Initiation into "The Dig" (First two days!)

November 9—The Dig, Day 1
How do I explain this to someone? If you have seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, there's a part in the middle of the movie where they are digging for the ark with shovels, buckets, jeeps, etc...that's as close of an explanation to what I am doing over here as I can think of. I start out clean as a whistle and not even 30 minutes into it I am covered head to toe in dust and dirt. This morning we got up at 6am, ate breakfast and at 7:15am took a 30 minute bus ride on the back roads to the excavation site of Beit-Lehi. We can see the Westbank from the excavation site...we joke that we are in missile range (Mom, don't worry, I'm very safe!). The size of the group is 41 people and over half are kids ages 13-18 years old. The rest of us are adults who are supervising the kids. This is an excavation of an ancient city that existed in the 5th-8th century. The site is located by about 20 miles south-west of Jerusalem. Most of the excavation is happening underground, where several rooms have been found. I am working on the only site that is at the surface level. The archeologists think it is a living room type setting where the people did everyday things. There are four perfectly round, shallow holes on one side that could have been used for cooking. Today, we uncovered the top of either a door or archway (at least that's what he hope it is, but what do we know?!) Hopefully tomorrow we will dig down far enough to figure out what it is. I worked on a corner with Heather Murphy of Preston, Idaho. We are the same age, so it has been fun to get to know her. Our corner started out as a dirt hill, and by the end of the day, after removing several rocks and boulders, filling several buckets of dirt, and with the help of many other people who came over later in the day, we got down to the top of the bedrock of the room. I also helped work on the top of the archway looking thingy or door with my bishop, Kevin Walkenhorst, and John Paskett, who lives in my neighborhood. After moving the first boulder, I made a new friend…a scorpion came crawling out of the dirt! It was really quite cool. We put it in a bucket and it was not very happy. It positioned itself in “fighting” stance, if that is even the right phrase for it, though it had nothing to attack inside a bucket. I’ve never seen a scorpion in real life! There are also biting ants…eek! Overall, it is hard work. I can’t remember the last time I’ve labored this hard! But its fun, it feels good, and the soreness is that good kind of soreness that lets you know you had a good, long day’s worth of work…plus it is way fun digging around in the dirt and being covered head to toe in it! On this site, several inscriptions have also been found in some of the caves that are being excavated. They are not publicizing these inscriptions until a later time in fear of vandals ruining what has been found.

November 10, The Dig-Day 2
I’ll be honest, filling buckets of dirt really isn’t all that fun, unless you have some motivation. Our motivation….finding out that there’s more underneath the dirt and trying to get to the bottom of it…no pun intended. We found part of an oven and what looks like to be a water trough going down into that opening we uncovered today. I was working on the wall and the far corner of the room…how exciting. I found nothing worth telling, though I did 90% of the work over there by myself! It was actually really fun to find the bedrock, the pottery, unconvering the stones in the wall, etc. The archeologist in charge of our excavation area is Ben from Virgina. He is working on his Masters degree here in Israel. He’s a great guy to work with. We all really love his dog, Kasha. ) Except, I accidently hit her with a pick today...I don't think she likes me anymore! She hangs around as we are digging and sometimes, and when we are working hard, it’s nice to have some company. Bishop Walkenhorst helped me a little today as well, but everyone was trying to work so fast to work on the three new things we found in our area, I just kept to my little corner to get that done! We worked from 8am-5pm. Our bus driver, Elan, is a very smart man. After a day of carting around the diggers, he bought an air compressor (I think that’s what it is), and he blows the dirt and dust off of us before we get on the bus. It’s fun to see how dirty we get in a day! We are now done excavating until next Thursday. Tomorrow, we will drive up to Tiberius, stopping at some historical sites on the way. Monday we’ll take a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee and then go to the Mount of Beatitudes along with other historical sites in the area. Then on Wednesday, we will drive to Ceasarea.