As promised: two weekends ago Misha really wanted to get out of Yerucham, and since I’m always up for traveling anywhere we decided to go to Tel Aviv for the weekend. At the last minute our friend David decided to come too, so we left around one in the afternoon. We got to Tel Aviv no problem, and our hostel was pretty nice. We walked along the beach and although it was a little chilly the sunset over the water was absolutely gorgeous, and we were all really happy to be there. We then went to dinner, and the weekend took a turn for the worse. I started feeling not so great, and my stomach hurt a lot. I told my friends that I needed to go back to the hostel, and fast forward an hour and I’m throwing up every fifteen minutes, unable to keep down even a few sips of water. After another hour and a half of this, I was really dizzy and had sharp stomach pains, and the three of us were beginning to worry about my possibly getting dehydrated. We played the ‘better safe than sorry’ game and after another round of puking we took a cab to the hospital. By the time I got there I was dry-heaving, and really dizzy, so we were all glad that we had made the decision to go. They admitted me to the ER pretty quickly (thankfully) and soon gave me an IV. I was finally able to stop throwing up and sleep for a while. Long story short, I was in the hospital from 10 pm until 6 am the next morning, when they shakily released me. I spent all day Saturday back at the hostel, sleeping mostly, drinking a lot of seltzer and eating a few crackers, and we made it back pretty easily Saturday night. But my sickness wasn’t really the significant part of this. The significant part was I realized how wonderful the friends that I’ve made on Nativ are. Misha (who, by the way, informed me just the week before that she refuses to ‘wait on people,’ even when they’re sick) and David took unbelievable care of me. The only people who could have taken any better care of me are my actual mother and father. They ran out and bought me crackers and drinks and anything I needed, doted on me constantly, and while they could have easily gone back to sleep at the hostel for the interim of at least six hours, they stayed all night in the hospital waiting room, checking up on me whenever I woke up. They helped me in and out of cabs, carried my stuff around, and called my parents to keep them updated on my situation. I am so unbelievably lucky that they were there with me, or else I don’t know what I would have done.
Two weeks ago the theme for Yom Nativ was Top Chef, and I just happened to be on that planning committee. The morning consisted of a scavenger hunt around Yerucham, and the in the afternoon each apartment was assigned a culture within Israel (Moroccan, Polish, Yemenite, Indian, etc.) and given a budget of 70 shekels to cook some authentic dishes. Each apartment then had to present their food along with some background information on their culture. Although I did miss some of the day because I was still recovering from Friday night’s fiasco, I was able to attend the Top Chef part of the day. My apartment made malawach (a sort of fried dough) and had a really funny Yemenite powerpoint presentation (courtesy of Sarah), and overall the day’s programming was a success.
Last weekend I went with Misha and Kesha to stay at her cousin Raya’s in Jerusalem, since Misha’s dad was coming in that weekend. It was all of our first time back in Jerusalem since we moved to Yerucham. One of my favorite things about living in Israel, and Jerusalem, is the bus ride to and from the city. I wish I could describe it adequately here. Jerusalem is surrounded by three valleys, so when leaving the city the view is incredible. The city sits atop the hill and is flanked by valleys that are covered in white stone buildings. In the day time, the white rock of the cliffs that matches the Jerusalem stone houses makes it hard to tell what is mountain and what is man made, and at night all of the houses are lit up and the valley is glowing. I love that bus ride. It always manages to remind me 1. that I actually do live in Israel and 2. why I came here. Returning to Jerusalem, it really felt like we had never left – except for when we walked past Agron and realized that we no longer lived there, and that strangers were staying in our rooms. Raya lives only about seven minutes down the street from Agron, in an apartment across from Ben Yehuda Street. We got there on Thursday night and went to our favorite restaurant, Japanika, for sushi. It was wonderful to not only be back in a city again, but in a city where we knew our way around and that was so familiar to us. After dinner, we went out for frozen yogurt and then to our favorite bar – two things that don’t exist at all in Yerucham. As much as I love living in Yerucham now, it’s very hard not to miss Jerusalem.
