Living & Digging

These past few weeks I've been volunteering with a number of my classmates at the Lloyd Street Synagogue in Baltimore. Our professor Esther Read is working there to excavate a mikveh, a ritual Jewish bath. She did some work there a number of years ago but had to stop; now we are continuing that excavation.

It's been an interesting ride. To my surprise, it hasn't hit me too hard. I'm out at the site on Sundays and Mondays, and in the lab on Fridays. After a day at the site, I try to do some basic yoga stretches before bed and when I get up, and that's helped to minimize my muscle stiffness.

The dig is in a difficult location in a back room of the downstairs area of the synagogue. It is still a mikveh room, although the synagogue no longer functions, and we're between the current mikveh and the wall of the building. That big pipe in the picture has been in the way from the start. I spent one day hanging over it, with the joint pressing into my abdomen. That was interesting. In the photo, if you look close, you can also see that there's part of a pipe right in front of my hips. That's an old pipe that broke at that point - we removed the other pieces already. When this picture was taken we were down into part of the mikveh, and I'm standing in 2 inches of water, six feet below the floor of the room.

I expected being in the cramped space, crouching and leaning and lifting the pump for the water in and out of the hole would kill me. It probably would have if I'd been doing it day after day. But I did pretty well doing it just that one day. 

In other news, this is finals week and I'm under a lot of stress there. I've been trying to do well but I don't think I've managed it very well. I'll see in January when I get my grades back, I guess.