August 08 - 05

Hey There Folks,
Well, I am busy with Zochrot, having just today established that I will, indeed, get some days off (today was my eight day without a day off since starting). Our office is located about a thirteen minute walk (yes, I have timed it several times) from my apartment. I am usually sweaty when I get there, but I have been trying different modes of carrying my backpack (one shoulder, type deal, which I've always despised) and I am standing in as much shadow as possible when at traffic lights. I chuckle to myself when I am trying to hide my "portly" body behind five inches of shadow, coming off the traffic post.
There are six staff, including myself, at the office in Tel Aviv (I will be touring the Haifa office next Tuesday-Thursday). At our office, four are half-time, and Eitan B. (director) and myself (inept moron) are full-time. The others come in for two days in the office, then one day working from home. We set up a time-table in our staff meeting today, because with the addition of myself and Eitan R., the office is just too packed and there's not enough computers to work.
The staff meeting was a really interesting experience, I'd say. The head of the Haifa office was there at our meeting and she's a militant in-your-face hippie activist: we're talking career activist. We all know the type. There were some tense moments, mostly in Hebrew, even though for my sake, they were trying to speak in English (but when emotions and tensions arose over methodology, languages were promptly switched to native tongues). I still got the point, though. One wants a personal desk, with a computer for exclusive use; another wants to be totally hippie and minimalist and not buy anything we don't urgently need; one wants cublicles; another refuses to budge; most everyone wants one's own way. Result: clashes! I just kept silent and felt like leaving after an hour of this back and forth dance. It lasted three hours!
So what do I do at work? Good question! I'm confused a lot; I constantly feel like I am in over my head; and I wonder at these machines, I think they're called computers. Monstrous beasts, whatever these computers!
Seriously.
I am actually kind of a gopher (go for this, go for that), which is good because I can do that kind of stuff. I am also the newly appointed audio/video guy, which is funny because I am fairly ignorant. My take, so far, is that Eitan B. wanted me to get involved somehow and thought that since I was going to eventually be programming in PHP, that I can do all things technical. Well, I tried to play it smart, like keep my mouth shut, the first week and the result is that now I am editing video footage to put to music or voice-over and get it all short, concise and web-ready. Great! The only problem is, I don't know how to do most of that stuff.
Tinworth and I made some video for Welkin a couple of years back and so I am using a program that is similar (but inferior), which just came with the video camera, which was purchased a couple days after my arrival. I am unofficially the filmer, too. The first tour we did, which I sent you guys the reflection of and some photos, I was handed the digital camera (also brand new) by Eitan B. and told to take pics for the day. AS IF I would tell him that I can't stand cameras and all that; I'm not that much of an undiplomatic idiot: so I said sure and took a pile of photos, which for whatever reason (probably because they had such low expectations of whoever was coming) they think I am some kind of photographic inspiration, so on the next tour, it was the video camera for me to take footage of.
I was the one that told them that maybe I could talk with my friend back home (Tinworth) and see about getting an editing program. Because I mentioned it, it must have left some kind of impression that I KNEW what I was talking about (I never claimed to, I only referenced it) and on Sunday, at the office (for Sunday is Monday, here), I found a disk in the video box that had this stock version editing software, so I installed it, and people were amazed, much to my disgruntlement because I don't want people to think I am too capable or impressive (it creates problems, I find: every spy novel I ever read told me to be anonymous and try never to stand out. I am SO good at that, I know!).
so, anyway, while on this tour of Bir'im, Saturday, I kept in mind that I might be making some kind of a clip, so I did film stuff with that in mind. Ten years in the film industry, watching people make movies had more effect on me than I thought it would have had. I am in the middle of editing this footage down to three minutes and I am a little impressed with myself for how I panned, etc. I am somewhat creative, so that helps in putting together clips, but i also have to be technical because I am the only one who knows about this software, so far. I have to make sure that I don't waste time making this three-minute movie only to find out later that I cannot put it on-line in an accessible manner. Eitan R. is the Admin guy for the website, so he can put it on, yes, but I don't know if we can stream it and I have no idea how to get into the code to make sure it pops up in a new window. I don't know how to degrade the resolution to get it Internet ready (I do know that I have to take out every fourth or fifth frame or something, which I have no clue how to do)......
