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Adele Raemer
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Adele Raemer
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Adele Raemer
Life on the Border with the Gaza Strip
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Rolling Despite Rockets

Sunrise in the Western Negev
Photos by Adele Raemer
In the wee hours of Friday morning, I woke up at 2:45. As I was getting dressed, I could hear the explosions of the IDF retaliation in the Gaza Strip: responces to the Hamas rocket attacks a few hours earlier.
We left Nirim at 03:20 in order to meet up at the starting spot for our sunrise phototrip, to document another sunrise in the Western Negev. I asked M to drive, so that I would be able to keep tabs on the situation through my Whatsapp groups and photograph Iron Dome in action, should we see it enroute.
Rather than take the usual route along Road 232, which hugs the Gaza Strip, we decided to detour from it when we could – not that we would be out of rocket range, but it did take us a bit further away, out of the closer mortar range. As we drove we got word of Red Alerts on our neighbors on Kibbutz Nir Oz, Magen and Moshav Ein Habsor. We arrived at the gates of Kibbutz Ruchama just in time to see Iron Dome racing through the skies, chasing down rockets that had been shot towards Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Nir Am and Mefalsim.
What followed that tension, was the perfect antidote to stress: a phototrip with my amazing teachers at Hasifa School of Photography. I’m sharing the beauty of the Western Negev sunrise, here.

Why didn’t I stay home? Why didn’t we cancel? Because that’s how we roll here on the border with the Gaza Strip; like the rolling hills in the Badlands of Ruchama.

Because if I had stayed home, I would have been letting terror win.

About the Author
Born in the USA, Adele has lived in a Kibbutz on the border with the Gaza Strip since 1975. She is a mother and a grandmother living and raising her family on the usually paradisaical, sometimes hellishly volatile border. She moderates a FB group named "Life on the Border". https://goo.gl/xcwZT1 Adele recently retired after 38 years as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, as well as a teacher trainer and counselor for the Israeli MoE for EFL and a Tech Integration Coach. She blogs here about both Life on the Border, as well as about digital pedagogy, in "Digitally yours, @dele". She is a YouTuber, mostly on the topic of digital stuff. (https://goo.gl/iBVMEG) Her personal channel covers other issues close to her heart (medical clowning, Life on the Border, etc.) (https://goo.gl/uLP6D3) In addition, she is a trained medical clown and, although on COVID hiatus, until allowed back into hospitals, she clowns as often as she can in the pediatric ward in the hospital in Ashkelon. As a result of her activity as an advocate for her region, she was included among the Ha'aretz "Ten Jewish Faces who made Waves in 2018" https://goo.gl/UrjCNB. In November 2018 she was invited to Geneva by an independent investigative committee for the UN to bear witness to the border situation, and in December 2019 addressed the UN Security Council at the request of the US ambassador to the UN.
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