Thu, February 25, 2010 9:28:16 PM
From:Linda Whittaker
To:Linda Olsvig-Whittaker
Negev Desert18 Februari .jpg (514KB) View Image
Hi Everyone,
The rains have returned, and it is pouring outside right now. This is a blessing since the one big rain of the brief winter didn't bring us up to an average rainfall for the year yet. Now we are predicted to have rains until Monday, the long soaking kind, which will bump us over into a good rainfall year I think. (Timing is as important as amount here, and also the way it falls.)
I went down to the Negev this last week to get my Dutch student started on plant diversity work. He has already been wandering the hills there, learning the plant species, so we were able to get some work done. The desert is in bloom this year, a great contrast to last spring when not a green plant could be seen. Today it looks like this:
So, it is time for us botanists to be out and about, and indeed I will be away from the office a good bit in the coming month. Still a bit shaky after being sick all of January, but on the mend. Doing gentle field work in the spring sunshine is healing in itself.
This is chicken soup time, and I've got the crock pot going for a Friday soup dinner with a friend. Winter is passing but we can still catch colds from the erratic weather and it is a time to be watchful. I had planned on walking the Via Dolorosa with a Catholic friend today (this being Lent, there will be groups from all over the world doing the Via Dolorosa route today in spite of the rain.) Since I am still weak from my past illness, I've decided to give it a miss today, though.
We have Purim coming up, and I'm making another soup for the congregation's party. During the last two months, between my own illness and the breakdowns with my car, I haven't been much connected to them. Now is a time to restore that. A few people did keep track of me when I was sick and I'm grateful for their concern. Sometimes it seems like "out of sight, out of mind" and that gets depressing, but maybe with lest reason than I felt at the time.
Quakers are coming through in a couple weeks too and paying me a visit from England. I'll take them around our little corner of the West Bank, including a visit to the Hope School for handicapped children (http://www.hope-school.8k.com/) where I know the director and have been able to do the school a good turn now and then. We have in this tiny corner a good relationship between Arabs and Jews, maybe because a large percentage of the Arabs are Christians, and most of the Jews are secular. Left to ourselves, we could live together in peace, and manage to do business with each other despite the difficulties of many barriers. The Arab garage, grocery stores, dentist, restaurant, etc. all have signs in Hebrew as well as Arabic, and the local restaurant, the Everest, has always been a meeting place for Palestinians and Israelis, right on the border. The cafe on our army base is run by a Palestinian. That has to be unique.....So I figured letting the visitors see this will sober them a bit from all the ranting they hear in Europe.
March is the conference season here for some reason, and we have a whole lot of ecology and conservation meetings in the next three weeks. Our own annual science conference for the Nature and Parks Authority is next week at the University of Haifa (we don't have an auditorium of our own), which gives me a chance to slip away and see my old friend Professor Naveh and his wife during lunch. Zev Naveh is 8 years old and confined to a wheelchair, but still working on books, his mind as alert as ever. He was diagnosed with a tumor this year so I don't know how much longer he will be with us. He was the person who originally brought me to Israel as a post-doctoral student after my husband died, and has been a loyal friend for more than 30 years, so I owe him a lot.
Other conferences on biodiversity and on conservation in agricultural landscapes will be held in the Galilee and Negev, so I will be hopping the train a good bit for that. I also need to spend two more days with my Dutch student to supervise his work, and am preparing for another Dutch student to join us in May on work in the Galilee. After several months of confinement to home and office this is great! I just hope my health continues to improve, since I sure cannot afford another illness like the last one.
That's about all for now.
shabbat shalom,
Linda
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