Picking Olives in Bethlehem

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from my friend, Sahar (who also happens to be the district Relief Society president here in the Holy Land). "Sorry for the late notice," she said, "but do you want to do a service project in Bethlehem? We need someone to come help us pick olives."

After mocking her that her "service project" involved picking the olives off of her own trees, I gladly volunteered to help. I mean, who hasn't always wanted to go and pick olives in Bethlehem?

Picking olives is hard work! It doesn't seem like it would be, but each tree holds so many olives, and they are difficult to see among the leaves and branches. The process goes something like this: grab a branch, start at the top, and slide your fingers along it, pulling the olives off as you get to them. This makes it much less tedious than picking them off one by one!

It might not sound that hard, but it took five of us several hours to do two trees. Climbing in the trees to get the olives at the top are my fellow Mormon Hebrew U students Joseph, Becky, and Greg. (On a totally unrelated note, how odd that there are 4 Mormon students at Hebrew U this year! I will write more about this later, but the emphasis in the papers recently on Mormons and the large number of Mormon students at Hebrew U (4 is a lot for a place like Jerusalem!) makes me think that Mormons are taking over the world sometimes!)

After you pick the olives off of the branches, you let them drop to the blankets that have been spread all over the ground ahead of time. This makes it easier to gather the olives, but also helps the olives from getting bruised. Just be careful to not step on the olives on the ground (I took my shoes off while I was picking to minimize the damage) because you will crush them!

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, freshly picked olives are disgusting. Absolutely terrible and bitter. I know this because I tried one. It was so bitter it made my mouth go numb for several minutes. 

And the best part of this service project? Last Sunday Sahar gave me a jar of olives and a bottle of olive oil--made from the very olives that I helped pick!