Brown students often undertake demanding volunteer work during school vacations, but this summer Nadia Maccabee '08 and Alex Ewenczyk '08 may have ended up with more than they bargained for. The two spent the summer working as first aid ambulance responders in Israel, and halfway through the summer they found themselves in a war zone as conflict with neighboring Lebanon exploded.
As pre-med students eager to experience emergency medicine firsthand, Maccabee, Ewenczyk and their friend Addie Peretz '07 volunteered with Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross. After one week of training in Jerusalem, Maccabee was assigned to Beersheva, a city in the Negev desert in the south of Israel, and Ewenczyk went to Tel Aviv.
Maccabee, a Minnesota native, said this was her sixth visit to Israel, and Ewenczyk, who is French but lives in Bangkok, had also been to Israel before. Both said security was tight even before the crisis broke out in July.
"Always in restaurants, coffee shops, there are people who check your bags," Maccabee said. "(Security officials at the hospital) always check every ambulance for explosives before it enters the hospital because in the past terrorists have used ambulances to go into hospitals to kill or injure sick people."
She added, "I never really got used to stopping the ambulance when we were rushing in with a sick person, but that's what you had to do."
Before the war began, Maccabee said her work consisted of desert-related medical problems, such as scorpion stings, food poisoning and heatstroke. During that time, she said she generally felt safe.
But once the first rocket hit Israel, Maccabee felt less secure.
"My first reaction was that I started crying," she said. "The first place hit was one of my favorite cities. And it was hit over and over again and hearing that totally freaked me out."
Once the conflict began, several people in her program left the country because of the danger. Maccabee estimated that of the roughly 130 people participating in her program, about 20 left. But Maccabee never considered going home.
"It was difficult for most of us (participating in the program) to leave, because it almost felt like we were abandoning the country," Maccabee said.
As the conflict continued, Maccabee said she learned native Israelis' strategies for ensuring day-to-day safety, including never sitting in the front of a bus. "If a terrorist is stopped by a policeman in the front of the bus, he may still blow himself up," she said. Other safety measures included avoiding long lines and sitting in the back of a restaurant to avoid glass windows that could shatter in an explosion.
Though Maccabee did not personally witness any violence, she remained aware of the ever-present possibility of danger.
"Once (the ambulance) got a call, and they just said 'bomb,'" she said. "The medics in the ambulance explained to me there was a suicide bomber."
Maccabee's ambulance arrived at an outdoor market where the suspected bomb was and waited while a robot inspected a bag that had been left behind. "It turned out to be just a backpack, but it was a really frightening 20 minutes," she said.
In Tel Aviv, where there was a constant threat of terrorism unrelated to the war, Ewenczyk had a slightly different experience.
"The secret services were finding one to two bomb threats a day in Tel Aviv," she said. "One day I was walking around near an outdoor market, and three hours later they had the whole area evacuated because they found a bomb there."
Because of police and army efforts, none of the attempted bombings was successful, Ewenczyk said. She added that she did not worry about going to Israel before the war and even felt safe during the conflict because fighting did not take place in Tel Aviv. Still, because of Tel Aviv's coastal location, she was constantly aware of the warfare going on just north.
"The war planes fly along the coast, so if you're just lying on the beach and tanning or something, you see them flying overhead to Lebanon," she said.
Like Maccabee, Ewenczyk did not want to leave Israel once fighting began.
"I told myself I wasn't going to leave because I'd be a coward," she said. "I'd made a commitment to help, if something was going to happen, I needed to be there. If there was a time when they needed volunteers, I was going to be a volunteer."
Maccabee and Ewenczyk both commented on Israelis' ability to embrace life in the midst of conflict.
"Israelis don't stop their life when there's a war, and that's really hard to understand when you're a foreigner," Ewenczyk said. "In Tel Aviv, life is not stopping - cafes, bars are open. In a foreigner's mind you're thinking life should stop, but Israelis have grown up in this environment for their entire life, so it's normal."
Maccabee said her experience in Israel helped her learn how to live in the midst of political conflict. "The Israeli mentality rubbed off on me," she said.
Both Maccabee and Ewenczyk say they are happy to be safe and back at Brown, but that even returning to an idyllic college campus has been overwhelming.
"Being back in America is hard in some way," Maccabee said. "It's hard to sum up everything that happened this summer."
