There are times when kibbutz life just seem to be one long string of duties. First, of course. There is your job - which, for many people is much more than a 9 to 5 thing; and then there are all the extracurricular activities: Seating on any of the dozens committees that actually run the kibbutz, feeding the sheep/turkeys/tourists on Saturdays, guarding said sheep against our lustful Arab neighbors at night, seating at the Kibbutz gate and nodding politely at cars going in and out (I swear! We actually do this, 10 afternoons every year...), or going out to the junction to pick up people coming by bus (we are situated in the middle of the great wilderness between Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, and the buses don't stop at the kibbutz).

Pretty daunting, right? Well, as the above T-shirt reminds us, it used to be much worse. Work used to be an end unto itself in kibbutz ideology - to some extent still is - and we expected to do EVERYTHING by ourselves. And everything was quite a lot - be it pulling out the weeds at the cotton fields, shipping off thousands of turkeys at 3 AM (really nasty one, there...), shearing the sheep, inoculating the turkeys (see drawing and shudder) or just manning the ever-growing number of machines at our factory.

But, as the kibbutz started to change, in the late '80, we started to realize that there was another way of doing this; the kibbutz has become a big, diverse corporation, and there is just no way that 200 people can run it all. So we started to employ workers from outside the kibbutz - first to help with menial jobs, later to fill some executive posts. I must admit that life is now much easier - and I wouldn't lie and say that I miss waking up at 2:30 AM and stumbling down to the coops to do battle with 700 crazed turkeys - but I do miss the sense of togetherness and of common purpose that we had back in those days.