I also stopped to oogle a multi-colored bin of peppers and kicked myself for not bringing my camera, as well as strawberries, cheap underwear, and some peaches--but didn't stop, rushing along, towards the end.
The shuk is one of the worst-smelling places I've ever been (this doesn't say a whole lot), especially when it clears or you walk too slowly past the fish market. Particularly as the day winds down, there are perfectly good fruits and vegetables getting squashed, vendors and buyers drop their things, and the smell just rises.. almost intoxicating you with its squalor. I know, I'm painting a really nice image here, but I go genuinely LOVE the shuk, it's beat, it's rhythm, the way that people are actually sort of nice to each other there because it's all based on buying and selling and not on politics or identity. You see Orthodox ladies buying flatbread from Arab women, pleasantly and almost politely (there's no such thing as truly polite for Israelis.)
When I got to the end of the shuk I met a group called "Fugee Friday." It's organized by two Americans--K. and M.-- who have found their way back to Israel. An expat with her beautiful, blonde son was there, along with a crush of Israelis and other Americans.
I found out about Fugee Friday from an Anglo-listserv, and decided to go and check it out. Similar to what we did at Shechen Tov (except it's later in the day, so vendors are really trying to get rid of their produce and have almost no need to hang onto it) we went through the shuk with boxes and bags, asking vendors to give their leftovers to us for charity. The food goes to a Darfur Shelter, a shelter for pregnant women, and another shelter for African refugees. Shechen Tov was beautifully organized and had a Judaic focus, we had flyers to explain our cause and a guide who talked to us about Jewish values and how to ask for food, Fugee Friday was a mash of people who just came to help
We went through the shuk, and I was surprised to see vendors giving away tons, one bakery gave us three boxes full of bread. After collecting boxes upon boxes of food-again, I wished I'd had a camera, we began to sort through it all. Groups of people--I couldn't tell if they were refugees or just impoverished Israelis, kept coming up and taking food. This caused a bit of an ideological question between K. and M., one wanted them to wait to take food while M. seemed to see little difference between giving it away. Did we want to help the poor or just the specific poor? Did it matter that a person was taking "too much" or did it matter more that she was going to quench her hunger?
After loading the food into various cars and onto bicycles (I rode with a Brazilian olah, her army-aged daughter, and their friend who had just finished the army) to a refugee shelter in south Tel-Aviv. The friend told me that she cried the first time she had gone, I've worked with the homeless before and consider myself somewhat able to cut off my emotions in these situations, so I was surprised by the sense of relief that I felt. "It'll be okay if I cry, she did," I told myself.
Once we left Shuk HaCarmel, I slowly became geographically more and more disoriented--I knew that we were in Tel-Aviv, but as we sped through the dimly-lit streets, I lost my sense of direction. When we pulled up to a squat neighborhood I had absolutely no idea where we were--geographically or in any other way. The Brazilian Olah ordered us out of the car because "the children swarm it." Damn, did they ever! Their little faces seemed to be from places I couldn't pinpoint on a map, were they Indian? Darfuri? Eritrean? Chinese? They ran around the dark craggy streets, most without shoes and supervision, and we thrust markers and coloring pages at them to keep them busy and away from the car. Each of the kids had a different reaction us-some grabbed onto our hands and hugged us-while others were immediately like, "What are you doing here with these uncool coloring pages?" One wouldn't move even as a car came along the street, another slapped at a smaller one beside her. They all seemed to fight over markers and ask for our opinions on their drawings, and they reminded me of the way my sister and I used to swat at each other for markers and such--the only difference was that we probably accumulated truck fulls of markers during our childhoods, while I'm pretty certain that these kids didn't. I smiled and made faces for them--delighting some and causing others to roll their eyes. I thought of the last time I played with kids, when I was in Amirim with my friend Sean and we played and made faces at this little kid named Zohar with long, curly hair and a slightly oversized kippah--while his mother stood closely watching him. These children could be so easily run over or spirited away, it seemed to be a minor miracle that one of them wasn't splattered on the ground like the fruits at Shuk HaCarmel.
