Fresh vegetables at Khezy's

Friday morning. Every Friday morning, my partner goes religiously to Khezy's to buy fresh organic lettuce and vegetables of all kinds. Khezy is an Israeli agriculturist from Ramat Hasharon owning several acres of agriculture fields on the outskirts of Ramat Hasharon, at the border of Herzliya; after years of "modern" agriculture, heavily relying on chemical pesticides and having suffered of a health condition due to constant exposure to agricultural chemicals, he has discovered the advantages of organic agriculture. Khezy does not have the look of a farmer as I know them from central Europe: quite, tall, slim and wearing glasses, he seems to be talking to his vegetables in the fields, stroking them in his shops. He is always happy to guide new customers through his patched together shack and to present his vegetables, as if they were his pets. On Friday mornings, typically posh housewives from the well-off nearby villa neighborhood  and people like us who enjoy the drive into the fields come to buy freshly harvested lettuces and green leaves of various kinds for their Friday evening family dinner. When he is not standing behind the cash, Khezy usually sits in the back of his old shack on an old sofa, leaning back, while watching the cash from afar and chatting leisurely with the nice costumers. Sometimes he plays backgammon with a few friends or relatives. From time to time he turns aside and drops a sentence or two in Arabic to his employee, an Arab woman of 55 from Jenin (a Palestinian city in the north of the West Bank), quite an unusual sight these days in Israel. Her name is Fatma. Fatma fetches the herbs and the leaves from the field or cleans the harvested vegetables displayed on the shelves for the costumers. She wears an old, wide and out-fashioned skirt over an even more out-fashioned pair of trousers, with rubber boots on her feat, her head wrapped in a white cloth. Her movements are slow and heavy, she limps heavily when walking around. Once Khezy, on a rainy day with very few customers, had told my partner Fatma's story. She had been working for him since years; then, one day, she had had a stroke and was left paralyzed. After months of hospitalization and rehabilitation in Jenin, since she was a widow since long,  her grown up children took charge of her, until she managed to resume living on her own. Khezy obviously knew about her situation and certainly would have come to visit her, if it would have been possible to enter the Palestinian territories. Eventually, when she returned to her own home, after about 8 months, Khezy made arrangement to obtain a special permit for her, allowing her to travel into Israel and staying there overnight at some relatives' of her and he took her back to work, knowing that this was the only option she had to find some occupation. Fatma makes tea from aromatic herbs which Khezy grows by himself and whenever a nice customer steps in, she offers tea to him or her. This time, as soon as we came in, she waved towards me, asking "Tea?" with a welcoming smile. I accepted immediately. Khezy invited me to sit down on an old chair and Fatma came up with a tray filled with big chunks of toasted pita bread, heavily sprinkled with olive oil and coated with appetizing "za'tar" (a traditional mix of grounded wild oregano - named za'tar - with salt and sesame seeds) - a definitely scrumptious and irresistible snack. Fatma poured boiling water into a jar filled with herbs and poured tea into several small glasses, asking me how much sugar I would like in my tea. When I said "none", she looked grimacing with disgust, saying in Hebrew "That's not tasty!". In the meantime another Arab woman, around forty, similarly dressed as Fatma, showed up and sat down to sip her tea. Again Khezy said something in Arabic, she answered something. The two women seemed to feel very comfortable; Khezy himself seemed like he had no intention to get up from his sofa anytime soon; he asked his partner to prepare the invoice for a customer who wished to pay. He told me that soon he would bring along a special oven for baking pita bread, so the customers could also buy freshly baked pitas; he is also considering to serve tea to his customers; somehow it seemed to me that his main preoccupation is to find a daylong occupation for Fatma, to keep her busy. Not because he needs it, but rather because she needs to keep herself busy. I felt like I could keep sitting there for hours, like sitting in a tent with Beduins in the desert, far away from civilization. Actually, you can see the highway from Khezy's shack - but seen from there, this seems like another world.