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Published: March 4th 2011
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Israel Day 4
Today was a mixed bag. I’ll start with the high point which is the evening entertainment. Our two junior Madrichot were again in charge of the evening. We started with number games translating numbers in to Hebrew. We then moved on to a game in which each team had to put post-its on the various body parts. The teams tied (not thanks to me) since each team missed the word for eyebrows. Moving on we had to play act skits with little cue cards with English phrases and the Hebrew transliteration. The first skit was the contentious father-daughter combination cast in the roles of a buyer and seller in the market. I was picked for the second skit and I was a customer trying to negotiate with a taxi cab driver for a ride to Tel Aviv. My partner, who actually speaks Hebrew and is kind o f a ham, had a huge challenge since I couldn’t understand a word he said. Even with coaching, it was pretty much a one way street. The next skit was two people fighting to get on a bus and finally a woman trying to make it with a man. Once again
one person stole the show. The woman flirted like crazy and the man (who is kind of a bully) simply stood there and turned red.
The mid-part of the day was also great. We were taken on a tour of the base. Our first stop was a meeting with a combat pilot who showed us an F-16. The Madrichot, who are all between 19 and 21, and the women on the tour all agreed that being tall and handsome must be a prerequisite for becoming a pilot. It takes 3 years of training and an additional 9 year commitment to become a pilot. Our second stop was to tour a Boeing 707 which is the work horse of the air force for ferrying supplies and refueling fighter planes. My big surprise was that the F-16 and the 707 have been around for decades and that most of the planes purchased by the IDF are 15 to 20 years old. I don’t know enough about planes to appreciate if there are better planes and Israel simply can’t afford them or if these are still viable aircraft. We also watch a couple of short films that showed the refueling process. The members
of the crew who manage this are the best of the best of the pilots who have several additional years of training. (They have just certified the first woman to do this.) When you think of two planes flying virtually on top of one another at 300 mph, it‘s pretty amazing. We also watched a short film that was made inside one of the planes that bombed the Iraqi nuclear plant. An F-16 is built to withstand 9 G (9 times the force of gravity) and the Israeli pilots were flying them at 8.6 G which is pretty close to that limit. You can hear how hard it if for the pilots to breathe when there is that much force. They grunt in a way that sounds like tennis players, except there a much greater physiologically reason for the noise.
I spent the majority of the day cleaning gas masks. We are actually making great progress and are hopeful that we’ll be able to make it the 2,500 masks that comprised out initial assignment. In the small world category, it turns out one of the volunteers has a daughter who went to Yale, graduated the same year as Jess and study Torah with Peter Salovey who was the Head of the Psychology Dept and Jess’s mentor. His father taught at Maimonides school in Brookline before becoming the head of Yeshiva University.
While the days aren’t that physically demanding they end early. Our evening activity finish about 8 and after sitting around and having a cup of tea and some cookies, it’s now only 9:15 and as soon as I finish this sentence, I’m heading for bed.
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