Adventures in Body Rafting

Originally uploaded by sarandkel.

Photo of a performer at the Jerusalem Festival

{posted by Kelli}
ALL IN A DAY’S WORK
I’m standing on the edge of the Jordan River as dozens of college students plunge into the swirling water. Wearing a skirt and t-shirt instead of a swimsuit under my life vest (“it’s a water hike, wet only up to your ankles” we were told that morning), there’s nothing to do but join the fray. My deaf clients have already leaped in; every second they’re floating further away, making visual communication increasingly impossible.

“Will any instructions be given along the way?” “Yes.” (interpreters needed)
“Is there a path along the bank?” “No.” (interpreters can’t follow along the side)
“Well. . . all right.”

And so this “water hike” became an hour-long struggle to remain in one piece; a futile attempt to keep some part of my person dry; and a hopeless experiment at interpreting while being washed downstream, trying to dodge underwater surprises like hidden boulders, logs, and big turtles. Within two minutes of entering the river, Sarah lost her watch and sunglasses, which were tied around her neck. Halfway into the experience, having managed to at least keep my bra dry by wading instead of floating, I banged my shin into a hidden tree trunk and flipped forward, instantly changing the nature of the sport of body rafting to “face rafting.” The absurdity of the situation became clear to me when I finally regained my footing and found myself shouting into the din to no one in particular, “I’m a professional! I work in offices!”

It was a fairly typical day of the last three weeks spent interpreting for tour groups visiting Israel. My initial impression of working again after nearly five months of not moving my hands in a linguistically meaningful way was twofold: I was instantly reminded that I generally like being around deaf people; and I realized that I like how signing feels on my hands, the kinesthetics of it. It all came back as if it had never left.

WHAT’S NEXT?
Work for this year came to a screeching halt Wednesday when we saw the last group off at the airport. Predicting that without some sort of schedule, I might start feeling the slump again that I experienced in May, the following day I signed up for a two-nights-a-week Hebrew language class downtown that runs through mid-Sept. Sarah also registered for Hebrew (different class, different nights) as well as an intensive Torah study program (called Pardes) that runs all day for the next three weeks.

After five slow years, Israel—Jerusalem in particular—is experiencing a sharp upswing in cultural activities. The summer months are jam-packed with events, most of them on the international scale. There’s the ongoing French Festival, trying to strengthen ties between the two countries. (France was, after all, the only country to give a point to Israel’s contender in this year’s Eurovision contest.) And the general Jerusalem Festival ended just in time for this week’s Jerusalem Film Festival—ten days of 190 movies from all over the world! It took us a combined four hours just to read through the 300-page program.

YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK HOME
This summer was my 20th high school reunion. I got the scoop from my friend from junior high who attended some of the events, and I also caught up on my classmates’ lives via an online “profile booklet.” I attended a school district where less than half of the graduating class (we were around 380 total) went on to any kind of school or training—university, community college, vocational school. Reading these bios about staying home with four kids, being active in church, and working in “freelance skin care” or part-time as a dental assistant (five of these, with two more in training), I never felt more like a foreigner. Female classmates married men who hunt year-round and build 4x4 rigs in the garage. One family enjoys bull riding, while another “puts on a great Rock Crawl and Mud Bog every May with our Jeep club.”(??) Our class’ greatest claim to fame is the ESPN Great Outdoors Games competitor ’02-’04 for speed climbing (that’s trees) and tree topping. One student “dumped that loser I ran away from home to live with,” while another, divorced twice, says she “never plans to marry again. . . not beyond shacking up though!”

I always thought my hometown was ordinary, in that way most people do. It wasn’t until I drove Sarah past my old elementary school some years ago and she asked about the cows meandering in the playground that I started rethinking the Puyallup, Washington, version of “ordinary.”

MYSTERY SOLVED
Remember that perplexing TV commercial I described where the woman drives up to a mini-mart and swaps a goat from her back seat for a carton of milk? Well, we learned about a Hebrew idiom that clears it up. It’s something like our “get the monkey off your back.” When you have something weighing on your mind—like trying to remember to bring home milk—and you finally take care of it, you “get rid of the goat.”