Friday morning, despite some unusually heavy rain, we went to the shuk to get the necessary ingredients for Shabbat dinner. I knew I loved the shuk when I lived in Jerusalem, but it’s being in Yerucham that has made me truly appreciate it. The produce is fresher, and cheaper, and the variety is infinitely greater than anything you can find in Yerucham. After gathering supplies, the three of us spent the day inside cozily napping, reading, and cooking dinner, which included hamentashen made from scratch and challah made from scratch – two things I’d never made before, and both of which came out surprisingly well. We went to Friday night services at a local synagogue, which was also an old comfort. While Yerucham is a religious town, and thus has no shortage of synagogues, they all leave much to be desired. The shul that we usually go to sequesters the women in a small corner and does most of the service silently, which defeats the whole point of going to get a community feeling and to hear everyone singing together. Additionally, most of the shuls in Yerucham (maybe all of them, I’m not really sure) are Sephardic, and thus they do things differently than we’re used to in our Ashkenazi shuls. Then it was dinner time, which was delicious, as was the company: Raya and her boyfriend are very sweet and also hilarious.
Saturday morning we opted to skip services and woke up just in time to leave for lunch at Misha’s uncle’s house. Her uncle lives in Abu Tor, which is about a half hour walk from Raya’s, which normally isn’t too bad, but because it was VERY cold (not compared to at home maybe, but definitely compared to the rest of the year in Jerusalem…it even snowed there later that week) and windy, the walk was a little bit miserable. But lunch was lovely; Kesha and I got to meet Misha’s family, including her father. It’s always nice to be around family here, and so I definitely enjoyed it. Saturday afternoon brought more relaxing and Saturday night brought Kesha and me back to Yerucham while Misha stayed in Jerusalem to hang out with her dad.
Last week’s Yom Nativ was ‘Yom Tiyul,’ so we went on a small hike through the hills around Yerucham. After the spectacular hikes of desert tiyul, most hikes for me are anticlimactic. However, in the afternoon we had a session where we met with the mayor of Yerucham, Mitzne. This was a big deal because not only did he used to be the mayor of Haifa, he also used to head the Labor party, which makes him a very well-recognized political figure in Israel. Unlike many people in Yerucham, he very much chooses to be here (rather than ‘ending up’ here) and he’s done a lot over the past few years to really try to turn Yerucham around. He was appointed after a big scandal with the last mayor that involved a lot of corruption, and he has been a really great change for the town. It was awesome to be able to sit down and talk with him and ask him questions, and it was easy to tell that he really appreciated us being here.
Last Thursday night was the Idan Raichel concert in Jerusalem. Apparently, Idan Raichel is a very famous Israeli singer. I’d never heard of him – I haven’t been exposed to that much Israeli music. But Nativ was heavily subsidizing the concert and providing buses, and tons of people were going, so I decided to go to. He was really great and it was a lot of fun, especially because it was the first time I was seeing a lot of Nativers from Kibbutz and Be’er Sheva since moving to Yerucham. That night I went with Keren back to Kibbutz because I was spending Shabbat with her at her family’s. On Kibbutz they live in caravans, and Keren’s caravan is really nice, as is the whole Kibbutz. But despite their living conditions being a little bit nicer than ours in Yerucham, I know Kibbutz was never for me. I’m not a farm girl, and the whole communal dining thing every day really gets on my nerves. Keren and I then went to Rehovot to spend Shabbat at her cousin’s. We mostly just hung out and relaxed, but it was a great weekend especially since I hadn’t seen Keren in so long and we had a lot of catching up to do.
*Before I finish this blog I’d like to make an amendment to my last blog post. My blog is never meant to offend anyone – least of all our famous cousin Morris, the family historian on my paternal grandmother’s side, the Greenbergs. I must make a correction to Bururyah’s warm introduction: I do indeed have cousins in Israel (who I AM looking up, I promise!), and what she meant to say was that the gan is my family now because I don’t have any family in Yerucham. There. Thanks for keeping me on my toes cousin Morris =).
Monday, March 9, 2009
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Volunteering in Yerucham
Okayyyyyyyy! Here we go again. I know it’s been a little while, I have been doing a pretty good job with procrastinating my writing, so I have a LOT to say! And don’t even start nagging me about my Europe blog, because there’s a voice in the back of my head that already nags me just fine. Ah well, life is tough.
So life in Yerucham has commenced full swing. First I have to tell you about what I know you’ve been dying to hear: our apartment’s puppy. Her name is Shai, and she’s a cute little yellow mutt. She was living on the street and following us everywhere, and the boys were feeding her, but then Kesha decided that she wanted to adopt Shai full time and bring her home at the end of Nativ (which is what the kids in Yerucham did with their dog last year). So while Shai does live in our apartment, she is mostly the responsibility of Kesha and Misha (mostly because no one else, myself included, really wants to be responsible). The vet came (yes, this vet makes house calls) and gave her her first vaccine last week, and we bought some toys for her. She’s not exactly potty trained yet, and there was an incident with her peeing in my bed (my fault, I shouldn’t have brought a puppy up to the top bunk to Skype), but she’s learning to go out on our little balcony that Kesha lined with dirt and sand…it’s hard to potty train a puppy to go outside right away when you live on the top floor of an apartment building. Overall, she’s cute but is making me recognize that Mom was right, I do NOT want to be responsible for a dog (I still think I could’ve managed a cat though).
