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. =)