Taking the classroom to the field this past May, Glocal students and staff headed off for a full-day exploration of Israel’s Negev.
The field trip began as a student initiative, and after establishing a ”field trip committee”, students and staff worked together to develop the day’s agenda. The theme was to be ’development in a developed context’, and the aim was to explore the unique challenges of under developed communities in a developed country. The result was a rich on-ground experience, where students put the models and theories of international development aside, and took a step closer to the local- exploring the actors, projects and complexities of development in today’s Israel.
The day started out with a visit to Earth’s Promise, one of Israel’s most vibrant community garden’s located in Beer Sheva. The garden’s uniqueness comes from the community behind it- a group of recent Ethiopian immigrant families at a close-by absorption center who maintain the garden’s plots. The students had a chance to meet these local cultivators, exploring the unique plots of each family and learning about the diverse array of Israeli and Ethiopian vegetables that were being grown.
The second stop on the group’s journey was the recently recognized Bedouin village of Qasr A-Sir. The village, in partnership with the Israeli NGO Bustan (’Orchard’ in Hebrew), has forged a holistic development project which explores the intersection between perma-culture and sustainability and traditional Bedouin knowledge. The students walked through Qasr A Sir, and met with Bustan’s director Ra’ed Al-Mickawi, listening to him recount his own unique life path, one which in many ways mirrors the development of the Bedouin collective as a whole. At the height of the day’s heat, the students settled in the shade to share an authentic Bedouin lunch which had been prepared by the Bedouin women’s cooking cooperative in the village. During lunch, they met with the village’s head, who opened a discussion about the political barriers to development that the village is currently facing.
In the course of the day, the group learned about the challenges facing the Bedouin community, and was exposed to the complexities confronting development initiatives and the diverse collectives in the Negev region as a whole. Both students and staff left the experience with a better understanding of development as it is carried out in a developed context, and the trip raised important questions about cross-cultural cooperation and land planning in periphery regions, providing fodder for future conversations and outreach initiatives.
Glocal Staff
