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I remember well the last time I was in Sderot. Our guide said if he yelled "Tseva adom" (red color), we would take cover. But he did not think we were in danger because Hamas had gotten their big prize the day before - they had kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Now, more than two years later, the circumstances of this trip were very different. Then, I was a National board of Hadassah representative to the World Zionist Congress and Jewish Agency Assembly. Now, my husband, as photographer, and I were accompanying a tour company coordinator and a group of Kiwanis from Belgium.

We drove by car from Jerusalem to the Re'em Junction, approximately an hour drive. There we met the bus and proceeded on several highways past trees and fields of kibbutzim for perhaps half an hour to the northern Negev town of Sderot.

Our Sderot guide was Eddy Azran, coordinator of the Sderot Coalition. This 40-something Sderot-born young man, married and father of two, had done his army service, gone to South America after the army, and returned to Sderot to volunteer with teenagers.

We soon learned that Sderot is not like any other city in Israel. Each day, he said, "when you leave your house, you plan your way from shelter to shelter, which are every 150-300 meters," said Azran. The 17,000 citizens of Sderot are now experiencing a quiet period. The day before we were there, one of the Russian missiles, built in Iran, fell in an open field. Over the last few months, 12 kassams have been aimed at the city. In the past, the average was three to five a day and on a hard day, 30 to 50 kassams would fall on the city, with an average of 10 seconds to run to a shelter.

"Most children can get to shelters on time," he said. "The rules of the people are: he who doesn't run fast enough will be in trouble. Tseva adom (red color) sirens are part of our lives; we are alerted to sounds and people here have different instincts." (Tseva adom is the warning broadcast on loudspeakers when a missile is coming in.)

As we drove through the community, we saw the reinforced shelters added to private homes built of concrete and often in pastel colors, the concrete protective covers over schools and kindergartens, and the shelters decorated by the children. We were being bussed to a lookout point. From the hill we climbed, we are standing 800 meters (875 yards) from the border with Gaza.

Azran pointed out the city of Ashkelon to the north and its power station, which supplies 60 percent of the electricity to Gaza but which does not prevent their trying to hit the power station with kassams. The terrorists launch these missiles from the protective cover of houses, kindergartens, and schools in Gaza, Azran explained. They shoot over all of Sderot and also to Ashkelon. Moving our eyes from right to left, we saw the northern border of the Gaza Strip, an Israeli army base, the highway and an electronic fence, small Arab villages, and Gaza City. He told us that Gaza is a 40 by 20 kilometer-wide area (24.9 by 12.4 miles) home to 1.7 million people. Until the 1980s, more than 400,000 people from Gaza came to work in Israel every day. In 2001, they stopped coming.

"They receive money from all over the world," Azran explained. "When they started shooting, they destroyed the industrial areas and agricultural equipment (left behind by Israel). Money, weapons and knowledge are imported into Gaza and there is no industry now."

Although the press does not report it, Azran said many people from Gaza receive medical treatment in Israel. The problems are caused by the leaders and the terrorists, he told us.

Floating above are zeppelin balloons, part of a complicated system, which sites the movement of the missiles.

We looked over the rows of red-roofed houses being built with shelters attached to them and learned that this area was a maabara (immigrant camp) in 1953 for immigrants from Iran, North Africa and Romania. Three years later, the government established it as a development town, to be the business center for the surrounding kibbutzim (collective settlements). At the end of the 1980s, Sderot had a population of 12,000. In the 1990s, it received a wave of 7,000 immigrants from Bukharia and Kafkaz in the Former Soviet Union, which was a huge challenge. By 2000, Sderot was a city of 24,000 but in 2001, the first kassam missile fell and to date 5,000 more have fallen, and 7,000 residents have left.

Since 2007, people of Sderot have begun leaving for 10 to 20 days at a time for relief from the kassams. Today, between 16,000 and 17,000 people live in Sderot, of which more than 1,500 are children. Eighty percent of the people don't pay taxes because they earn below the minimum wage.

Why does Eddy stay? "I stay because of the teenagers. You are in a trap. You have a commitment. I talk with them about my fear," he says. Sixty percent of the people would leave Sderot if they could; 40 percent say they could leave, but choose to stay.

We climbed down the hill and drove past a neighborhood where, ironically, Arab workmen were building a home's shelter. Schools have special glass windows, which cannot be opened; a car hit by a missile is parked on a street; we see the marks of the missile that hit a playground three months ago.

We meet three teens at the recently renovated sports center whose staff trained at the Wingate Sports facility. Michael is a Kafkaz-born 17-year-old high school senior and finalist nominee for a countrywide Israeli youth award. He said he will go into the army after he graduates high school, is a volunteer with Magen David Adom (Israeli Red Cross), and wants to be a doctor. He is co-leading a group of younger youth from Kafkaz and Ethiopia with 17-year-old Avram, whose parents came from Ethiopia a week before he was born. He wants to be a paratrooper and will either stay in the army as a career or perhaps be an architect. Or is a 16-year-old 10th grader whose grandparents came from Romania. After the army, he wants to be an engineer. All want to return to Sderot after their army service and studies and have no intention of abandoning the city. They are part of the four groups at the Extreme Sports Center, which services about 250 youth.

From here we went for lunch at YAEL, an acronym for business entrepreneurship for youth, a restaurant operated by 15-18-year-old Sderot youth from distressed backgrounds, supervised by social workers, to help them gain the tools of self confidence and how to manage in the world. Two teens and one adult are on each shift. Some of the students didn't even go to school before they began working at the restaurant. The restaurant is open from 4 to 10 p.m. and its profits go for activities of the students. The restaurant serves sandwiches, salads, pasta, toast, cakes and desserts and drinks and is close to the cinema, so people all around come here. The youngsters who prepared our lunch and served it were very friendy and sweet.

We board the bus, having spent three hours in Sderot and head back to Jerusalem and another world.

Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, book review, lecturer, food writer, author of three Jewish children's books, and synagogue librarian from Overland Park, Kan.