middle" of town, i.e. across from the main square, which consists of a basketball court, small playground, a turn around for cars, and a bunch of dumpsters. But it is a good location because we get to watch everyone coming in and out!

At any rate, Celia and Dror make organic goat milk products (cheese, yogurt, etc.) and we help them. Their labor is divided along "gender" lines...i.e. Celia makes all the cheese and Dror does all the cowboy-ing. In general, they appear to divide their volunteer labor along those lines as well - women help out with Celia and men go out to shepherd with Dror. But because there is already an additional (female) volunteer helping Celia, both Noam and I are helping with the goat and sheep herding. Our normal days consist of waking up around 6am, getting down to the farm area by about 6:45am so as to help finish the morning feeding (Celia and Dror have always finished milking by the time we are there), separate all the baby sheep and goats from their mommas and bring all the grazing animals out in a herd for the morning. There are about 70 goats and 25 sheep that go out with us. We bring them out for around 3-4 hours, and then get back by 11am, when it starts to get really hot. We then go back to our place and hang out until the evening feeding and milking at about 4:30pm. And that's it!

There are, of course, many more fun details about goat and sheep herding, milking, feeding, etc, but I will save those for later. All I can say is, I had a wonderful birthday that included a bouquet of wild flowers, a homemade chocolate cake with ganache from Noam, and a newborn baby goat named after me.

And...baby goats are the cutest. In this photo, baby Lindsey goat (born to an old Grandma goat on my birthday) is on the left. And baby Noam goat (born on our second day shepherding, and whose pre-labor pains in the field that I successfully flagged, plus actual birth we watched once we brought the herd in from the desert) is on the right with white ears: