DCO Etzion: We continue

We still go faithfully every Monday to the DCO at Gush Etzion though there is nothing really to report. Except for the fact that people are called in for questioning or come for the magnetic card. There is never anyone at the window. There is no one to phone as we once were able to do. The soldiers are so busy that we cannot expect them to answer the phone. 

.Now and again,with long intervals in between, a voice calls out from the unknown for someone who has already been sitting there for a few hours to enter the sacred halls.....we never see them coming out again because we are Israelis and our time is precious and we can leave.  Not like the Palestinians from whom even the notion of time has been stolen. Do we go for ourselves or just to show them that to some of us they are not invisible? Now and again we  ask how they are managing financially. One man said he is slowly  eating away his savings and when we ask what will be when there are no longer savings, he  shrugs and does not answer .  And there is nothing we can say.  This is starvation step by step. In a country where the ministers are flying all over the world and living the life of Riley. We do not see haggard faces beyond the fence as we once saw because there is no fence just villages which are blocked off to the outside

And having written that and for light relief, I thought where on earth does that phrase come from and this is what Google told me. But when I asked Google when all this would end .....there is only silence.

 An easy life, as in Peter had enough money to take off the rest of the year and live the life of Riley . This phrase originated in a popular song of the 1880s, “Is That Mr. Reilly?” by Pat Rooney, which described what its hero would do if he suddenly came into a fortune.