Volley Ball Competition
between female pupils
from Eilat and from Aqaba.

The girls from Aqaba would each sleep
at the house of a girl from Eilat.

We were invited by the Eilat school,
to host the two teams
in our FourNationTent.

I prepared this meeting carefully.
The letter I wrote in Hebrew,
needed a translation into Arabic.
I renewed contact with Nimr Ismir,
my main partner in Partnership in the Seventies
and my friend ever since,
even if we rarely contact each other.
He went into the terrible trouble
of translating my condensed, sculpted writing.

IN the end something "happened" on the political level,
which gave the Aqaba authorities the pretext
to cancel the operation and to trample a hope.

A token of what a real partnership would be like,
is in the story of Tamir and his father Shim'on.

Tamir, then 27 and not tied to a family, a job or a location,
had recently come to Eilat,
and as became so relevant for all of us a few month later,
he had run away from too much pain at ~~~~the SaltSea.
He worked as a cleaner and was brought by his roommate:
"Tamir could write up something for the visitors, couldn't you!",
he introduced him.
Tamir said nothing.
But Tamir came again, on his own,
and after a while he joined our partnership.
We were six now, and we stayed six,
for those who joined us later and founded with us the NGO,
left us just as fast.

In March Tamir erected one of the three pyramids,
which had been rolled up since the forced dismantling of the FourNationTent
east of the bus and closer to the sea,
so close, that during one of those dreaded southern storms
he got almost washed away, together with the tent's equipment.

His family came to visit - father, mother, brother, sister-in-law.
They were fiercely attacking Tamir for his new craziness.
At that time I judged them as "ordinary people, who don't know any better."

In time I came to deeply admire
the strong love and caring between those family-members.
Though Tamir is definitely the odd ball out,
and though he is always exposed to fierce attacks,
he is always warmly cared for.
By not backing off he grows, and they grow too.

There is one incident, which opened my heart especially to Tamir's father:
Father and mother visited us at our first place above the SaltSea.
We brought them down to the sweet springs at the beach,
left them there and said, we would join them befoere sunset.
Tamir was, is, never on time, and when he finished his work
and we drove down to the beach, it was pitch dark.
I worried: "Your parents are not used to be left alone in such solitude,
leave alone in such darkness."
Tamir wasn't worried a bit.
When we approached the beach through the strip of entangled tamarisks, passable only for us locals,
we heard something extraordinary: an Israeli folk song from a piccolo flute!.

There they sat, an elderly couple, no fear, no blame,
just playing sweet melodies on a tiny piccolo.

Back to Eilat, half a year earlier:

When Tamir's father kept attacking him:
"Who would give you the permission to put that raft out there" etc.
Tamir said:

"You are attacking me,
because you too wanted to realize your dreams,
but you couldn't,
because you didn't know what to do with feelings of pain!"

And then the son said to his father:

" Instead of telling me that all we do is unrealistic,
I suggest that you yourself write something for our visitors,
explaining how  y o u   see the aim of our partnership."

Shim'on is not a learned man,
as a small kid - on his way to a concentration camp
- he jumped from the train
and in Israel he had a hard time bringing up his 5 kids in Dimona,
a dreary desert town, not exactly a city with glitter and glamour.

But he agreed,
and this is what he wrote about the RedSeaPartnerSHIP.