Shelter Refurb

Part of our trip was a service project to refurbish a bomb shelter in a older / less affluent apartment building. Did you know that it is required in Israel’s building code to have a reinforced shelter per every certain number of people or to have a safe room in every apartment? That isn’t even something we have to consider when putting up a new building. We emptied our smaller shelter of all the clutter the first day and plastered the walls the second and third days. Our family had the youngest team member (Joel) to ever work with the organization Shelters of Hope and also the oldest (Pat).

This also gave us a chance to meet some local Israelis. It was a surprising mix of Jews vs Arab and also many refugees from other countries. On the tourism part of our trip we hardly got to interact with anyone other than our tour guide so we really enjoyed the chance to talk and ask questions as well as love on the people in the building where we were working. They were also appreciative of the work we were doing because they may need that shelter any day. Many of them brought us snacks and came to say thank you.