It Sucks to Live in Sderot.

(Note, I would never entitle a note so crudely, but that I noticed that the best selling song on iTunes today is chunky little Kelly Clarkson romantic warbling, “My Life Would Suck Without You.” Whatever happened to “I Want To Hold Your Hand?” But I digress.)

The rockets are falling on Sderot again (today, February 3). You can read about it, probably on page D99 of The New York Times. It’s been going on for so long that it’s hardly even news.

There are not so many – only 2 or 3 or 4 a day, far less than the 8 a day average of the last 5 years (which includes the one year so-called cease fire that expired just before the January outbreak of hostilities). But they’re back.

At the risk of losing my street cred, I did not, in fact, go to Sderot when I was in Israel last week. (Patty had made it pretty clear that, if the rockets didn’t kill me, she would). I did go to Ashdod, about 15 miles up the coast, newly in range of missiles from Gaza. That was close enough. 

But volunteers from JDC Ashalim go to Sderot every day. In the world, children are at risk all over, all the time. But only in the towns in the south of the Negev Desert, the so-called Southern Conflict Region, have kids been at risk every day for the past 5 years of a rocket landing in their sandbox.

Sderot is a town of maybe 20,000 with the extremely bad fortune to be located less than a mile from Gaza. Pretty much every day, the folks who live there know there is going to be an alert, usually followed by a Qassam missile. Every Day. This can make it hard to plan your day. 

When the warning sirens go off, you have about 30 seconds notice to take cover. That’s how long it takes a rocket fired in Gaza to show up live in your living room, or anywhere else in town. Since the incoming Qassams are ‘crude,’ they have no guidance systems; they can land anywhere. However, when a rocket lands on your head, I don’t think you much care about its degree of sophistication.

This means the children of Sderot, and the whole southern conflict region, are growing up different from yours and mine. They are never allowed to be more than 30 seconds from a safe room, which makes it hard to, say, go kick around a soccer ball. The sirens go off at all hours, while sleeping, at school, whenever. The kids must have, at all times, some kind of pre-stress, stress, or post traumatic stress disorder going on. They’d be nuts not to.

Residents in Sderot are isolated. Even your fat Aunt Sybil, the one who always empties the refrigerator and then wants to borrow $20, ain’t coming to visit you if you live here. The residents are largely immigrants with no other place to go. If you think the real estate market is bad in Worcester, imagine a listing in Sderot (3 bdrms, 2 bths, Gaza missile vus). Selling your house and moving on is not an option.

I have a concern that, based on logic, we are growing a generation of psychopaths and axe murders, or worse, purveyors of automobiles, from kids growing up with this stress (just as I am concerned that the people of Gaza are growing similar kids for similar and other reasons). 

One of the Ashalim programs here, in partnership with the Ministry of Education, is called Havens of Calm. It is in Sderot, and in 73 other kindgergartens, elementary schools and high schools in Qassam range of Gaza. The one I visit is in Ashdod, which was considered out of rocket range until the recent action. 

Havens of Calm creates in schools an emotionally protected ‘safe space,’ a cheerfully decorated room, or a therapeutic outdoor expanse. Younger children – the ones my girls ages, and younger – are treated with a variety of arts and animal therapies. Older students are taught yoga, or outdoor activities that help them try to learn to relax.

I have previously expressed my view of many social workers – best used well seasoned, cooked, and served to someone you don’t like – as ineffectual do-gooders. But here, as everywhere else on this trip I meet them, they are true heroes, often voluntarily putting themselves in harm’s way, to help the children who simply have the bad luck to be in harm’s way all the time themselves. The Ashalim workers are creating pillars of support, and they are voting with their feet by being here.

I was asked not to photograph any of the children I meet here, for privacy reasons. But I can tell you they look like your kids and mine, at least on the outside. They draw pictures of smiling people, and even laugh when I go through a shtick I have perfected with Corky that features a talking stuffed animal with an anger management issue.

You get a lot of chances in life to screw up, and not so many to do good. Driving back to Jerusalem, the sun on my back, this is one I feel good about.