Dear Friends,

Two days at home….  I really needed it.  I screamed at work this week.  So?  People do it all the time, just not me.  Everyone was kind, even sympathetic, but it really scared me.  They’re Israelis who grew up on a different decibel level; they do not realize how out-of-character this was.  Slept on and off all day yesterday, sometimes placing a pillow over each ear; pretending it blocked the booms.

After 3.5 weeks I washed the table and ate breakfast on my north-facing porch, but I couldn’t take my coffee out there - too much like Russian roulette.  Are fewer birds singing this morning than a month ago? 

Three of us picked the plums, running inside when sirens sounded, waiting while the rockets fell.  Over a bushel of gorgeous Italian prune plums from a neglected, barely watered tree.  Stupid, yes.  Some mock those who step out of the shelter, but then we, more honestly I, find an excuse to do so.  I’m a bad influence, enticing my husband and good friend into the yard.  I knew I was better off at work.  Mentally and physically, work has saved me.  There I am disciplined, except when taking reporters to the 4th floor to see where the katyusha hit.  I have plenty to do, while at home, everything that needs doing is not in the shelter.

Shelter, I’ve learned, is a misnomer.  Ours is a sealed room.  After the ’91 Gulf War building codes reduced the thickness of the walls for the required “protected room,” The tons of poured concrete and steel will most likely not stop a direct hit.  Instead openings can be sealed keeping contaminants out.  After four weeks of sleeping with my husband and dog in a 2x3m space, with the door and portholes fully opened, I can assure you that it does an excellent job containing contaminants. 

True shelters that are also sealed rooms, have thicker walls and ceilings, like those at each end of the hospital floors in the surgical wing and radiology, and those in the underground hospital. 

Thursday night I listened while I took reporters from Israel to China to interview parents of wounded children from Acre and Meilliah, Jews and Arabs.  No one allowed the reporter walk away before emphatically stating that the killing and destruction on both sides must end.  We are neighbors.  We can all work and live together.  Perhaps this is the untold secret of the Western Galilee.

It was a difficult weekend for the residents of the Western Galilee.

August 6, 2006  1,428 wounded have come to the Western Galilee Hospital of whom 160 are soldiers.  The numbers of physically wounded compared to those with acute stress reaction have begun to change, with 550 being physically wounded, approximately 39%.

B'shalom,

Judith Jochnowitz
International Liaison, Western Galilee Hospital-Nahariya