Volunteering is finally settled – it took a good week and a half to figure out everyone’s schedules, with people switching all around after realizing what they did and didn’t like. We work four days a week, since we get Friday and Saturday off and Tuesday is ‘Yom Nativ’: an entire day devoted to our group and an activity, with every Tuesday having a different theme. Sunday I’m in my gan (kindergarten) all day, Monday I’m at my gan in the morning and at Kama (the girls religious school) in the afternoon, Wednesday I’m at Kama in the morning and then in the afternoon I tutor a girl one-on-one in English, and Thursday I’m at the gan all day again. I absolutely love my jobs. The gan is wonderful, my kids are adorable and they love me. My favorite part of Mondays is when I leave early and the kids say ‘Don’t go now!’ and when I tell them I have to, they ask when I’m coming back. The biggest issue with gan is that no one, teachers and kids included, speaks English. My Hebrew is improving, but that isn’t really saying much since it was so poor to begin with. With the teachers I can usually communicate fine, because I use a lot of hand motions and even with my terrible grammar they can sometimes understand what I’m trying to say – and they’re very patient and correct me when I say something wrong, which I really need. With the kids it’s harder, because sometimes I’ll say something to them and they’ll just stare at me, or they’ll mimic me because I’m sure I have a ridiculous accent. Often times the kids will ask me questions, and depending on how I’m feeling I’ll just say yes or no. More than once after doing this, a kid has dragged me over to do some activity or sit with him or her at which point I realize that I’ve agreed to do something I didn’t necessarily want to do. Luckily these kids are young enough to cuddle and tickle and run around with, so a lot of our communication is also non-verbal. And once or twice after a long day without going outside, when the kids get a little crazy, I have been known to yell at them in English out of frustration, but they always just laugh at that. I’m still learning all the kids names, even after two weeks, because A) there are 32 of them and B) they all have really hard Israeli names like ‘Niveeveh’ and ‘Mivaseret’ that I can’t understand until I see it written or hear the teacher say it.
The teachers in the gan are absolutely wonderful. The system there is a little crazy – there’s always a main teacher and an assistant, but on Sundays and Mondays two of them (my favorite two – Buruyah (I just made up how to spell that because I have no idea) and Etie) are there in the morning and then two different teachers come and switch with them for the afternoon. On Thursday when I’m there it’s a whole different teacher and the helper from Sunday and Monday afternoons that stay there together all day. And there’s also several other people that come in at random times during the week to do music or aerobics or whatnot. It’s pretty ridiculous. But for the most part I love all of the teachers. For the first few days they would ask if I wanted anything to eat or drink, and I always told them no thank you, I’m fine, and so finally they just stopped asking and started handing me food whether I wanted it or not. And after finding out how much sugar I like in my tea, they stopped asking if I wanted that, too, and just started making it for me every morning. On the first day, after talking to me and asking me a little bit about myself, Buruyah introduced me to the class and told them all that since I don’t have any family here in Israel, they’re my family now. It was really sweet. And Buruyah has already invited me for Shabbos dinner (unfortunately I try to travel on most Shabbatot, but if I stay I will definitely go there for dinner) and Etie has told me all about her four kids and five grandkids who I will get to meet when I come over to her house. These people are very much the reason I love Israel so much, because as harsh as Israelis can often be, Americans rarely welcome you into their homes and families with the ease and sincerity that Israelis do.
