OLIVE PICKING on the MOUNT OF OLIVES
The olive harvest started last Saturday. The Lutheran World Federation has about 800 trees on the slope of the Mount of Olives surrounding the LWF and the stone house (where Mark & Susanne Brown live). Different groups will volunteer to pick olives over the next several weeks. Individual expats and Palestinians will put in a few volunteer hours when they can. Mark Brown invites the different Lutheran schools as well as schools of other denominations to take a turn, and eventually the olives will be picked.
Donna and I were there for the 1st day of the harvest. We started about 9 am and stuck it out until 4:30 pm. There are a couple of ways of going about picking olives. If the tree has an ample yield, you first spread a plastic sheet around the tree, and then, with rakes of various lengths, rake the olives onto the plastic sheet. The olives that are missed are picked by hand. Every olive is fair game. It doesn’t matter whether they are green, black, any colour in between, shrivelled, as long as they’re not insect-infested. They all have oil in them which will be extracted by the olive press. The view from the olive grove is breath-taking. Every time we raised our heads, we were looking down on the Old City. But we got the day’s work done.
There was one reality that marred an otherwise perfect day. As you look toward the Old City from the olive grove, you can’t miss the Israeli settlement. The Jewish settlers have obtained a piece of land abutting LWF property and have established a Yeshiva (a Bible school). There are a number of trailers there which probably will become permanent homes. One day they tried to disrupt the Muslim call-to-prayer by singing Israeli songs through a bullhorn. The settlers have designs on some vacant LWF property. The LWF hopes to build affordable housing for Palestinian Christian families on the vacant property but can’t start until financing is in place and until they have the building permits from the Israeli authority. The latter may be hard to get, and vacant land in this part of the world, even if somebody owns it, has a tendency to be grabbed.
But it was really a good day. We worked hard and the bunch that turned out enjoyed the camaraderie. If memory serves me, we picked 18 burlap bags of olives, and Mark told us it was a good great 1st day. We celebrated our work with a BBQ behind the stone house. In about 10 days Augusta Victoria will begin to harvest their trees behind the hospital and so I’ll be joining my colleagues from the 4th floor for another day of picking.
The olive oil that is produced by all these olives is bottled and sold to raise money for Augusta Victoria Hospital to help defray the costs of treating patients who cannot pay. If a congregation is interested in supporting the plight of the Palestinian people by supporting Augusta Victoria, you can order jars of olive oil directly from LWF in Jerusalem and sell it in your congregations. You can get all the information you need from the LWF website http://www.lwfjerusalem.org/
The olive harvest started last Saturday. The Lutheran World Federation has about 800 trees on the slope of the Mount of Olives surrounding the LWF and the stone house (where Mark & Susanne Brown live). Different groups will volunteer to pick olives over the next several weeks. Individual expats and Palestinians will put in a few volunteer hours when they can. Mark Brown invites the different Lutheran schools as well as schools of other denominations to take a turn, and eventually the olives will be picked.
Donna and I were there for the 1st day of the harvest. We started about 9 am and stuck it out until 4:30 pm. There are a couple of ways of going about picking olives. If the tree has an ample yield, you first spread a plastic sheet around the tree, and then, with rakes of various lengths, rake the olives onto the plastic sheet. The olives that are missed are picked by hand. Every olive is fair game. It doesn’t matter whether they are green, black, any colour in between, shrivelled, as long as they’re not insect-infested. They all have oil in them which will be extracted by the olive press. The view from the olive grove is breath-taking. Every time we raised our heads, we were looking down on the Old City. But we got the day’s work done.
There was one reality that marred an otherwise perfect day. As you look toward the Old City from the olive grove, you can’t miss the Israeli settlement. The Jewish settlers have obtained a piece of land abutting LWF property and have established a Yeshiva (a Bible school). There are a number of trailers there which probably will become permanent homes. One day they tried to disrupt the Muslim call-to-prayer by singing Israeli songs through a bullhorn. The settlers have designs on some vacant LWF property. The LWF hopes to build affordable housing for Palestinian Christian families on the vacant property but can’t start until financing is in place and until they have the building permits from the Israeli authority. The latter may be hard to get, and vacant land in this part of the world, even if somebody owns it, has a tendency to be grabbed.
But it was really a good day. We worked hard and the bunch that turned out enjoyed the camaraderie. If memory serves me, we picked 18 burlap bags of olives, and Mark told us it was a good great 1st day. We celebrated our work with a BBQ behind the stone house. In about 10 days Augusta Victoria will begin to harvest their trees behind the hospital and so I’ll be joining my colleagues from the 4th floor for another day of picking.
The olive oil that is produced by all these olives is bottled and sold to raise money for Augusta Victoria Hospital to help defray the costs of treating patients who cannot pay. If a congregation is interested in supporting the plight of the Palestinian people by supporting Augusta Victoria, you can order jars of olive oil directly from LWF in Jerusalem and sell it in your congregations. You can get all the information you need from the LWF website http://www.lwfjerusalem.org/
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