So, all these things have been eating me up, and I have been trying to understand how to get answers. The two folks who write the PHP for the website have been unreachable all day and I hopefully will get to meet with the one in Haifa next week. Yeah, but's that's seven days from now! I had a horrible time trying to get to sleep last night; kept thinking about how I am going to pull this off when folks at Zochrot keep telling me I am doing great and I feel like yelling, NO I SUCK CAN'T YOU SEE THAT; CAN'T YOU SEE I AM FREAKING OUT!
At least I have gotten to the point of throwing my hands up in the air and laughing. I feel WAY better about being an ignoramus today, than I did yesterday. I even talked with Talia and Eitan R. today, telling them how useless I feel and how frustrated I am. But see, I can't really express myself without using grandiose language and satyrical jokes, which these two thought was hilarious, so the good part is we were all laughing good about me feeling like a moron. End result, I can relax a little and take my time.
I have decided that I will just finish the video clip and deal with Internet related matters afterward. there must be a way....
Today, I was at the office for eight and a half hours and didn't really get anything done for this clip. Everytime I had a minute to myself to try to sort out the video (reading instructions, searching google and reading people's tips) someone would come up to me and ask for help accessing the network, or burning a folder onto cd, or installing programs or whatever. I think that's actually why they think I know what I am doing, because I can use Nero and I know how to get freeware installed and I can send stuff to different computers. But, as I keep trying to explain, I don't know much. I always show them what I do, but it seems I am not the only one with horrible short-term memory. Must be the humidity.
And Eitan B.(director) is fairly computer illiterate, so I feel badly trying to explain that making this video is, like, a twelve-hour job first time around, not a three-hour job. I finally mustered the courage to tell him today that I couldn't get it done for a few days and is that okay? He is super nice (which a big relief) and TOTALLY not a controlling person (which is a bigger relief) so he simply said, "no problem." I did show the rough copy (without smooth transitions or audio) with Welkin's Horses Heaving... playing on the cd player to set a mood and he really liked what he saw, so did the rest of the staff, so that is gratifying, although I now know why KP disses his own work as soon as he shows it to people. I found myself muttering about how it's not very good and I can change it all around if they want. It's pretty scary to show people stuff you poured yourself into: they don't have the commitment to it you do.
And if sitting for hours in front of a computer isn't enough at work, I come home and do it more. You see, I have this older laptop, which I am very GRATEFUL for, but it is Pentium II and shoudlnt have anything more than WIN98 on it, and it has WINXP so I am constantly battling it. Any kind of program download makes it run out of space and slow to a tortoise crawl. Which is really frustrating when I am trying to learn stuff for work and it is always seizing, etc. I am going to try to put WIN98 on it next week, when I'm in Haifa. we'll see.
I am really sorry for all this technical garbledy-gook, but I have to channel it out or I will just say stuff like "work is good" and you will have no idea what I am doing, or how I am struggling.
Let me change it up by talking about our tour to Bir'im on Saturday. There were about forty of us on a chartered bus (I got to hang out with my MCC friends Chris and Tim Siedel - and their World-Vision pal, Kelly, too). We all met at 0830 at the Arsolov train station. It was about a fifteen minute walk from my place. The drive took maybe three hours to get up north. I got to lay my eyes upon the Sea of Galilee and also some mountains that are in Lebanon (that's how north we were). My friend Eitan R. told me that if I look really closely I can see Jesus walking on the water. (Funny nihilists they grow up-here!) Our group met some of the Zochrot chapter of Haifa and also the displaced refugees of Bir'im summer youth camp (where youth from all over who are "from" Bir'im get together for a week to learn together and stay in unity)
A little history: Karaf Bir'im is a Christian Arab village, in the upper Galilee region of Israel. On October 29, 1948, the Israeli Army Forces interred it and its 1050 inhabitants. On November 20, 1948, the townspeople were told that they have to leave their community for only two weeks. They moved into a nearby community only four KM away. At the end of the two weeks, they were not allowed to go back; they haven't been allowed to move "home," since. Half of the village was allowed to stay in their town of refuge, while half were deported to Lebanon by the Israeli Army. Families were split up and people have been separated for sixty years.
