To be invited into the home of Khalil Alamour and his family is a privilege. Khalil is a warm and modest man, a high school teacher, and a member of the village council.

This experience is not like the ‘Bedouin Camps’ that are advertised elsewhere. There are no tourist facilities; no shops, no cafes, no restaurants, just ordinary families going about their daily business in a very challenging enviroment. No-one speaks English except your host.

The Alamour family home is situated in the Bedouin village of Alsera about 15 kilometers east of Be’er Sheva in the Negev Desert. Two rooms are available for up to four people per night. This is a traditional community so unmarried men and women must sleep in separate rooms. The family has a modern bathroom and serves traditional home cooked meals using their own olives, oil, and home made pitta bread.

The house has solar powered electricity supplemented by a community generator that runs for four hours each evening. For those of you with laptops, there is wireless internet ingeniously obtained via microwave transmission from a nearby town. There are no telephone land lines but the village is within range of cel phone networks.

He is a teacher and member of his village’s local council, and in that role has helped to initiate several local initiatives such as procuring a daycare for the village and afterschool programs for youth. Khalil has been instrumental in providing the village with piped water for which he and other villagers laid over two kilometers of pipe to the nearest main supply. He speaks Arabic, Hebrew, English, and limited Spanish.

Alsera is typical of the 45 ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin villages in the Negev. Over 65,000 people live in these villages without basic services such as electricity, water, schools or health clinics. The Israeli government continues to ‘encourage’ them to leave their traditional lands through demolishing their homes, sometimes entire villages, poisoning their crops, and expropriating their land for new Jewish farms or communities.

The Bedouin are citizens of the state of Israel.

Guests should understand that they will be entering a very traditional society and should dress modestly. Both men and women need to be covered up. Shirts and dresses should be close to the neck, shoulders and arms covered, and long skirts or trousers (pants) for both men and women. It helps if the women have a light scarf to thow over their heads when walking around the village.  Reservations
geolocation – multi currency