After looking around the place for several long hot hours, I eventually met the man who was in charge of this project in the desert. Even though it had been explained to me by the folks at Jordan College where I'd gone to school that he was supposed to be a Jewish believer, he looked and talked like an ultra orthodox Jew to me... Seemingly polite out of necessity, he didn't have much to say and didn't seem to care much about me, or my connection to a Christian college back in Michigan with the Blossoming Rose project. Needless to say, it left me with some unanswered questions...
I can't remember all the details, but for a small farming community this size in the middle of the Negev desert, it had an unusually large water well that was approximately forty or fifty yards away from the living quarters. The well was surrounded by a steel fence with a lock on the gate. The water pipe was at least ten inches in diameter. The man running the farm told me that the well went a mile down into the sand. I was amazed that they had put a pipe that deep into the ground out there! It had a metal wheel that was about two feet in diameter on a valve at the end of the pipe that the people turned whenever they needed water. There were several wild camels that liked to lounge in the shade of a few palm trees nearby. It was virtually an oasis in the middle of nowhere. The camels were occasionally allowed to get a drink out of a small pool of water where it came directly out of the end of the water pipe.
The pool of water was said to be occasionally used as a healing well where they supposedly preformed healing ceremonies of some kind? On the physical side, I thought I might give it a try on my leg that had been giving me some problems. I'd been having difficulty healing up an opening that was draining just below the knee where the grenade had done the most damage. It was re-occurring osteomyelitis. I didn't have anything else to do the extra day I was there, so I went to the pool and sat down next to the pipe and held my leg directly under the water for a couple of hours. I thought maybe the minerals in the water might have some healing abilities... The water was warm and had a reddish color to it. It smelled a little like sulfur, similar to the smell of my antibiotics. I thought if this water could help heal my leg that I'd better take some back with me to Jerusalem and so I filled a large pop bottle with it. I also took a few of the rocks from the pool as a souvenir. The water didn't seem to help the wound any, but the problem with my leg wasn't keeping me from doing what I needed to do...
The other Jewish person I met there, who had a lot of things to say, became interested in my plans of going to Egypt for a couple of weeks. For some reason, after talking with him for a while, he took it upon himself to show me the inside of his briefcase, which was crammed full of passports from several different countries. I had my own single passport, but had never known anyone with passports from so many different countries... He said he was in the business of buying and selling large quantities of extra virgin olive oil with several countries throughout the Mediterranean. His name in Hebrew was David, but his name in Arabic he said, was Pan...
David, or Pan..., had a wife back in Jerusalem who had been wanting to remodel their kitchen. One of the improvements they wanted to make was to install a new, double basin, six foot long, stainless steal sink which had to have a bunch of plumbing to go with it. Even though he was supposedly making good money with the olive oil transactions, he stressed that things in Jerusalem were too expensive and that he'd been wanting to go into Egypt to buy them because everything there was half the price of what it was in Israel. The American dollar is worth twice as much in Egypt, at least it was then anyway. He wanted to know if he could go with me in order to visit some relatives of his and have me bring the sink back for him. He supposedly had to transfer a van from there to somewhere in Germany and wouldn't be able to take the sink with him. At the time, I didn't think it was too much to ask for, so I agreed, providing he and his cousins in Egypt would help me with my bank transfers... What I hadn't realized however, was the undisclosed difficulty of bringing a six foot long sink across the Egyptian border into the southern border of Israel. First of all, it had to be carried on the city bus out of downtown Cairo, and then transferred to a country bus that led out of the city to the Israeli border where I ended up putting it on an Israeli bus that went to Tel Aviv. From there, I had to pay the fare of two people to have it put on top of a cab for a very long cab ride, because the bus drivers out of Tel Aviv absolutely refused to carry it on any of their buses into Jerusalem... The moral of the story is that none of these drivers wanted to carry a six foot long sink on their vehicles. Of course, David (or Pan,) knew I was going to have this problem, but gave no indication that there would be any kind of problem carting this six foot long sink from Cairo to Jerusalem...
Anyway, I agreed to do this that afternoon in IrAvot, with the man who spoke Arabic, Hebrew and English fluently. I had already planned on going into Egypt myself to get a good look at the Pyramids. I'd been studying the construction of the great pyramid of Giza and wanted to go inside of it and see for myself what the insides looked like. After talking with him, I thought it might be a good idea to have him with me because he could speak Arabic which would help me communicate with the Egyptians, and had relatives there who would be helpful with bank transfers. and so on.
The bus trip to IrAvot through the Negev desert was an experience in itself. Above the ground running along side of the road, all the way from Jerusalem to IrAvot and beyond, was a very large water pipe line. The pipe itself, every ten or twenty miles or so 'leaked,' spilling drops of water here and there into the hot, dry sand. There wasn't quite enough water in these places to promote plant life, but wherever there was a leak along the way, there were other forms of life getting the water including a few wild camels, a few kids, and some adults as well...
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