I remember doing fire drills and inclement weather drills during school. The fire alarm would sound, and the entire student body would slowly snake its way out of the school building, at a pace that I always thought would not do us any good in the event of an actual fire. Then we’d line up on the field, which was right next to the school building. Effective. For inclement weather drills, we would crouch down, facing an “indoor” wall, and tuck our heads in between our legs. I was always skeptical of these drills as well—if there was any sort of “inclement” weather, I’d want to run away, not crouch down in an unmovable ball such that I couldn’t see the problem coming.
I’ve been doing drills for my entire academic career—that’s the only way to be prepared in the event of an actual emergency. But when I found out that Israel’s Department of Defense would be running a drill in conjunction with the Department of Education to prepare its students for an emergency—I spent 24 hours shaking with nerves. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. And when I did sleep, I dreamt that it wasn’t a drill anymore and I didn’t know where the shelter was. I carefully planned out every move I would make the next morning so that I would be prepared—and I begged Andy to stay home from school so I wouldn’t be alone. (He didn’t).
In the states, fire drills are done on a micro scale—a school, or school district, or a business decides to do a fire drill. People participate begrudgingly because they know they have to. The emergency drill here in Israel took place on a National level— sirens went off throughout the entire country, with the exception of a few towns close to Gaza. So even though I'm not a student, and I wasn’t even in a “public location”, I still heard the emergency drill sirens. To be honest, I expected them to be louder and scarier—but I heard them anyway.
A few minutes before the time that the sirens were scheduled to go off, I made my way down to a busy intersection near my apartment. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I knew that I would need to see people going about their daily lives and unconcerned with the siren in order to be convinced everything was ok. And that’s exactly what happened—I heard the siren start to wail, and I saw the pedestrians keep walking to their destinations without picking up the pace, and cars continue driving instead of pulling over. I even watched as a cab driver checked in with another driver to ensure it was actually a drill.
Convinced, I headed back to the apartment. The siren was still wailing (it was supposed to last for 90 seconds). As I climbed the steps in my building, I met two of the Yeshiva boys living in the building—one still in his pajamas, and the other in the midst of the shower process. They were checking to see that everything was ok—they hadn’t heard that it was a drill. So I told them “it’s just a drill” and in the blink of an eye, they had returned to their former activities. I was not so chill or nonchalant about the situation. It took me a few minutes to calm down and get my heart rate back to normal.
People used to tell me when I was younger that after I got my first bee sting, I wouldn’t be so afraid of bees anymore. The truth is, my first bee sting hurt so much that I might have become more afraid of bees as a result of it, if that was even possible. I figured after this drill, I would at least know what the siren sounds like and I wouldn’t think that every little sound I hear is the siren anymore. The truth is, the siren was quieter and subtler than I thought it would be—it sort of sounded like a strong wind blowing by a window instead of the shrill shrieking I expected. So… I may be even more on edge about the sounds I hear from now on, especially the techno music played by the Yeshiva boys downstairs, which sometimes sounds eerily similar. Here’s hoping today was the first and last time I will hear the emergency siren in the Land of Israel.
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