Samara's TRY Blog: Sataf

Yesterday, being Tuesday we had half a day of regular classes, and half a day of learning around our beautiful classroom of Israel. Yesterday our classroom in Israel was around the area of Sataf.

Just to give a little bit of background information about Sataf, Sataf is located 10 km west of Jerusalem and east of Har Eitan. It is known for the remains of a 4,000 BCE Chalcolithic village with some of the oldest agricultural traces in the region as well as the remains of a pre-1948 village which are clearly visible. Currently the site is maintained by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), as a reconstruction of ancient agricultural methods. We hiked down hill the whole time. The weather wasn't sunny, but Israel did get a small amount of rain. When we reached the middle of the mountain we climbed into a cave, turned off our flashlights and sang all together. It was quite amazing to be in a cave singing and not see anything nor anyone. There was a stream going through the cave that fills up a full 'pool' outside of the cave. We hiked down to the bottom from the cave to where our buses were waiting for us. We got on the bus and went on our way to the "Monster slide" in the Kiryat Yov neighbourhood in Jerusalem. We had a group picture on it. Although it was painful to go down, it turned out as an entertaining group photo (coming soon) We were all sandy afterwards while getting on the bus. We had a short drive to our campus, we washed up and had a much needed clean up of our dorms. I still wasn't unpacked until last night :). We had our first council meetings afterwards. I signed up for the tzedakah council where we are in charged of environmental activities as well as charity events and collection of tzedakah boxes. Not much is going on today besides the fact that I lead shacharit this morning for the first time!! Tomorrow we are going on a tiyul to Nir David so stay tuned for that blog post on Friday!

The agriculture in sataf on the mountain