Neot Kdumim Nature Reserve
Today we visited Neot kdumim . What an experience! This artificial reserve of 600 acres is guarded and protected by a very special group of people. The leader of this reserve and our tour guide Sarah showed us how they plant develop and cultivate the land. Sarah is not your average tour guide, this lady has a real keen connection with nature. Within a few moments you could feel that this lady could probably talk with the animals. She’s all about the natural world, saving the planet, planting trees, saving water. A person like Sarah is truly one of a kind and unfortunately a dying breed. We started our tour by walking through fields of olive, pomegranate, and grape trees. Can you imagine real vegetation just growing on trees, not something you see in America. Sarah led us trough Jewish history to explain how our ancestors used the land to live and survive. Moving from Egypt to Israel was not an easy transition, our Jewish ancestors had to give up herding and trade in their cattle for farm equipment. In the new land of Israel the land would provide the source of life. As you may already know Israel does not have a continuous down pour of rain water. This created a lot of issues for our ancestors. Sarah showed us different methods of how to store and gather water. One of which was a cistern similar design of a water well, with one exception the water gets filled from the top and has cement borders all around to keep it from seeping into the ground. She demonstrated the process by showing when the water would flow down the land these cisterns would collect the water. Hearing the water flow into the well as she says is the sound of life. We then entered a room where they would make wine. A large pit that farmers used to collect grapes, and make wine from. This exhausting process is not as easy as it may seem. Engaging in the tour was similar to a rebirth, where kids from the richest country came and saw how people live on the simple basics that nature has to offer. The sheer excitement of Sarah and the land that she works on brings a new way of thinking for all of us that don’t have any connection to the outside world. Living breathing eating and drinking from the land is a way of life that we have abandoned, but one lesson that we all learned is that we must take care of the land or else it will not provide for the generations to come.
