Cowshit – First Impressions of Erez

The jeep pulled into the car park and our driver left us to struggle with our bags and other shit.
I stood and looked around me drinking in the scenery.
“This place looks all right,” I said addressing my comments to no one in particular.
“Cowshit.” said my brother.
“Don’t you mean Bullshit,” I replied
“No I mean Cowshit.” he persevered, “Sniff.”
“Well seeing as how you haven’t had a wash since yesterday morning I would rather not.”
“Can’t you smell it? The Cowshit I mean.” He was definitely well into one now and there would be no stopping him, so I let him continue.
“I smell Cowshit and you know what that means.”
“They probably have exceedingly small milk bills.”
“Exactly.”
We did have an ultimate plan that we had been discussing over the last couple of months and step one of that plan had been to get onto a kibbutz where they had a dairy farm attached.  Step two would be to get assigned to work in the dairy.  We had chosen Erez for that very reason.
Back in the Reps Office in Tel Aviv, despite total lack of sleep and too much booze still in the system, we had both been together enough to put the presence of a dairy on our list of requirements.
Erez had a dairy farm, or Refet, to use the Hebrew word, and according to the latest information available at the Kibbutz Reps office, they also allowed volunteers to work in this area of the Kibbutz. This was not a universal thing as we were to find out over time. The dairy was a substantial moneymaker for any kibbutz and therefore a high degree of responsibility came with membership of the workforce.
Of course, we were both highly dependable and dedicated or at least we could pretend we were.
The master plan was that if or when we chose to leave the Kibbutz and swapped over to work in a Moshav, where you were paid a higher wage, we would have a marketable skill.  The highest-paid Moshav workers were those that worked in the Moshav dairies.
So there was a method to all this madness although it did depend on us getting over the second hurdle and actually getting assigned to the Refet work team.
Being just after lunchtime it was a bit of a job to track down the volunteer leader.  He was the guy we had been told to report to.  Like most of the workers on the kibbutz, he had been working at his usual job since the early morning and had come to the dining room, eaten his lunch, and was probably looking forward to an afternoon nap.  Instead, he had to come and collect us from the dining room and take us back for processing.
A volunteer leader is a strange beast, often a cross between a drill sergeant and a big brother or sister.  How much of each of those diverse personalities they allow to manifest depends largely on the individual.  We got the drill sergeant, with a small dash of the big brother who was also the main gang leader and the principal school bully.  At least that was my first impression.
Wulf, a German, of Bavarian descent, who bore a heavy facial resemblance to Charles Bronson, strolled into the dining room and approached the table where we were sitting.
“You the new volunteers?” he asked us in heavily accented English.
“Yes.” We chorused
“Get your things and come with me.”
The reason for the somewhat frosty reception became clear when we got out to the car park and were loading our stuff into his jeep.
“I don’t like the English; you’re a lazy, drunken, noisy lot.”  Well, he was right with two out of three, but we did enjoy our quiet moments.
“We’re not English,” says Dingo “We are Irish.”  Now this tenuous link can be drawn through our maternal grandmother whose father hailed from the emerald isle, but as at that time, Jack Charlton was getting footballers to pull on an Irish team shirt on the premise that they knew someone who once had an Irish wolfhound or they quite liked the taste of a pint of Guinness, my brother obviously didn’t feel he would be causing a major diplomatic incident.  To be fair to Charlton he did point out that it was only economic circumstances that had prevented his prospective players from being born and raised in Ireland.  As the story stood, our ancestors had emigrated from Ireland during the Potato Famine in the 1850s and starvation was a pretty strong economic circumstance.
Wolf was not so easily fooled.
“How come you have English accents?” He asked
“We are London Irish.”  I quickly added, thinking on my feet.
This seemed to give Wulf something to think about and he remained silent as we drove through the centre of the Kibbutz to his house, or to be more precise his room.
Most of the unmarried members on a Kibbutz lived in blocks of similar single-story rooms, with a small kitchenette and bathroom, and in some cases a separate bedroom.  Families with Children were usually allocated houses.
The rooms were of varying ages and reflected the development of the Kibbutz over the years.
The older single rooms were occupied by soldiers serving their time in the army by attachment to a Kibbutz, students, and the older Kibbutz children.  The oldest and therefore most basic rooms were for the volunteers.  No prizes for guessing where we came on the pecking order.
Wulf’s room was pretty basic and pretty scary.
Aside from the usual furnishings of sofa, table, and chairs, a bookcase, all of which were pretty normal, it was the extra wall decorations that got our eyes rolling.  The presence on the wall of an old submachine gun was OK, but it was the presence of a crossbow and alongside that an evil-looking hunting bow, that got us both going.  It looked like we had walked straight onto the set of the movie Deliverance.
Cue the Banjo music.