Unloading the food was the most difficult part, K. thrust a box at me and asked:
"Are you afriad of the dark?"
"Um.. no," I responded. I'm afraid of pitch-black, but so is any sane person.
"Are you afraid of old homeless men?"
"Uh.. haha.. no, as long as they don't rape me," I replied.
Then he asked me to go bring the box over to a man living in a hovel, a shack maybe (but that would be dressing it up) near a semi-distant apartment building.
"Sure," I said, thinking of how certain I was that my mother would have KILLED me, but I didn't know if "Oh, Damn! I wish I could, but my mother just hates it when I go into dark places with old homeless men," would fly with this group, and it was all within K.'s eye-sight, so I took the box over to the old man, eventually realizing that I had nothing to fear besides the prickers are on the gross growing up along the field. A small dog, who had a startling resemblance to a rat, followed me. He wore a tweed hat, the kind that has no become overly trendy, and was squat. His face was a mash of lines. "Shalom, gever, yesh li mashahu l'Shabbat," (Hello sir, I have something for Shabbat") I said, and put the box in his weak arms. "Shabbat Shalom," I smiled at him, and he smiled back, saying, "Shabbat Shalom," sweetly. That seemed like a piece of cake after K. gave me another box-heavier than a couple of the kids combined-and asked me to bring it over to the shelter. The box had vegetables, the kind that I ignored when I was ages 3-9 (the ages of most of the kids), and in fact still try to ignore but only eat when I feel guilty about eating chocolate. The box was heavy, but the children clinging onto the sides and grabbing at it's contents, persimmons and cucumbers and bell-peppers, weighing me and the box down. If I'd had a couple more arms, or better Hebrew, I might have gently swatted at them verbally or physically--but I had no option but to carry the box around the corner towards the shelter, looking around for someone to guide me. "Where should I put it down," I wondered. "Put it down in front of my door," they cried. Shit. Now was I going to be forced into making a real decision--which family would get the choiciest of the fruits and vegetables? I quickly came to the conclusion that it would just be easier to drop it somewhere in the middle, and rushed by the kids trying to get the best fruits and vegetables. The box stood almost abandoned in a minute, with some of the vegetables left ignored on the sidewalk. "Shouldn't you take these inside?" I asked them. They shook their heads. Eventually, one of the kids led me inside the shelter, the floor was covered in sand (like mine on bad days), and when I asked to use the bathroom I was guided to a little room with no door handle. When I entered, and saw their toilet, I thought of something one of my professors mentioned earlier this week, that there are tens of saying in Hebrew that mean, "We're equal," such as, "All of our shit comes from the same place," and "your head is getting to large for their shoulders. Damn, I thought, my toilet is EXACTLY the same as theirs, we really aren't so different in equality terms or dignity, we're exactly the same type of humans, but I've been given everything in my life while I know that these kids are going to have to struggle, especially in a society like Israel where they're neither "Jewish" or "Arab."
The neighborhood, despite it's dismal location and the dismal financial situation of its residents, was bursting with delicious smells--better than any of the uber-exclusive, hyper-expensive restaurants that I walk by on a daily basis.
One of the coolest things that I saw was an Iraqi-Jewish-Israeli woman (too many hyphens, I know!) who had lived in Iraq until she was 10. She spoke with this kids from Darfur in Arabic, even though hers was the Arabic equivalent of Yiddish and theirs was far different than say, Moroccan or Egyptian Arabic. Other kids spoke Eritrean, and others spoke who-knows-what. In the end, I was walked to the Central Bus Station (somewhere I swore I'd never go at night) by two French-Jewish students, and put safely onto a sherut uptown to my neighbor, where refugees don't reside and the immigrants are from the US and England.
Before this voyage, I had always thought of Tel-Aviv, a flat city that is physically cohesive, as a single unit, it's only world, and Jerusalem as a totally separate world-perhaps a separate planet. Now, I got to see there are multiple Tel-Avivs, and my Tel-Aviv is nowhere near the impoverished Tel-Aviv.
