Safe and in Bethlehem

Here is a picture of the beautiful airport in which we landed yesterday.
The boys are staying at the Bible college and the girls are at House of Hope. Hannah and the boys are going to be working with the Bible college and Audrey and Myself (Melody) are working with five young girls at House of Hope.
The city of Bethlehem is gorgeous, I woke up this morning and Audrey greeted me with her smile and led me outside to a wonderful view. We'll be posting pictures soon.
Today was our first full day to see Bethlehem. We visited the church of Nativity, that is the place where Jesus is supposedly born. We also went to a local place to eat and had a delicious meal. With every meal we've been served pita bread. And we learned that if you don't eat your pita bread they reuse it.

Falafel will have to wait

3 of the teams in training spent last Monday and Tuesday at Camp Hebron for a team-building and wilderness experience. Monday was jammed full of stuff on the low-ropes challenge course. The spider web picture is one example of those challenges. If you've never done one of those things before, the point is to get you to work together to solve a puzzle or a physical challenge as a group. The point is rarely the actual task but the communication and the process that goes on in accomplishing the task--thus, they're called team-building activities. The other pictures come from a scavenger hunt we did around camp. I'm not sure what the point of the scavenger hunt was since there was no prize and no winner. It just encouraged us to run around camp making fools of ourselves and having fun together. And I just realized that I can't tell you much more about our camp. You see, there might be some future YESser reading this and we've been warned not to give up too much info about what went down. I will say that we got to see some spectacular early morning views--the leaves were every color from green to yellow to fire red when we were ther. Overall, I was totally blessed by the experience and especially by my teammates' good attitudes throughout the experience.

Ever since leaving Israel this summer, I've been craving some good falafel. Falafel is a middle eastern sandwich--hunks of fried chickpeas in pita with veggies and sauce. You can get one for a buck in Bethlehem but it's hard to come by in central PA. I thought I was in luck though for today when as a team, we planned to go to the 2nd St. Kabob in Harrisburg for lunch. Unfortunately, we arrived this afternoon to find the place closed even after I made reservations on Friday...ugh. We got monster burritos at Neato Burrito instead. Still good but definitely not what I was hoping for. I suppose my tongue can wait 2 more weeks for pita goodness.--Jared

Nearing the end

The end of training is coming soon. We have two weeks until all of us here at HDC go home, relax, and prepare to go out into the world. Yesterday our team returned from a 30 hour stay at Camp Hebron. For the 30 hours we were awake and active for 26 hours. You can imagine how tierd we were and probably still are. At camp we participated in a number of team building exercies ranging from making an expressive poster without markers, pens, or pencils to rock climbing. Our team felt some bonding, but I think we all just had a lot of fun. With all this said it is time for me to start my day and finish training!

We're going to Israel!

Welcome to the Israel YES 2007 team blog!