Firewood

One of the January jobs in the village is gathering firewood so that they’ll have it on hand even when they get busy in the fields and the rains come and such. After several days of them saying that I couldn’t join them, my host mom and her daughter-in-law finally agreed that I could come. Although I must say, that after a few days getting firewood, I started to wonder why I insisted . . .
The first day was good. We started fires at the trunks of a few dead trees by piling up brush around them. The goal was to get the trunks burned through enough that the trees would fall over. And with one tree it actually worked and it fell over later that day. The other two we had to restart another day, and then they fell over. I guess when the wood is super dry, it’s a good way to get the tree down!
Then we went up the hill into the woods to find more dead sticks and logs and such. We gathered our finds in a big pile up on the hill.
The problem was the next day, when we went back and had to get that big pile of wood down the hill and to the pile by the side of the road. That required carrying it on our heads. Down a hill, through the trees, on a not-quite path, and my feet were sweating so I had quite slippery flip-flops. Not quite a walk in the park! Let’s just say that my second and third loads weren’t quite as big as my first load, and after a few more, when they insisted I take a break, I was up for it! (On a side note, doing everything like this in flip-flops is why I rebelled against the leaders on our Israel trip in October, who said that we needed hiking shoes for our walks. If I could carry firewood on my head through the woods, down a hill, in flip-flops, I figured I could walk around Jerusalem in flip-flops as well.)
In the picture (and sorry it’s against the sun – it felt too complicated to explain that problem to someone who had never taken a picture before as far as I know), you can see me carrying wood from one of the trees that fell down after we burned its trunk over to the pile. At least there it was basically flat and with no trees and vines to catch the load on your head!