Time flies

The steep road home

I don't know what happened yesterday ... but it flew past so quickly it's now Wednesday. I had a gruelling day ... early morning work in the library and then off to preach a retreat at Gethsemane down in the Kidron Valley. Though the distance is barely 800 metres, the valley is deep and going down, there is the danger of slipping, and coming back up is especially difficult under the unrelenting sun. Many tourists have suffered heatstroke or heart-attacks along this unforgiving climb. Well I have to do this twice a day (morning and evening) for 8 days till the sister ends her retreat. After the walk back home, I hardly have any energy to walk another kilometre uphill to work.

Well at noon I had gathered my volunteers and workers of the 2 libraries to meet for a simple lunch (arab fried chicken) and get to know each other. It was a good occasion and everyone enjoyed this meeting. After that I had to head back to Gethsemane for another talk and this time, being a little cooler, I walked the extra km to work. Managed to classify some 50 books before going down to Billy's Mian restaurant to pick up soup that they had boiled. They are very nice and every week gives me chinese soup to strengthen my constitution. Linda his wife said my right side of the face is still swollen and I must say it still hurts a little. Yesterday's soup was beef boiled with papaya, chinese almonds and dates and snow fungus. And they gave me white rice as well so I had a very big dinner.

Papaya-beef soup and rice for dinner

Summer holidays have begun and most of our students and profs are in Turkey on a study tour. Our house is half empty. Which is nice and quiet ... except when I needed to move the heavy huge flower pots in the courtyard, and couldn't find anyone to help me. Well you can't have everything.

There're tensions in the south as Gaza fired lots of missiles into Israel and Israel was bombing Gaza in return. The gazans have also been flying fire kites into Israel, burning up several hundred square meters of ram land and nature reserves. We expected clashes in Gaza this summer and we got it now. Let's hope things will not get worse. Syria up in the north has quietened down a lot ... which is a relief for us. We don't want war. Everyone loses when there's a war.