my first tear of medical school is complete, and it was a good one! thankfully i passed all my exams, and now we’re into the second year – systems! this means we will now study just one subject at a time and have an exam every three or so weeks. we recently finished hematology, and now we’re into endocrinology!
a few happenings of the last semester:
-holidays: purim (think jewish halloween), hag b’omer (collect scraps of wood all year so that they can be thrown into a huge bonfire that can be partied around), holocaust remembrance and israeli independence day (minutes of silence during which everything in israel stops, including all traffic on the freeways, followed by a huge party with epic fireworks right outside my apartment), ben-gurion university student day (live music all night; pool party all day)
-a disaster management module that was quite interesting
-ran the dead sea half marathon with a number of my classmates; the lowest race on earth!! 1:37; i was happy with that. afterward we got to swim in the extremely salty dead sea water, which felt great on some our freshly chaffed nipples – you can imagine the yelps!
-had the opportunity to go to two christian “student conferences” that involved jewish as well as arab believers. really good times and great to meet some people outside of beer sheva.
-msih prom: bringing the american high school experience to israel.
-some unplanned school-free rocket days (they come from gaza). after one, we made some young israeli friends hanging out in a bomb shelter. they took us to where one of the rockets had hit that day – it decimated a school. good reminder that it is important to hide when that siren goes off.
-perhaps the most profound three hour conversation of the semester was with an american college student who had just finished three months of nonviolently documenting abuses of the occupation with christian peacemaker teams in hebron, palestine. check out some of his documentation of what’s going down in hebron here: http://www.cpt.org/underattack. the occupation is so messed up, yet so intractable – so seemingly impossible to do anything about. but this guy found a way to really put himself out there in a politically poignant yet very Christ-like manner, and i found it nothing short of inspirational.
