Meeting other volunteers and being assigned to a military base

At the airport on Sunday the 22nd the volunteers congregated around the coordinator for Volunteers for Israel.  We received stick on labels with the name of the base where we would be serving and we were instructed to follow a certain soldier who is assigned to supervise us.  Our leader (madricha in Hebrew) is a 19 year old French Israeli woman specially trained by the Israeli Defense Forces to deal with 13 people, mostly 65 years of age or older and strangers to each other, and have them all go in the same direction at the same time.  One of the group is Sidney Conn of Birmingham, Alabama.  Sidney and I volunteered together last year and had a great time so we requested to serve together this year.

The 13 of us and Sarah, our Madricha, boarded a bus and traveled for about an hour to an Israeli Air Force base.  We could see immediately, when we were assigned our rooms that the Israeli Air Force lives better than the Israeli Army.
We are in the same buildings, on the same floors as soldiers, four to a room.

While it may appear that the grass in front of our building is perfectly taken care of but its not.  Its Astroturf and theres no care necessary.  The picnic table are occupied in the evening by the young men and women of the Israeli Air Force who then consume soft drinks and Domino's Pizza.  

We dropped off our luggage and we walked to another building where we were given our "work clothes", uniforms with no insignia, available in small, medium, and large.  Nobody's fits perfectly but the process went smoothly.

From there we went to lunch in a large dining room with lots of soldiers who looked at us like we were from the moon.  We learned that this air force base has never had volunteers, where most of the army bases have had a regular flow of volunteers for many years.  I was approached at the first meal by a young woman who asked who we were.  I explained why we were there and pointed out that she spoke perfect English with no accent.  She told me she was from West Bloomfield, Michigan, the city where my Uncle and my Late Aunt called home for years.  We talked about our favorite deli (Pickles and Rye for you Detroiters reading this) and our favorite local soft drink (Faygo Rock and Rye, you non-Detroiters are really missing something).  Her name is Andrea and she trains dogs for the Israeli Air Force.  More about the dogs later.

All the travel was pretty exhausting and we had no work Sunday but we did have dinner together and a meeting after dinner where the base commander welcomed us and each of us introduced ourselves to the group.  I was fighting no to fall asleep in the meeting and conked out immediately after knowing that breakfast would be at 630AM and I'd probably still be tired.

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