Ha Kol Dvash
(It's all as sweet as honey)
By Dave Zinder
Sar-El, October-November, 2010
“Daveed, sit here. Put six of these in the bag, then seal it. Six in the bag. OK? Got it? OK.”
So began my second “tour of duty” with the Sar-El program of Volunteers for Israel. I was assigned to
an army base just outside of Tel Aviv, a base that serves as the distribution center for
all medical supplies and pharmaceuticals for the Israeli army, the IDF. We packed and unpacked
and repacked field kits for the army medics and medical supply depots throughout the country.
Every two, three, or four years depending on the contents, the supply kits are returned to the base
to be opened and inspected for completeness and expiration dates of the individual supplies. Every package
in the kits has a date sticker put on with a grocery store price labeler. I became adept at labeling and at sealing
the plastic bags with the heat sealing machine. Now I have new skills for my resume! The work was sometimes
easy and sometimes a little harder when we opened the big kits. An open kit can spread to four feet long.
At one time we had 62 kits opened up on tables throughout the room. A full kit can contain four bags of
IV solutions, syringes, tubing and administration devices for IVs, down to packages of antihistamines and
diarrhea medications. As an aside, the diarrhea medication was named STOP IT in English on one side of
the box and on the other side in Hebrew characters, STOP IT! Transliterations from English to Hebrew are
as common there as the reverse is true here.
I worked most of the time with Liora. She is a civilian in charge of one of the warehouse areas at the base.
Each of the warehouse areas is supervised by a civilian worker. Most of the areas were run by the same people
who were there on my first tour. On my previous time there, Liora was a soldier working with me in a similar
area. It’s not often that a soldier will return to this job as a civilian.
Although the work is the reason we’re there, it’s the people that make the program good or difficult.
We had a large group of thirty five at the beginning of our session. A few dropped out after only one
week, and a few more after two weeks, but most stayed for the entire three week session. Ours
was a good group.
The first week I worked with Mary. What a lady! She lives in a small town in Colorado that was
downstream of a nuclear processing facility. She lost her husband to cancer at thirty five and raised two
sons on her own. She lost an entire leg, as she put it, from “drinking too much plutonium in the water.”
Now she’s caring for her parents who both have cancer. If anyone had a right to be bitter…., but she has
the nicest personality, smiling and good natured all the time. That first week I also worked with Elaine, a
pediatrician from New York, a real little spitfire. There was Jerry, a judge in the Maricopa County Superior
Court System who lives not two miles from me and I had never met; there was David, a Christian minister from
northern Michigan, and Ash, a retired marine and also Christian, both roommates of mine. We had four
married couples, two of them obviously long term first marriages and two obviously second marriages.
Not a politically correct thing to say, just my observation. In the small world department, one of the couples
who were from New Orleans, are good friends with some friends of my daughter, Lonnie. I also found a kindred
spirit, Fred, a retired high school teacher from southern Oregon who is an amateur radio operator, an amateur
astronomer, and a weather watcher.
We worked full days Monday through Wednesday. Sunday is a normal work day, but the morning was taken
up traveling back to the base and getting re-settled. Thursday morning we worked until eleven then cleaned up
our living areas, went to lunch and left the base for the weekend. We wore fatigue style uniforms on the base,
but were not allowed to wear them off the base. Weekends we were required to be off base. That made four
nights on the base and three nights off the base each week. I was fortunate to have relatives to visit each weekend;
others took tours and explored the country. Sar-El provides a hostel at no cost for those who don’t want to stay
in hotels. I became quite familiar with public transportation. Tel Aviv buses are frequent and inexpensive especially
for retirees. Trains are the best I’ve seen anywhere, clean, smooth, fast, and inexpensive, but often crowded with
soldiers on weekends.
The army took us on two field trips. The second Tuesday we went on an afternoon trip to Caesarea, an ancient port
city built by Herod. There was no port there, so he built one! Later that afternoon we went to a museum of the Jewish
Legion, a British army unit in both the First and Second World Wars. The third week, also on Tuesday we went on a
full day trip to Jerusalem. We toured the Menachem Begin Museum, went shopping and had lunch on Ben Yehudah
Street, and visited the Knesset grounds in the afternoon. We could not get into the Knesset building that day. We
were back at the base in time for supper.
Food in the dining hall was different. It took a little time to accustom myself to tomatoes and cucumbers with yogurt
at breakfast and supper. At breakfast there was almost always cornflakes. There were also eggs in one form or another,
most often hard cooked. Supper was much the same without the cornflakes. Having celiac disease, I could not eat the
bread but was able to bring in my rice cakes. Lunch was always the big meat meal, on a totally different serving line.
There were always six or eight salad choices, including cucumbers and tomatoes, cooked vegetables, potatoes and or rice, orzo or other pasta and three choices of meat, one to a customer, please.
I signed up for an ulpan after work twice a week. My Hebrew skills are OK, but any practice is worthwhile even if
elementary. The words are there, but the retrieval isn’t very good. I even learned a new expression used on the
streets of Israel. Just as kids these days here have started using the word “sweet” meaning “cool” to us, the Israelis are saying “hacol dvash”. It’s all honey.
Would I recommend the experience? Absolutely! Just remember that the primary reason for the trip is to work;
it’s not intended to be a vacation and is definitely not a luxury spa. However, weekends are yours to spend as
you wish, as posh or as simple as you like.
To sum up my trip, 'Ha Kol Dvash.'