Field Trips are so much cooler than they were in 4th grade

I apologize for my lack of postage the past ten days, and the only excuse I have is three field trips, three midterms, and several Jewish holidays right in a row. However, I hope to redeem myself in the next two hours before dinner.

As I mentioned, we went on a few field trips the past week and a half, and I would like to discuss portions of them. Last Monday and Tuesday we had an all day field trip and then a half day field trip, so we were busy. We visited several Old Testament sites and were able to discuss events on location, which is always cool. We saw where Sampson grew up, Lachish (the second most important city in Judea, and the one that was always conquered second to last when first the Israelites, then the Syrians, and then the Babylonians -- Jerusalem being the most important, of course), and the Valley of Elah where David slew Goliath.Oh look, there's the valley.

The hill to the left of the photo with all the trees is where the camp of Israel would have been, and the hill behind it that is partially obscured would have been where the Philistines and Goliath camped. Visualize them shouting threats at each other across the valley, and Goliath coming down for 40 days and none of the Israelites were brave enough to face his challenge. Being a class excited about participation as well as intellectual discussion, we also went down into the valley and got to sling (sling? Is that the correct verb? TO SLING: sling, slung, have slung. Interesting.) stones into a farmer's field. Poor farmer.

It's really hard to do. Well, not entirely true, slinging stones was very difficult for me to do. Some people were really good at it; some were worse than me and we tried to stay as far away from those individuals as possible so as not to get nailed in the head by a baseball-sized rock. I no longer doubt the validity of the account in 1 Samuel, Goliath could certainly have been killed by a stone to the head if the slinger were strong and accurate enough, and if he had a decent sized stone. Thank goodness I will never be battling the Philistines or 9 foot tall giants.

The next day we crossed the border into the West Bank and went to Jericho. Crossing the border is interesting, Brother Huntington (our director) said that sometimes they stop us and ask for passports and sometimes they don't. They didn't, the soldier (who looked younger than me, and I have been mistaken for 17) just talked to the bus driver for at most 30 seconds and we went through. However, any of the Israeli members of the staff at the center are not allowed to go across the border, which means they cannot come on any field trips to the West Bank.

Jericho was cool on multiple levels. The Old Testament one, of course, is in regards to Joshua. Quick refresher for those of us who aren't up to speed on our Bible stories, after the Israelites wander in the wilderness for 40 years and Moses dies, the Lord tells Joshua (new prophet) that they can enter the promised land. To do this, they must conquer the city of Jericho, but the Lord wants to do it His way which was to have the priests walk around the city once every day for six days, and on the seventh day they walked around seven times. At the conclusion of the march, they were supposed to blow the shofars (rams horn) and the walls fell down. They killed every living thing inside the city except Rahab and her family because she protected Joshua's spies when they came into the land.

Would you like to see the wall that came crashing down? Oh here, I think I have a photo of it. I'm standing in front of the wall, and the break that you see would have been where the gate was. If I remember correctly, this would have been part of the inner gate (they had an inner and outer wall as it offers more protection, although I suppose if God wants the walls to come down it doesn't really matter how many of them you have). Oh, and since I suspect the question might come up, I have not been listening to Megan's ipod (thanks Megan!) at all of these cool sites. The reason for the earphones is that our teacher always has a microphone on to talk to us so that if we're spread out at whatever site it might be we can still hear the information regarding the location and we don't have to try and crowd 40+ people in a very small space. It's a nice use of technology.

The other super interesting thing about the Old Testament Jericho (there is also a New Testament Jericho site, as well as Jericho where people currently live) is that it looks out onto a refugee camp. Coincidentally, it is the same refugee camp where our director, Brother Huntington, went to study during his PhD work; he spent several years with a few other students studying the refugee situation after the Israeli War of Independence, and one of the camps he went to was visible from Jericho. Some refugee facts for you:

• There are 5.5 million Palestinian refugees in the world and only 4 million Palestinians living in Palestine (West Bank and Gaza).
• Although settlement between Israel and Palestine has been discussed, part of the problem is that the Palestinians want either the option for the refugees to move back to their land or complete compensation. Can you imagine a country the size of Israel -- or any country for that matter -- compensating 5.5 million refugees?
• Many of the refugees have the option to move out of the refugee camps but refuse because they have more international mobility as refugees, and if they no longer have refugee status then the refugees have a smaller voice because the numbers will go down.
• Refugees receive an excellent education. That's one thing the U.N. does well, they come into the refugee camps and set up schools for kindergarten through ninth grade, and they are very good schools. We could see the school clearly from our view at Jericho. It is the building with the blue U.N. flags flying.