Living next to the border to Gaza is a surreal experience. I have been to Kibbutz Holit before and never felt unsafe. Of course it needs some getting used to that the graffiti-sprayed bunker is also a disco, and that you hear a loud boom once in a while, which is supposedly nothing to worry about. But all in all, when our madrichim (leaders) told us that we were now in a state of alert and should always stay 15 seconds within the next bunker, we didn't know what to expect. For what we know, a Qassam rocket could be a fire-breathing dragon or a six-legged monster. Without actually realizing the danger, it is impossible to be completely serious about it. Even though we obeyed the rules, the feeling that we were playing a game was still there.
A few days ago, the sound of a female monotonous voice saying 'Tzeva Adom' (which means code red in hebrew) over and over again woke me up. I was alone in my room, which is also a bunker. Completely terrified I needed several attempts to close the window and to slam the broken door shut, and then sat on my bed in panic, waiting for one of the madrichim to come and tell me that everything was clear again. But what was queer about the situation was that neither I, nor the 70 other people from the program, felt personally endangered. Later in the dining room, everyone was acting as if nothing had happened.
When my roommates woke me up at 4 a.m. that night by bursting into my room, I was too sleepy to understand that the alarm had gone off again. So when we sat crammed together in the bunker, most of us continued to sleep. The next days we spent hours talking with the madrichim about the feelings we had experienced during the Tzeva Adom, but no one of us said that they felt scared. Now I felt stupid that I had panicked the first evening.
The weekends during our program are free, but we still have to pay for transportation, housing and food if we leave the kibbutz. On thursday, our madrichim told us that they had rented a bus to bring us to Tel Aviv, and that we were free to leave from thursday to sunday. They even let us pack some food, even though it is usually a big problem to even make yourself a sandwich for later. It was clear that they wanted us gone, the situation was too tense to have the responsibility over 70 young people from all over the world in this small kibbutz. We are now on an evacuation holiday, staying with family or friends in the north. The concept of being in danger, even if it's not severe, is completely strange to us.
If we go back to Holit on Sunday, life will be the usual again. We will go to our classes, work in the kibbutz and party in the pub. And in the evening, we will be sitting again in the front of the dining room, singing 'Tzeva Adom' to an acoustic guitar.
