February 8

Dear ones,

We spent the entirety of today trekking about the Shephelah, the low hill country. We saw the place where Samson was born and the valley where David slew Goliath. They even distributed slings and let us wander up and down the valley shooting stones off into the grass. I was actually okay at it, in that I could usually make the stone go forward.

We spent a lot of time underground. There were: the Bell caves, huge white lime quarries shaped like bells with holes in the apex, where we sang and enjoyed the acoustics; cisterns for holding the rain; an underground dovecote lined with dove-sized cubby holes; an olive press complete with wood and stone olive-pressing apparatuses; and Malachi Caves, which were pitch black and lined with holes you could squeeze into and then wriggle through the cave walls, popping out somewhere else. All of the caves smelled like rock and mildew and standing water.

The countryside was beautiful. They say in summer it's all dead and brown, but right now it's covered in bushy green grass, red anenomes, yellow daisies, and little pink flowers. The almond trees are blossoming white and pale pink. Brother Emmett, our Old Testament teacher, says that the locals eat the almond seeds when they're still green and fuzzy. He says they taste like fresh peas, and that you can get almond juice from almond seeds which tastes like marzipan. There were fields everywhere, wheat, grape vines, red peppers protected by canopies of black or white or red plastic. The fields covered in red plastic looked like red lakes and rivers from up on top of the hills.

We wandered across hills covered in the ruins of towns and forts, former archaelogical digs now abandoned. We saw black Bedouin tents, and sheep, and white birds with curving necks, the kind we saw all over the Nile. We crawled through caves until our clothes were covered with dust. We saw the shells of armored cars that carried supplies down the road to Jerusalem during the '48 war. Brother Emmett's children came with us, and we played with them. We were told that, under Israeli law, wildflowers are protected, and it is illegal to pick them. We picked them anyway, and pressed anenomes in our scriptures and stuck them in our hair.

-Stella