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December 3, 2014

For the third time since October, I’ve now arrived on a new army base with a new group of volunteers and new jobs for us to do. And while all the bases are starting to look the same, the work here definitely isn’t.

My job this week is to help repair the radio headsets that are fitted inside the soldiers’ helmets, which requires a lot of playing around with wires, and I know — this doesn’t sound like something that a volunteer can be taught to do in a couple of hours. It’s a lot less complicated than it sounds, though, and on paper, it’s not actually hard at all: The same step-by-step process applies to each broken headset that gets delivered to us.

After taking out all the padding and getting to the box with the series of wires (all connected by two main cords) that connect the earpiece, microphone, and radio transmitter, the first thing to do is remove all the screws keeping the wires in place. So far, so good. Once the screws and then the wires are out, I then replace the faulty cord with a new one and screw the functioning wires back in, following a diagram that shows me exactly which colors to connect in which order and combination.

It may not be hard on paper, but in reality, this is where it gets difficult. Manipulating just one wire and screw into a minuscule spot was frustrating enough at the beginning, but when it came time to put three together — connecting the earpiece to the rest of the headset — I must have spent over half an hour getting just the first one right. Every few seconds I would manage to drop a screw or my fingers would slip and the wires would move half a millimeter and I’d have to start all over.

I have to admit, though, once it finally came time to plug the headset in and check it for the first time, talking into the mic and hearing it through the earpiece, I felt pretty accomplished. There’s something about that little burst of static — the one that means, “You actually fixed this” — that made all the frustration and the finger cramps beyond worth it.

The learning curve is pretty steep; I got used to the job quickly and can now fix about three headsets in the time that it took me to do that first one (and with less help from the soldiers). To someone who isn’t here, I recognize that that might all sound incredibly unimpressive and possibly no different from the warehouse work from my previous bases. But for me, someone who has never worked on this side of technology before — or even had a job that required a toolkit — every successful job feels like a little bit of magic.

And each moment of pride when I hear the static reminds me why I took this semester off to volunteer for Sar-El in the first place.

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