Yonni's Education and Academic Experience
Travel Experience
Work Experience
Additional Information
About Yonni
Jose C. Borrero

My full name is Jonathan (Yonni) Schwartz. I was born in South Africa to a South African mother and an American father. When I was one year old, my family moved to Israel.

Since 1965 we have been living in the small town of Michmoret, Israel, which is located half way between Tel Aviv and Haifa on the Mediterranean coast. As a youngster I spent much of my time at the sea swimming, sailing, surfing, and scuba diving. In school I was a member of several sports teams, swimming competitively for 7 years and playing basketball, tennis, track and field. As an adult I have spent much of my free time traveling all over Israel, through the mountains of Galilee, the Golan Heights, the Negev, and the Sinai Desert. Through all these experiences I gained a strong knowledge of and great love for the outdoors.

At the age of 18, like all other Israelis, I joined the army where I served in an elite infantry reconnaissance unit. During my service I went through a three-month medical course, an eighteen-month navigation course, a survival course, and a parachuting course. Since 1986, I performed reserve duty as a Staff Sergeant in the Alpine Elite Unit of the Israeli army. In addition, between 1994-1996 I gave lectures about coastal processes along the Mediterranean shores to the Israeli Navy Seal Unit. In 1986, after completing my three-year army service, I spent considerable time traveling. I worked for nearly a year on an Italian cruise ship as an under cover security officer. During that time I traveled all over the world, stopping in North and West Africa, South America, the South Pacific islands, the Far East, and Europe. After that I traveled for a year in the United States, spending most of my time at the different National Parks. This was followed by a 2-year trip throughout South America. Where I spent extended periods of time along both coasts of the continent, and in the Amazon rainforests of Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. I crisscrossed the Andes Mountains from Colombia in the north down to the southern tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. Most of my time was spent backpacking, hiking, and mountain climbing, traveling on boats, horseback or foot. During the summer and fall of 1996 I spent 4 months trekking through the Himalayas, spending extended time in both Nepal and Tibet. During the summer of 1997 I did a cross-country trip from upstate NY to California, hiking through many of the national parks I visited. During the winter of 1998 I spent a month backpacking, hiking and skiing in the Sierra Nevada. In 1999 and 2000 I traveled five months throughout Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. During this trip I backpacked, hiked, mountain climbed, scuba dived and traveled through the jungles of Guatemala and Mexico by a canoe.

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