Day 12: "Living Museum"

If you haven't seen yesterday's post, a land mine was found on the site last week and that's why we've gotten too much down time. The police and defense forces are satisfied it's perfectly safe to head back out.

We got our police briefing this morning. Wow. We were in a small room where in cabinets and on the wall were 100s of ways that people kill each other. It's the stuff they've discarded in this part of Palestine for the last 200 years. Land mines, of course, also grenades, bazookas, rifles, artillery shells of every shape and form. Even a huge metal cannon ball from the time of Napoleon. Interesting, informative and scary. Didn't take my camera unfortunately.

There 3 types of people who might be messing around with land mines. Farmers who want to protect their cows. Kids (of course) who are out for a thrill. (The policeman said he used to be one of those. Now he gets paid for it.) And, who knew, collectors. Well, maybe terrorists too, though that's very low probability. Any one of those may have stashed a mine in the excavation - with or without the intention of retrieving it later.

We're headed out to the excavation in the late afternoon today to get back on the horse that threw us.

The boys from Macalester have an appropriate frisbee cricket game they play, whose rules involve knocking down bottles, exchanging wickets and chugging beer that I don't quite understand. But that's ok because cricket will always be a mystery to me.

I got my stitches out today at the kib clinic. The cut is healing perfectly.