Beauty Within Thin Walls

Eyes open, the bus is unusually quiet. From the front seats, snoring echoes around the steel frame. Across the aisle are the closed eyes of Dominique with our Israel lanyard hanging between her knees. Her head is against the back of a head rest as cities pass behind her. We traveled across this country in one day to spend the last hours of it in one of the most dangerous areas to live. Our chaperons for Passages Israel stood at the front of the bus and exclaimed that we have to move quickly into the building when we arrive at Netiv HaAsara. Before we arrived in the city and most of the bus was waking up, I saw dessert with rocks scattered everywhere and a line of trees off in the distance like they are in line warfare. Entering the city happened so suddenly and it took no time for all 32 of us to get into the building and sit in a lecture room like I would see in my classrooms. We stayed put until a young man with a big green box walked in and greeted us.

“Hello, I am a resident here in Netiv HaAsara and right now you guys are sitting in a city that borders the dangerous city of Gaza,” Uri said. “At any moment during my lecture there is a siren that goes off. You will have approximately thirty seconds to find shelter before the bomb impacts the earth.”

The room looks around at one another in shock at the quick speech as everyone gets a sense of fear as to where Passages wanted us to travel to.

“Don’t be alarmed, right now you are sitting in one of the biggest bomb shelters we have in this city.”

A hand behind me raises. A girl says, “But what about the children playing on the playground outside? Is thirty seconds even enough time to get all of them down here?”

“Actually it is mandatory for each building to have at least one bomb shelter and for each outdoor facility, like the basketball court we have, has a bathroom and a bomb shelter because it would be too far away to go to any other bomb shelter,” the man opens up the green box while he speaks and pulls out a bomb that looks like a raindrop with a fan on the back. On the side of the metal body is a protruding hole like something wanted to escape being trapped inside the metal. “This is a mortar round that we dug up after the residents in Gaza launched it at us, normally they break up into shards of metal and they are scattered around the city, but this one was a dud.”

In 1994 , Prime Minister Ehad Barak gave an order to put up a wall around every Palestinian controlled city because there was too much violence to be contained by the Israeli military forces. The same wall is being built around the West Bank but it has not yet been completed and there is a large divide between the two inhabitants leaving wasteland between the differently controlled governments. We finished a lecture on why they continue to bombard their neighbors with explosives and they gave us the chance to walk around the city. Leaving the main building the children were still on the playground and on our right was the basketball court with the small building next to it. We walked past it and onto the residential road which had houses with lands full of scrap metal and old rusty cars with dogs barking. You could barely even tell what color the house was painted on each of these trailer style homes. But the orange rust matched the setting sky, on the other side of the house was just a small fence of barbed wire and dead shrubs that could get you tangled up for weeks. Beyond the sea of shrubs was a port with an electrical plant close by, and the Mediterranean Sea beyond that. Straight down the road, a black outline of the two towers from a mosque with a dome shades over the beige wall while military jeeps drive around the perimeter. While I see a skyline, lit up by a fading ball of fire, the mosque sees a tiny city with Peace written in every language.

© 2021 Sebastian Chipoco