A Visit to Bir Madhku

I'm alone in our compound all day, and I'm to lock myself inside so to keep out the stray Bedouin looking for work. The hallways echo in their emptiness as I make soup, lot's and lots of soup in vats I can barely pick up. I de-boned ten chickens in one day. How I wish for options.

But it's not all cooking. I went out to the site and actually got to see what an archeologist does. Out the door before 5am, we arrived as the sun was coming up behind the Roman fort. It's still decently cool, but that is relative.

Big Bill was kind enough to give me a tour and pointed to this rubble heap and defined fort towers, the back door, the baths and domestic area. A more recent Bedouin cemetery falls just off the front gate. An ancient well in the back where water can still be found.

Then they get to work, with their paint brushes, trowels and pick axes. They sweep off walls, remove rocks that have tumbled in from old walls, and pile their dirt into guffas - buckets made from recycled tires- then into wheel barrows. From there, the dirt is sifted and pottery shards removed, labeled and bagged. They fill out endless paperwork, measure their elevations down to millimeters and take photos with all of the footprints wiped away. I'm pretty good at sweeping away footprints since I continuously walked places I wasn't supposed to go. Ah, my ignorance.

Little Bill lifts a rock and discovers what appears to be a whole pot, intact. It takes him the next three days to unearth it. Others find old coins, looking more like lumps of corroded copper. We take breaks in what little shade can be found, and its not even 10 am, but they work until one. I've gone through three liters of water already. Must be time to escape back to the coolness of my inefficient A/C. A 100 degree galley is suddenly cool.

My visit has motivated me to cook even better. I see the heat they work through, the earliness of their wake-ups and the endless pursuit that they have embarked on. It's excitement at a snails pace. Suddenly, banana bread seems like caviar. Fresh bread instead of stale pita a religious experience. And the excitement on their faces when they walk into the compound and see cold drinks, massive salads, burritos, or anything, anything but more pita. Hmmmm, what to make next?