A few anecdotes that I’d like to share about my gan: the first is that the other day there was a really intense desert sandstorm, which apparently had blown in from Egypt and even reached Tel Aviv. You couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of you because the air was orange. On this day, I noticed that a bunch of my kids were crowded around the window. I walked over to see what they were looking at, and saw three camels just hanging out in front of our gan. That was when it REALLY hit me that I live IN THE DESERT now. You don’t see that in New Jersey. My second story occurred yesterday. It was a regular morning, we had services (sidenote: I work in a religious gan, so every morning we have services, with one student who is chosen to lead and all the boys blessing their prayer shawls…it’s very cute), and regular playtime. Then a little while into playtime, the teacher puts on this one CD, and immediately all the kids start SCREAMING, like they knew something was about to happen. So the teacher leaves the room and returns with a HUGE bag of dress up clothes, and all the kids, the teachers, and I get dressed up, wigs and everything. The kids are literally running around in circles, everyone’s screaming and dancing, and it was reallllyyyy crazy. Then, the teacher gets this vat of what looks like mud, and starts spooning in into the kids’ hands. So the kids are all dressed up, screaming and running around, and holding out handfuls of mud. I asked the teacher what it was and she told me it was “Heena.” When I still looked confused, she explained that it was for celebrations and wedding ceremonies. I then realized it was HENNA and all the kids were running around with handfuls of henna so that their palms would turn orange. I went home with completely orange hands yesterday and I still have no idea why they did that at all.
My volunteering at Kama, while the kids are not as cute, is much more relaxed. Mostly we just help the girls with their English exercises. Also, most of their English is pretty good, so sometimes we just talk about ourselves (they want to know all about where we live in America, and what our school was like, and what music we listen to), and by just forcing them to have a conversation in English the teachers tell us we are really helping. Plus, the girls openly adore us. I wore a black t-shirt my first day and a girl told me that I was ‘so cute’ and that my shirt was ‘very, very beautiful.’ I mean, what’s bad about that? I work with girls aged 7th-9th grades. My biggest challenge at Kama is my personal tutoring. The girl is really sweet, but her English is very limited and she’s hesitant to try to speak. Coupled with my abysmal Hebrew, I often cannot even understand her questions, much less answer them. I’ve only met with her once so far, and it was very frustrating, so I think this personal tutoring will be my biggest challenge while I’m here, and both of us are going to have to work extremely hard.
Dad likes me to break up my blogs, so that’s it for this one…coming up next: an exciting Shabbat in Tel Aviv, a relaxed one in Jerusalem, and Yom Nativ. =)
So life in Yerucham has commenced full swing. First I have to tell you about what I know you’ve been dying to hear: our apartment’s puppy. Her name is Shai, and she’s a cute little yellow mutt. She was living on the street and following us everywhere, and the boys were feeding her, but then Kesha decided that she wanted to adopt Shai full time and bring her home at the end of Nativ (which is what the kids in Yerucham did with their dog last year). So while Shai does live in our apartment, she is mostly the responsibility of Kesha and Misha (mostly because no one else, myself included, really wants to be responsible). The vet came (yes, this vet makes house calls) and gave her her first vaccine last week, and we bought some toys for her. She’s not exactly potty trained yet, and there was an incident with her peeing in my bed (my fault, I shouldn’t have brought a puppy up to the top bunk to Skype), but she’s learning to go out on our little balcony that Kesha lined with dirt and sand…it’s hard to potty train a puppy to go outside right away when you live on the top floor of an apartment building. Overall, she’s cute but is making me recognize that Mom was right, I do NOT want to be responsible for a dog (I still think I could’ve managed a cat though).
Volunteering is finally settled – it took a good week and a half to figure out everyone’s schedules, with people switching all around after realizing what they did and didn’t like. We work four days a week, since we get Friday and Saturday off and Tuesday is ‘Yom Nativ’: an entire day devoted to our group and an activity, with every Tuesday having a different theme. Sunday I’m in my gan (kindergarten) all day, Monday I’m at my gan in the morning and at Kama (the girls religious school) in the afternoon, Wednesday I’m at Kama in the morning and then in the afternoon I tutor a girl one-on-one in English, and Thursday I’m at the gan all day again. I absolutely love my jobs. The gan is wonderful, my kids are adorable and they love me. My favorite part of Mondays is when I leave early and the kids say ‘Don’t go now!’ and when I tell them I have to, they ask when I’m coming back. The biggest issue with gan is that no one, teachers and kids included, speaks English. My Hebrew is improving, but that isn’t really saying much since it was so poor to begin with. With the teachers I can usually communicate fine, because I use a lot of hand motions and even with my terrible grammar they can sometimes understand what I’m trying to say – and they’re very patient and correct me when I say something wrong, which I really need. With the kids it’s harder, because sometimes I’ll say something to them and they’ll just stare at me, or they’ll mimic me because I’m sure I have a ridiculous accent. Often times the kids will ask me questions, and depending on how I’m feeling I’ll just say yes or no. More than once after doing this, a kid has dragged me over to do some activity or sit with him or her at which point I realize that I’ve agreed to do something I didn’t necessarily want to do. Luckily these kids are young enough to cuddle and tickle and run around with, so a lot of our communication is also non-verbal. And once or twice after a long day without going outside, when the kids get a little crazy, I have been known to yell at them in English out of frustration, but they always just laugh at that. I’m still learning all the kids names, even after two weeks, because A) there are 32 of them and B) they all have really hard Israeli names like ‘Niveeveh’ and ‘Mivaseret’ that I can’t understand until I see it written or hear the teacher say it.
