If its Tuesday it must be the Negev Desert

Tuesday morning we left at some ungodly hour (6am? Can’t remember) to drive to the Desert for our wilderness experience, and what an experience. Again, difficult to capture in words, but we went first to the Negev desert, drove through it for a while, then went to the place we were staying, which is a Bedouin hospitality centre. It has been set up for education purposes, to try and educate young Israelis and world tourists about the Bedouin culture which is seriously in danger of disappearing off the face of the earth. The Bedouins are no longer able to wander and be nomadic here, they are now settled in one place, (although in the Sinai, they are still nomads) however the hospitality centre is trying to keep the culture alive. We had a traditional Bedouin welcome, 3 cups of coffee, one to welcome, one to say 'I protect you my guest' and one for fun!...sat around a fire on which our tea and coffee were being made, ate Bedouin food, listened to Bedouin music, (provided by a Bedouin named Muhammad who is doing his PHD in Bedouin music! Expect to hear more of this….I bought his CD!) and slept (in name only) in a fantastic big circular tent.

One of the features of our desert experience was of course to pray, both together and individually, our guide Raphael is a biblical scholar and Indiana Jones type figure (I am not kidding….he even wears an Indiana hat), and he gives us reflections based on desert spirituality and the psalms etc as we are getting to the places in which they were written. There is something quite incredible about reading these scriptural passages in these places, and being able to look around at the scenes described in documents written so long ago. We had a time where for 45 mins we went off by ourselves up on a mountain top overlooking the Negev. It was beautiful, incredibly wild and windy and miles and miles of what seems to be ‘nothingness’ but which is so beautiful.


40 people in a Bedouin tent is an experience everyone should have in their lives. That is all I will say...except that at one point, around 2 or 3am I decided that the desert at night was a beautiful quiet place, and the tent wasn't. At one point late in the evening we found ourselves singing through all the 'desert' hymns we knew...with a few extra old favourites thrown in for good measure. I found myself giggling at the incongruity of it all....Kumbaya, for example...and we realised next day that we completely forgot to sing 'Rock my soul'...! At 5am we were all up and getting ready to go again. Breakfast was like dinner.. all manner of dips, breads, salad, fresh vegetables, Arabic coffee (with cardomam) and sweet (really really sweet) tea...but with breakfast cereal and fried eggs added. It was a feast.


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