Israel 3: Kadesh Barnea - a village in the middle of the desert

It was already dark when we arrived to the Nitzanei Sinai village and passed through the gate of the Kadesh Barnea Moshav. Our hosts were already awaiting us together with their children, excited about our arrival. Despite our embarrassment, as we didn’t want to make any trouble, our hosts insisted to invite us for a supper: aromatic rice with vegetables, grilled meat and a variety of salads. We sat together under the starry sky and talked about their life on the desert which we considered very exotic. And we discovered that, despite different origins, religion, history, geography and climate, we had the same problems relating to the everyday life: how to be a good person, how to raise children and teach them how to be happy and how to cook the best rice in the universe!
We asked them more questions, of course. And not only about the life on the desert, but also about the history of their families and their own. We started to see that, in this melting pot consisting of immigrants from all over the world, each encountered Israeli carries inside a piece of the Jewish history and the mixture of genes and experience.

Finally, tired after a long day, we started to yawn discreetly. Our hosts rushed to prepare a place for us to rest in their tiny house, but we rejected their offer. It was because we had our own idea: a big trampoline for children next to the house. All in all, we were on the desert, so -if we managed to sleep 10 days in a row in Iceland in tiny tents at +2 degrees of Celsius outside- we wouldn’t get cold in Negev neither. 
We convinced our hosts to carry on with our idea and they gave us sleeping bags and pillows. Nothing was between the starry sky, us... and a military observation balloon which we saw only in the morning. Along with some other things which made us understand we are a couple hundred metres from the border with Egypt, in a region you may call anything but an oasis of peace. 
Our hosts added fuel to the fire: “If you hear the shots on the left, it means we are shooting; if on the left, the Egyptians are shooting. If you hear the shots on both sides, wake us up, it means the war has broken.” This inside joke made it difficult for us to fall asleep.
But we didn’t hear any shots, so we slept well until the sunrise. We woke up cold, the temperature must have dropped significantly during the night. The feeling was intensified by the humidity: our sleeping bags were humid, and on my leather bag which I forgot to leave in the car there was a layer of morning dew. My hand was moist after touching it. In that, you may say burned-out, region, the water comes back to the ground as the night cold comes. We got out of our desert bedroom...

 ... and we could look around in the daylight.

But before that, we were invited to eat:
pita and hummus, vegetables, cheeses, variety of pates and coffee with cardamom.

After the breakfast, the hosts decided to show us around their moshav and tell us about the life of Israeli settlers in that politically unstable region. You can find a lot of military bases there, and each rock tells the story of quite recent bloody fights: the Six-day War (1967) and Yom Kippur war (1973).

We were unfamiliar with the name “moshav”, because the term “kibbutz” is more widely used. Moshav is a village or a community composed of families which belong to a cooperative. Kibbutz is a similar community, but its members may own land, run their own agricultural, production or service activity, and they contribute to the community. It is administered by the elected committee. Anybody willing to settle in a given moshav have to be accepted by the community, and the approval is not automatic. There is a trial period of living in the community in one of the provisional buildings. After obtaining the approval, a new family receives land -in the past it was free of charge, but not anymore- and may start the construction of the house. 
Our hosts have just finished the construction of their house and were preparing to move out from the provisional pavilion which would soon be inhabited by a new family.  We shared their excitement. The provisional house was not very comfortable for a four-member family, but the arrangements of decorative details and smart “flowerbeds” were charming:

The area of the community was surrounded by a high fence. In the daylight, we saw a solid gate protecting the community from unauthorised entries.

The Kadesh Barnea Moshav was established by Israeli soldiers stationed in the Sinai Peninsula. After signing a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, they had to leave their original settlement which was moved to Nitzana, and in 1987 to their current base near the border-crossing point Nitzana. Its official “governmental” name is Nitzanei Sinai, which refers to the proximity of the Peninsula, but local people use the name Kadesh Barnea. Over 40 families engaged in agricultural activity of any type, wine production and other works for the community live here. Some of them are teachers in local schools, work at the border crossing or service local investments.

In one part of village you can find houses with gardens irrigated by complicated systems and labyrinths of tubes.

 But there is still a lot of land for construction.

We had a chance to visit a local kindergarten in the oldest part of the village when we went out to pick up the hosts’ daughter. We wandered through tiny streets which resembled small villages near Wrocław (maybe except date palms in the yards).

The kindergarten was not very different from the one our daughters attended. Ever the leafy arrangements pinned to the cork board resembled the autumn school works of Polish children, even if the leaves were totally different.

 For a while we could forget we were in the heart of a real desert. People, at the most basic level, do not differ from each other, but the politics and religion may claim and cause the opposite.

However, the differences are not scarce, and we came here to get to know them, among other things. 

A short walk through Kadesh Barnea was a journey to another world. We visited some of the houses under construction and they were all open. The moshav is surrounded, similarly to other settlers’ villages in Israel, by a high fence with barbed wire. It is also monitored and protected, and the gate is closed for the night. Therefore, nobody closes their houses. 
The architectural styles are diverse: beginning with single-family houses which could easily fit in one of the villages near Wrocław, to low but wide Eastern-style houses with shadowy patio and a common space for celebrations. However, there was one common element: obligatory shelter made of reinforced concrete with special ventilation and door.
We had a chance to see the construction of concrete walls:

Our hosts complained that the cost of such shelter amounts to one-third of overall costs of construction of a house. Unfortunately, nobody will get a permission for construction without that element. These requirements apply in the entire territory of Israel: also to multi-level and public use buildings.
When we understood that, we felt a wave of heat not caused by the external temperature. These people were living in a permanent danger zone. Every day and every night a war like the Yom Kippur War may break, and the concrete cage gives them a chance to survive the rocket attack. 
At that moment, the joke about shooting heard on both sides of the trampoline was not funny anymore. 
We also saw the construction of a new house of our hosts which was located closest to the border with Egypt.

Even if the construction was still in progress, we could easily imagine how pleasurable it would be to sit on a patio protected from sun and dust brought constantly by the wind. Out hosts invited us to visit them once the construction of the house is finished. They promised to move also the trampoline, in case we would like to spend a night under the sky once again.
There, at the parcel’s border, we could clearly see the work of those determined people who with their hard work and ingenuity torn a space to live and water from the desert, which we admired a lot.

In the rows of tents they were growing amazing vegetables and fruits: pineapples, cherry tomatoes, vegetables, herbs and a lot more. Those goods are later exported to remote countries. You can find them also in Biedronka or Lidl: take a closer look at the labels and imagine those tents and desert where cherry tomatoes, you are about to buy, are grown.

But the sun was getting more intense with every minute and the dew on my bag has gone.
It was high time to depart - there were another attraction and world waiting for us. A world which has already disappeared, but whose remains stand for the power and determination of people who are capable of creating great works in the most extreme and adverse conditions. Works which, on the other hand, may be easily turned into dust.