Title: Esh penimit
Description: Yaniv leads desert challenge and empowerment campaigns for at-risk youth. He guides young people who have been given up by Israeli society, and they too have almost given up on themselves. In an intense five-day journey he confronts them with unfamiliar challenges, and with endless patience helps them find within them hidden powers. When he meets the teens at the beginning of the journey, it seems that this time he will not be able to penetrate the armor they have built around them. The violence, loneliness, the conflicting past and the mistakes he made pose obstacles to him, which make him doubt his abilities and also flood him with memories and fears. Although Yaniv is a hiker and a tracker, a man of words as he is a field man, he also carries mental scars. And at night, when he can drop the confident appearance of the all-knowing guide, he remembers the friends he left in Gaza in Operation Eitan and the sense of unfinished mission floating and rising, and with them a sense of guilt that never lets up. Yaniv believes that the desert has the power to heal almost anyone. But is the task he has taken on too great? And will he find rest for his own soul as well? --
Subjects: Teenagers, Fiction, Dropouts, Adolescents, Romans, nouvelles
Places: Israel, Israël