I don’t yet know the details of her death, but I know she’s gone.

Gillie - I worked with her everyday at the Feast. Her broad smile and good humor kept us all going. Her life revolved around her love for her family and friends - it defined who she was. The tough girl who chain smoked and rode motorcycles, the sweet girl who was absolutely crazy about her nephew and put pictures of him everywhere.

She was biking with a friend yesterday, and they were hit by a car. Her friend is in serious condition at the hospital, and Gillie is gone. I wish I had had a chance to know her better. We kept in touch after the Feast, but I never made it to visit her in Tel-Aviv. I never did get the address of her blog - I wanted to read what she wrote about the Feast, I know that it touched her deeply. I wish I had taken her up when she invited me to hang out on Thursday nights at her favorite pub. I didn’t know that I’d never have the opportunity again.

Take care of her, God. We loved her.

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Pity us. We just got back from our second Thanksgiving meal.

It’s funny how ex-pats of other nationalities will make fun of Americans on just about every score, but when there’s an awesome American holiday like Thanksgiving, they all want to pretend that they’re one of us. Our chef (South African) decided to honor our big day by fixing a full spread for lunch. He’d never made anything even remotely resembling a Thanksgiving meal, so he looked up recipes on the internet (how do you explain stuffing, exactly? I mean, what is that stuff anyway (besides wonderfully tasty)?). He did a bang up job: turkey, gravy, sweet potatos with marshmallows, greenbeans, stuffing, mashed potatos, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and pecan pie. To give him extra time to cook, they moved lunch back from 12:30 to 1:00.

Everyone even remotely related to the Embassy showed up. The dining room was full of spouses, children, neighbors, people from other ministries who “happened” to be at our offices today. There were even a few people I didn’t even recognize. Total percentage of actual Americans: 20% max. I spent lunch explaining the Thanksgiving story to 2 South Africans, a Brit, a German, and an Australian. I ate until my eyes bled. I mean really, I was absolutely miserable when I left the table.

We had a short but fun afternoon baking buscuits (flour everywhere, you should have seen the dog), and then it was off to the neighbors for a 6:00 repeat of the gorge-fest. It was a wonderful, very family feeling celebration with all the trimmings - you guessed it: turkey, gravy, sweet potatos with marshmallows, greenbeans, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and pecan pie. Oooooohhhh it was wonderful, and I managed to eat at least as much as I had for lunch. I almost suffered tryptophan shock. I spent a large portion of the evening lying on the tile floor trying to digest. We finished off the evening by watching A Christmas Story and carting home leftovers.

I look forward to breakfast tomorrow (leftover turkey, gravy, sweet potatos, greenbeans, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pie).

Life in Israel | 1 Comment »

It’s been a good week.

Last Saturday Franklin and I went hiking with some friends at Maktesh Ramon - a giant natural crater in Israel’s Negev desert. I really love the desert - it is stark and silent and vast. And we thoroughly invaded it: 5 girls, 2 guys, and a small dog. When you’re hiking a rocky path, watching your feet and chattering with your hiking partners, you don’t notice the desert. Then you stop to catch your breath, you look up and there it is.

Chloe loves to hike with us. If our destination is remote enough, she gets to hike off lead. She’s pretty good about it, staying nearby and coming when called. So she runs around, and when she gets tired she begs and Franklin will carry her on his shoulders. Really, a day of hiking is like a day of heaven for Chloe; a day of sunshine and people to pay attention to her. This trip proved especially fun for Chloe as she got to chase an ibex. We were hiking near the field school, and we stumbled upon a full herd of grazing ibex (i say grazing, but there isn’t anything to eat in the desert but rocks). Chloe decided to go check out a nearby full grown ibex with HUGE horns. We were worried, but the ibex didn’t even blink an eye. He watched her bold approach, and when she got too close for comfort, he just hopped gracefully over a nearby wall. When we joined Chloe at the wall, she kept looking back and forth from us to the ibex and talking - “row row rowww row row.” It’s like she was saying, “what the heck is that thing, anyway?”

Wednesday night we participated in a triclinium reenactment. We got all dressed up in biblical garb, lounged awkwardly around a ground-level U-shaped table, ate lamb stew with our hands, and acted like we were first centruy believers for the benefit of about 70 onlookers. Honestly, the things we get involved in.

Our house guest left yesterday and it’s just Franklin and I in the house until the end of December, when Laura arrives. While the room is uninhabited Franklin and I are planning to rip up the nasty carpet (which impedes the heating of the room anyway). We’re hoping that the concrete underneath is decent enough to paint. We’ll see.

