During the summers (mid June-mid August) of 1976 and 1977 I was a volunteer worker on Kibbutz Massada. This video was made the second year I was on the kibbutz, but I’m guessing at least a month or two after I had left since they are harvesting the bananas. When I worked in the bananas it was before they were ready to be harvested. I remember setting out poles to help prop up the trees and trimming the leaves with a curved knife. Toward the end of the video, when you see people putting blankets on the grass in front of some long house-like looking buildings, those were the places where the volunteers lived. I was in the building on the left, if I recall correctly.

When I was on the Kibbutz, besides working in the bananas, I also got to work with chickens (from about 1:30 AM until around 8:00 or so, if I remember right), the olive trees, the alfalfa, and the date palms. Normal working hours were from about 4:00 AM until noon, with a break at 8 for breakfast. We stopped work for the day at about noon. After that it was so hot that no one did much of anything; typically it was above 104 by 10 AM. We ate hard cookies and drank strong coffee in clear, handle-less Pyrex cups at 4:00, before we went to work. Breakfast and lunch were in a communal dining hall; the meals were mostly the same, every day, morning, noon and night: hard bread, plain yogurt, boiled eggs, lettuce and tomatoes, olive oil, date jam (with the huge seeds in the jam that you had to pick out. Water, tea or coffee to drink. Sometimes at lunch or supper there was chicken and once in awhile we had pasta noodles and chocolate sauce. I do not know why they liked that. They had a place behind the cafeteria where you could fill water jugs with either plain water or carbonated water. There was a store on the kibbutz where we could buy things like Coke, ice cream and bubble gum: the Bazuka Joe comics were in Hebrew and just as dumb as they are in English.

We worked six days a week, with Saturday’s off, when we would take trips around the country. Kibbutz Massada is located in the Jordan Valley, just south of the Sea of Galilee on the Yarmuk River. We were right on the border with Jordan; I remember working in the date palms, up in the top of the palms tying the bunches of dates to the leaves so they wouldn’t fall off before they were ripe. I could see the barbed wire, the warning track, and the minefield; beyond that was the Yarmuk river. One day a wild bore hit one of the mines. Pigs can fly in that case.

This video brought back a lot of memories.

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