Stumped Pt. 2

So for those of you keeping tabs on the on going whodunit which I have entitled the Herodian Caper, I’ll give you an update. Miss Grace, the elementary school principle and school headmaster decided it would be best to go over to the Herodian and talk directly to the caretaker there and explain what we’d found out from our students. I had my doubts about how effective this was going to be. After all this guy seemed to be holding a pretty decent grudge against us since he did call the fuzz and all. Furthermore, what could we tell the guy… “Well sir we questioned our students and we got squat. Hope that helps with your investigation.”
With all these thoughts running around in my head, I pile into the van with Miss Grace and we trek over to the Herodian. I just had to trust that Miss Grace understands the culture more than I do, God will work things out, it will all be ok.
We got to the Herodian and the caretaker has a huge dog, which is great start because Miss Grace just got done telling me on the van ride over how she is terrified of dogs. Luckily, this dog was more interested in shade than in us so we walked right past him with scarcely more than a sniff (from the dog, not us.) We sat down in the caretaker’s office. His name is Natan (Nathan in Hebrew). He showed us pictures of the lights that had been broken and the tree stump that was missing and he told us how they have school groups there all the time but they’d never had anything like this happen. He said he hated to think that our kids might have done this because it was Jewish site but he was kind of feeling like that was the case. We assured him that if it was our kids, which it kind of seems like it may have been, that they were not thinking on that level. It seems more like the stupid stuff kids just do when there’s not enough people watching. We told him that felt responsible because we should have brought a smaller group or watched them more closely and he seemed to appreciate that. He told us he would like to see a formal letter of apology from our school and then he would drop his complaint with the police.
So that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll write him a letter and hopefully smooth things over with Natan and the Police. Pray that this letter works and that they do let the matter go without pressing any charges. That could cause big problems for our school and any future field trips we might like to attempt.
I guess what I got out of this whole experience is this: well first of all, I’m never taking the whole high school on a field trip again. But also, it was cool to see Natan and Miss Grace interact. Palestinian and Israeli, they sat down and talked about their differences. It’s possible. Who knew?