waiting for the instruments to be released from harbour of Ashdod

If you go to this webpage, you will find a selection of pictures of the container, as it was loaded in Brussels, and as I saw it today in the harbour of Ashdod, Israel. I left Pol and Lisa in Tel Aviv and spent today in the harbour of Ashdod, trying to sort out the last minute requirements and problems involved in releasing the container with the music instruments. Unfortunately, I did not succeed to get the instruments out for now. There is a delay in the treatment of the goods. The reasons for this delay are multiple and not very exciting to explain on this blog in detail. It is a scary experience for people like us who are unexperienced in the treatment of such cargos and are completely dependent on others who do this on a day-to-day basis. I do not give up hope though to get the instruments released tomorrow, so that we can start distributing them anyway in time before Pol and I have to leave the region again this coming Saturday. Both the Israeli Embassy in Brussels (Carmella Shamir and Uri Bruck) as well as the Belgian Embassy in Tel Aviv (Pierre Gillon) are working hard to give me the extra support I now need to make things work out at the end. I have been continually in touch with them throughout the day and my hope for a solution to this delay by tomorrow is especially based on their interventions, for which I am really grateful. Without their support, I would have felt pretty lost in a world of harbour, customs and security regulations which I do not know. Although people in the harbour were very kind to me, I often felt as in a book of Kafka. Anyway, we cannot give up on so much work by so many people who made this donation possible, and the authorities here seem to understand this.