Sar El I

After two weeks of nothing but relaxing and taking it easy, last week I started Sar-El. It's a volunteer program where you go and do some work for the army for 1,2 or 3 weeks. We have uniforms and stay at the base we are working on during the week.  Because we are staying on the base and working with regular soldiers, you also get a feeling for army life, that might be more realistic than Gadna (the week of the army we did during the ulpan).

There's all different kinds of jobs/projects that Sar-El groups do, but our group is young (17-45 yrs old), so we have a lot of physical work. Its a little bit hard to explain what we are doing but basically, we are filling these blocks with sand and using sand bags to make one of the outposts safer (hopefully) for the soldiers working in the bunkers and trenches there.  It feels good to doing some physical work and be outside. This project is also nice because we can see the soldiers we are helping and we can see the progress we make every day, as opposed to Sar-El  groups that are counting bullets or repacking medical kits. My group itself is pretty interesting too. There's 14 of us from all over the world. South Africa, Holland, Germany, Holland, England, Australia, Scotland, and 5 from the US.

By the end of the first week we were all starting to losen up and getting friendlier and getting into the routine of working together, so I'm looking forward to week 2.