Hard drive attack & Next Destination

We'd used the laptop as usual Tuesday night, and when I opened it back up again at the Village Wednesday morning, the hard drive was hosed. Oh no!! Of course we hadn't backed up any of the hundreds of photos we'd stashed here, and I couldn't print out the document I'd been working on for a meeting with Shirley and Amer (program director) to talk about the picture dictionary (one of the children's books I've been working on) . . .

I worked with Robin, Erin, and Lily to bottle some nard for sale at the gift shop for a while, then walked on the land again taking pictures of as many building details, terraces, etc, as I thought I might need to have if we couldn't recover any of our photos. Eldon and Janelle were tweaking the drip line on some newly planted trees at the top of the land until the computer guru (a friend of Rani the office manager's) could come and try to help us with the hard drive.



I finally had my meeting just before 1 p.m., and at 1:15 Shirley was called to a different meeting in the conference room where we volunteers usually hang out. The staff was hosting a goodbye party for us, complete with delicious pastries with sesame seeds on top and a layer of either potato or warm cheese on the inside. (No shortage of white carbs around here!) Shirley gifted us with mementos.

Zoe with Razan and Nina with Mundar at the party.

Nina and Zoe each got a ceramic sheep to remind them of their time with the herds. Lily got a little NVillage saucer and a package of za'atar, the hyssop & herb mixture that gets blended with olive oil for bread dipping. She loves it. Eldon and I got a new pack of their just-printed post cards and book marks with lovely new photo series on them, plus a CD of music. Very nice event that brought folks out of the dressing area as well as the office to bid us farewell.

Village girls raid the wagon for grain and hay to feed Haas-Haas the donkey (whom they rode soon thereafter).

By late afternoon, the computer friend who'd come in to help us recover our documents had gotten us to a basic recovery point -- including photos!! -- and we were SO grateful. Hallelujiah!! We have more backing up to do, and today will get some fresh CDs for the photos, since the two we brought from the village office did not work, for some reason.

Previously we had arranged to leave this morning to make a couple of links to get into Hebron and visit with Kathy Kern, who's a regular CPTer there (went to Bluffton when I was there, and attends the Rochester MC in New York with cousin Mark Shelly's fam), but we thought through more of the luggage issues (too much for our little rental car), the making-links with a Palestinian driver (so we didn't have an Israeli plated car and act like a "target" driving down the highway). But, we considered the issue of increased tension with Wednesday's Jerusalem bulldozer attack that killed several people on Jaffa Street (where we had walked to our late Chinese dinner a couple of weeks ago). We had arranged to stay back at the Christ Church Guest House too, where we'd been before -- but it's essentially the same n'hood as the attack in Jerusalem on Wednesday. It's just insde the Jaffa Gate of the old city (the attack happened outside in the new city, but we were counseled that actions like that have reverberations for days afterward). So -- we will drop in to the Village for a short time again later this morning, then say goodbye for real.


Lily shows the seats she re-wove for stools in the landlord's house.


Friday morning we'll be picked up by the same driver team (in a van) that brought us here from the Tel Aviv airport. We'll stay at a Best Western Regency Suites Friday night and get a cab to the aiport Saturday morning early (they require 3 hours before flight time, so we'll need to check in by 5:00). Then we'll be on our way, back through London to Denver. This time with only about a 4.5 hour layover, so we'll stay put for the next plane, I suppose.

In apartment updates, the refrigerator has a new compressor! We've lost a lot of food, and were eating out of the picnic cooler (being very good customers for little bags of ice). We'll still be using our little baby's bath thermometer to measure the frig temp in Centigrade. It's still too warm for safety. Better luck to the new folks who come here next! :)