In 1952, the Supreme Court delcared that for the refugees to visit their village they had to get special permits from the military; who simply refused to give out these permits. Instead, in August 1953, the government confiscated the lands of Karar Bir'im (3017 acres of the oldest and most fertile ground in "Israel"). September 16-17, 1953, the military demolished the village, to demoralise the people in their pursuit to return. There is a kibbutz on some of the land (only 494 acres), named Bar'am. The only thing that was not destroyed in Bir'im is the church (which, now, Bir'im refugees can baptise, marry and pray in). Since 1967, refugees can also bury their dead in the cemetery, which raises an interesting point: they are not allowed to live there, but they can die there.
In 1995, a ministerial committee agreed that the uprooted could return. Except, that all the land was to remain confiscated. The land is to be used by Israeli settlers and their cows. The people of Bir'im have, instead, continued their peaceful and civilised struggle to have their legal rights recognised on their village and land. This is why they have the youth camp: to teach their young people about the land, its history and to teach them the value and importance of principles and truth. It is these young people that are the hope of return for the future.
We had a talk given to us all about these and more aspects of their struggle, some of which I was able to understand through the help of an interpreter, who only was able to translate so much, and some of which I gleaned from Eitan B's explanations, and some of which I read from a pamphlet.
After we were given a talk, our group of fifty, or so (minus the youth campers, they had their own program), toured the paths that lead through the village. I was limping for the burns that I had suffered on my feet-bottoms the previous day when my sandals melted on me from the heat in Tel Aviv (and walking for three hours in the heat of the day on a gopher-mission for work). During our tour, I was amazed at the archways still standing and the walls that were erect. There were many cacti and thorns, pricking me in my feet as I limped long. Somehow, for some reason, my limping and groaning over tramping through thorns (trying to get cool angles to film) resonated deep inside of me about the pain of seeing a stolen land and a destroyed village. Able to see and touch people who had lineage linked to Bir'im made it so much more real than just looking at stones piled up upon each other. I don't even know the English words I can use to describe how I felt about touring the village and hearing about its history.
I am clearly not used to working so much, and my body has been rundown. I woke up in the middle of the night last night with a horribly sore throat. i thought the problem might have been dehydration (for I am almost always sweating) and so I chugged a litre of water. I drank water and green tea all day at work and still my tonsils are swollen and sore. I can't believe it! I haven't been sick in so long and I am determined not to be now. I wish I had fresh garlic to bake. I also wonder if I should get some vitamins. Where's Geoff Baart to tell me what to do when I need him!
I am eating a lot of fruit, though, ever since moving here, out of paranoia of getting scurvy or something. I am eating hummous everyday for lunch (there's a ridiculously cheap place near work) and I have been having an ongoing discussion with a couple of work-mates over whether hummous is healthy or fattening. I think hummous, in itself, is really healthy; but the caution would be how much bread is eaten with it.... my work mates range from kind of agreeing with me to saying that hummous is just plain fattening no matter what you say about bread. Mark Christianson, tell me the TRUTH, MAN, for the love of hummous!
Alright, I will sign off now. But please don't mistake my self-debasing comments for a need to do an intervention or anything. I am just rather performance driven (it seems) and I get overwhelmed by all the stuff I don't know but that I "should" know.
Peasse in the Middle Easse!
Burro D Block OUT