I should become a tour guide here...

From the 15th-22nd my brother visited. He’s 5 years my senior and was always a person I tried to emulate growing up so naturally we share many traits. I introduced him to everyone here in Tabgha and immediately everyone made comparisons and saw the resemblances: personalities, jokes, laughs, smiles, etc.



It was good to have him here. He also served in the Benedictine Volunteer Corps, in Newark, NJ. Obviously not too comparable Israel and New Jersey, what we both share with our service is how extremely different our cultures were from what we were raised in. So in a large way we had many of the same challenges with just a different face. He was good to bounce questions off of.

Damascus Gate and the greater Old City of Jerusalem

Whenever the two of us get together we seem to regress back to adolescent feral boys (my parents are wondering how that’s a change for us). We had a lot of fun, some may say too much fun, but even in the moments when it may have been easy to get irritated with the other (mostly him with me on my navigation skills…lack of), we were laughing.

It was almost like a fantasy or some strange dream you have because as a child I would have never foreseen him and I in Israel. There were moments with indescribable views and moods where we were just left enthralled in silence taking it all in.



We are beginning the busy season for guests here in Tabgha, as our first big group just left and now I can’t imagine how fast time is going to fly from here on out. I kind of feel helpless like time is whizzing by me and I can’t grab onto to it to slow it down.

Gethsemane garden

Early Friday morning we had daylight savings. As miscommunication has been my motto this year, our cook Ibrahim said “we get one more”, and un-clarified a couple people thought he meant that you get to sleep an extra hour where he meant you have to add one more hour ahead. It caused for quite some confusion: the bells for mass rang two hours late and as I walked down to my workplace one of the sisters asked, “why are going to work so early?” (thinking it was 6:40am).

Church of All Nations (at Gethsemane)