Rainbow Rant

We went off to the Spring Rainbow Gathering this week. Luckily, it was held in a relatively (for Israel) nice place, only about 40 minutes drive from home.

I thought I might stay a few days, but once we got there... well, though it was a pretty easy site - very small, easy access to everything, and we found a nice spot to put our tent up, it was SO hot. Like, Global warming came early this year. Seriously; when we left, the reading in the car thermometer was 42 degrees Centigrade (105F)!

We ended up leaving on the second day, choosing Ice Cream and Air Conditioning over Rainbow Warriors.

When we got home, I put our household thermometer outside to see how hot it is, and the poor thing went up to 50 degrees (120F) and then broke!

We spent most of the time there drinking lots of water and hiding in the shade. I, of course, found my way to the kitchen and started to focalise dinner. What can I say? I'm an addict.

There was a great kid there helping, he was 14, and lots of fun to chat with. Only he didn't speak English, so I had to brush up on Hebrew. Anyway, we chopped a huge pile of onions, and vegetables, and made a big dahl, and a salad. That went down really well, and we even had it served before sunset. :)

The main problem was that Littletree was miserable. The ground was got and rocky and dusty - not fun for going barefoot on her little tootsies. Only she refused to wear her sandals, coz she can't stand if bits of sand get in. So she went around barefoot, complaining pitifully the whole time. and it was too hot for her. and there weren't other kids for her to play with. and she wanted to go home. and she wanted to eat...

I still had the same old problem with the levels of hygiene in the Israeli rainbow.

Okay, let's be honest; hygiene levels are never too hot in rainbow - it's a bunch of hippies camping in the woods, without running water or proper facilities. So, in order to counteract this deplorable level of hygiene, we make really strict standards - thorough hand washing, no tasting of food from fingers or already-used spoons while cooking, and most of all: the food servers should *never ever* touch anyone's plate when serving.

But in Israel, everything is exacerbated by a couple of issues:

1) There's no water at all - This gathering thankfully had a tap that was only about 200M to walk to and fill up the jerry cans, but it's still a mission to get them filled. Some times they gather in the desert where there really is *no* water at all. They have this 500L tank, which supplies 300+ people. and it gets filled every second day. You do the math. Clearly low standards of hygiene

2) It's freaking hot! like you can't believe. And there's flies everywhere.

3) The people are mostly Israelis. This means that it doesn't matter what you tell them, they will insist that they should do just whatever the heck they were doing in the first place. The more you try to explain that a small splash of water from a bottle is not sufficient to cleanse one's hands after defecating, especially if one then goes to chop salad for hundreds of other people, the more they will insist on cutting said salad, and refuse to wash properly. Their final word in any argument is inevitably; "I'm not in the army any more so no one can tell me what to do."

Not touching plates while serving is the hard one. It's a strong habit. Now, I've been to over thirty rainbow gatherings, and I've focalised the serving at a lot of them. You get a few wingnuts, but in general, it's pretty easy to explain this to the servers - we carry the pots of food around to the people, and we let them hold their plate close to the pot while we scoop the food. We never touch their plates, not with our hands and not with the serving spoons. It's a new way of doing things, but totally doable, and in the long run, less work for the servers.

Only in Israel, they insist that the pots should remain in the centre of the circle, and the servers walk around collecting up plates, bring them in to be filled up, and then carry them back out.

Great. So that server, who just went and made a big show of washing her hands, is then going and touching the dirty plates of those dirty hippies. Plates that are sitting on the ground. Plates that haven't been washed properly for a week, and that dogs have licked, and flies have been on, and that people with random intestinal parasites from India have been eating off. And then they go and touch everyone else's plate. great thinking guys.

Now this non-touching of plates might sound extreme, but I've been to gatherings where literally 85% of the people got lying-on-the-ground-screaming-in-agony-in-a-pile-of-their-own-diarrhoea sick. It spreads like wildfire. I'd like to prevent it.

I explain all of this to people, calmly and patiently. They seem to understand. But the Israelis don't change the method of taking everyone's plates. Some Israelis even say they understand me, and say very nicely, "okay sister, I understand. Sometimes I do it your way. But today, I want to do it my way. We're in a flow".

Drives me batty. </rant>

Anyway, here's some highlights; The Welcome Centre: Breakfast Circle (well, not a "circle" because the shade was so precious):

Here's Me with Butterfly, and me after Littletree swapped our Shawls (wow, me in non-green!)