The teachers in the gan are absolutely wonderful. The system there is a little crazy – there’s always a main teacher and an assistant, but on Sundays and Mondays two of them (my favorite two – Buruyah (I just made up how to spell that because I have no idea) and Etie) are there in the morning and then two different teachers come and switch with them for the afternoon. On Thursday when I’m there it’s a whole different teacher and the helper from Sunday and Monday afternoons that stay there together all day. And there’s also several other people that come in at random times during the week to do music or aerobics or whatnot. It’s pretty ridiculous. But for the most part I love all of the teachers. For the first few days they would ask if I wanted anything to eat or drink, and I always told them no thank you, I’m fine, and so finally they just stopped asking and started handing me food whether I wanted it or not. And after finding out how much sugar I like in my tea, they stopped asking if I wanted that, too, and just started making it for me every morning. On the first day, after talking to me and asking me a little bit about myself, Buruyah introduced me to the class and told them all that since I don’t have any family here in Israel, they’re my family now. It was really sweet. And Buruyah has already invited me for Shabbos dinner (unfortunately I try to travel on most Shabbatot, but if I stay I will definitely go there for dinner) and Etie has told me all about her four kids and five grandkids who I will get to meet when I come over to her house. These people are very much the reason I love Israel so much, because as harsh as Israelis can often be, Americans rarely welcome you into their homes and families with the ease and sincerity that Israelis do.
A few anecdotes that I’d like to share about my gan: the first is that the other day there was a really intense desert sandstorm, which apparently had blown in from Egypt and even reached Tel Aviv. You couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of you because the air was orange. On this day, I noticed that a bunch of my kids were crowded around the window. I walked over to see what they were looking at, and saw three camels just hanging out in front of our gan. That was when it REALLY hit me that I live IN THE DESERT now. You don’t see that in New Jersey. My second story occurred yesterday. It was a regular morning, we had services (sidenote: I work in a religious gan, so every morning we have services, with one student who is chosen to lead and all the boys blessing their prayer shawls…it’s very cute), and regular playtime. Then a little while into playtime, the teacher puts on this one CD, and immediately all the kids start SCREAMING, like they knew something was about to happen. So the teacher leaves the room and returns with a HUGE bag of dress up clothes, and all the kids, the teachers, and I get dressed up, wigs and everything. The kids are literally running around in circles, everyone’s screaming and dancing, and it was reallllyyyy crazy. Then, the teacher gets this vat of what looks like mud, and starts spooning in into the kids’ hands. So the kids are all dressed up, screaming and running around, and holding out handfuls of mud. I asked the teacher what it was and she told me it was “Heena.” When I still looked confused, she explained that it was for celebrations and wedding ceremonies. I then realized it was HENNA and all the kids were running around with handfuls of henna so that their palms would turn orange. I went home with completely orange hands yesterday and I still have no idea why they did that at all.
My volunteering at Kama, while the kids are not as cute, is much more relaxed. Mostly we just help the girls with their English exercises. Also, most of their English is pretty good, so sometimes we just talk about ourselves (they want to know all about where we live in America, and what our school was like, and what music we listen to), and by just forcing them to have a conversation in English the teachers tell us we are really helping. Plus, the girls openly adore us. I wore a black t-shirt my first day and a girl told me that I was ‘so cute’ and that my shirt was ‘very, very beautiful.’ I mean, what’s bad about that? I work with girls aged 7th-9th grades. My biggest challenge at Kama is my personal tutoring. The girl is really sweet, but her English is very limited and she’s hesitant to try to speak. Coupled with my abysmal Hebrew, I often cannot even understand her questions, much less answer them. I’ve only met with her once so far, and it was very frustrating, so I think this personal tutoring will be my biggest challenge while I’m here, and both of us are going to have to work extremely hard.
Dad likes me to break up my blogs, so that’s it for this one…coming up next: an exciting Shabbat in Tel Aviv, a relaxed one in Jerusalem, and Yom Nativ. =)
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