SDEROT, ISRAEL—Today our United Jewish Community’s hosts introduced us to some of the most courageous people I’ve ever met. Our day started on the military base called Nachal Oz, the front line on the Gaza border. There we met young female IDF soldiers who spend hours each day scanning video monitors watching Gaza territory leading up to the fence protecting Israel. These soldiers have spotted and prevented the entrance of countless numbers of terrorists into Israel. From there we traveled to the Sderot Community Center where we met members of the town’s crisis response team. This was followed by a meeting of some of the bravest people of them all, the elementary school children who attend Sderot elementary school. We met people like Shirley Katzir who takes care of young girls who have been molested in their homes. This is on top of the trauma that these girls face each day by just living in Sderot. We met nine year old Vicki Chernak who isn’t afraid to play outside and has lived almost her entire life under the threat of rocket attacks. We met a high school student named Kalin Mymon who is getting ready to graduate and looks forward to being one day both a lawyer and an actress. And finally we met Estee Nemeth, a student at Sapir College who’s moving film making skills have captured the tragedy of Sderot forever.
All of this was pretty much on our first day. Tomorrow we spend most of our day in Ashkelon, Baltimore’s sister city.
We learned some new expressions today. Israeli social workers don’t call it post traumatic stress syndrome. They call it on going stress syndrome. We also learned that color means a great deal here. While every one fears code red an innocent sign in the Sderot elementary school said simply “blue doors are safe (these are the doorways to the safe rooms).“We passed many green and white road signs that said Gaza as normally as if you were driving along and saw a sign for Pikesville. We learned that Israelis refer to the Ashkelon and Sderot areas as a peripheral region of Israel. We saw beautiful sun flowers growing on an open space next to a moshav. We saw the omnipresent white blimps used for early warning systems. We saw concrete walls used to block sniper fire. We learned that Sderot has seen a dramatic increase in its cases of diabetes, and it is attributed to stress. And the thing we seemed to learn the most was that even the therapists need therapy here in Sderot.
A good day is when there’s no Tzeva Adom, or red alert.