Oh - and we put up some pictures in the photo gallery, so go have a look.

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Winter has officially arrived in Jerusalem. The temperature has dropped dramatically - and if you haven’t turned the heat on in your house yet, it is probably colder inside than outside (an amazing trick of Israeli architecture). It’s funny, I have never been as cold in my life as I was my first winter in Israel (and that was in Tel Aviv, it’s much colder in Jerusalem). It isn’t that it’s so much colder outside, its just that you’re never quite warm. It’s cold outside, it’s cold at home, it’s cold at work, it’s cold on the bus, it’s cold going through mall security - your feet are like blocks of ice that almost thaw overnight, but not quite.

And now is the time that you discover all your plumbing problems. Israeli houses are required by law to have a solar powered hot water heater. This is because 80% of the year a solar powered heater can easily meet all your hot water needs. However, we have now entered the 20% of the year where the sun just doesn’t cut it. And now you discover that you have problems (thats right, not only are you freezing, but suddenly you also have no hot water). And the Linker household was rife with problems. First, we had a burst pipe. 1400 shekels later, that was fixed. However, in the process we managed to burn out the element on our hot water heater resulting in - no hot water. When we fixed that, it was time to turn on our heating.

Let me pause for a minute to tell you about our heating system. We are absolutely blessed to have under the floor heating. I cannot tell you how wonderful (and rare) this is. Since we moved into our current abode, I have not had to suffer ice-block feet. Our friends come over just to get warm. It is my single most favorite thing about our home (and I really like our home).

OK, so we turned on our heating….or…er…tried to turn on our heating. It became quickly apparent that something was vastly wrong with our system. After several days and the conferral a slew of various specialists, it was determined that we had a leak. After several more days and the conferral of another group of specialists (read: hulking men with muddy boots tramping back and forth through the house), the leak was located. The (unfortunate) location required the formation of a massive hole between Mom’s bathroom and the back yard (if you go into Mom’s bathroom, and open the cabinet under the sink you’ll find…our lemon tree). After a 2 days of jackhammering the beautiful Jerusalem stone on our house (and, I’d like to add here that the leak fixing procedure required another few days of NO HOT WATER), the leak was fixed (the hole remains). The whole operation cost 7200 shekels.

I can’t complain, though. Our house is warm, and our friends are flocking. Since we have no money, we’ve taken to playing lots of board games (Puerto Rico, Tigris and Euphrates, and Settlers of Catan being favorites). Really, when I’m sitting in the dining room with warm feet surrounded by friends and contemplating the purchase of a development card - life just doesn’t get any sweeter than that.

Life in Israel, best of | 5 Comments »

The Feast of Tabernacles 2005 is now officially over, and it was a huge sucess. As in past years, I was responsible for the video projection for the event, and Franklin headed up the finance department as they dealt with thousands of registrants. If this weren’t enough to convince you that I have the much better feast job, consider this: I saw every single thing that went on during the Feast from the best seats in the house, while Franklin spent all his time cooped up in a little room backstage dealing with problem after problem.

This year we had 6000 people at the Feast (usually not all at the same time) - from about 80 different nations. Our opening night was at Sultan’s Pool - right beside the old city - and 6000 people really did show up. It was a lovely celebration, where all the nations represented were called up one by one to present themselves before God for this Feast. It says in Zech 14:16-17 that all peoples are to go up to Jerusalem for the Feast, and any nation not represented will not have rain.

So - we’re outdoors, in Jerusalem, in the winter, with 6000 people and a lot of extremely valuable sound/lighting/projection equipment. About half-way through the event, the crew that I work with became extrememly antsy. It turns out that it was absolutely gushing rain everywhere in Israel EXCEPT Jerusalem. This is virtually unheard of. They wanted to know exactly how hard we had to pray to keep the weather so good for our events!

And God is so cool. The last piece before the finale was a song about the new Jerusalem, a very lovely song. Just when we built up to the crescendo of the chorus - where we were singing about the new Jerusalem - a tiny little sprinkle of rain began to fall. The crowd went NUTS. When the chorus was over, the rain stopped and didn’t return until after the crew had broken down all the equipment. So we got our promise of rain for the year without seriously ruining our event.

The rest of the Feast was also cool - but I’m running out of typing steam and you’re probably running out of reading steam. I hope to have pictures up soon in the photo gallery, and you can relive the experience with me there.

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