I am going to write now about three very different and exciting weeks! I'm going to start with שבוע קייטנה, which is a week that the mechina does every year where we plan a day camp in an area around our mechina. This year we did it in Kiryat Gat in a community center. There were about 240 kids there who were split into groups of about 22, with 2 or 3 counselors each! It was hard, to say the least. The kids were super cute, but also super crazy. There were two girls from the program who had spent hours and hours and hours writing activites and coming up with the schedule for those five days, but it was nearly impossible to do the activites because the kids would not listen at all! I learned a lot about education in this week, though. We talk a lot in the mechina about the problems with the education system in Israel, many of which are similar to the problems in America, and it always seemed so simple to solve those problems. But experiencing what it's like to have such a big group of children who don't care about listening to a single thing you say made me rethink a lot of the assumptions I had made before. The truth is that the counselor:camper ratio during the camp was much smaller than a lot of the teacher:student ratios in schools, and we weren't even trying to make them sit and learn something-we were trying to have fun!
Other than the problems we had with listening, though, we had a lot of fun with the kids, and we had a lot of free time after the camp was over in the afternoon. It was nice to have time to be together without programming-it's something that doesn't happen very much.
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| Me with one of the cuter campers |
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| The whole group with our awesome staff shirts! |
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| The community center that we had the camp at wanted to thank us for volunteering to organize the camp, so they had a zumba teacher come at give us a lesson! The boys left halfway through, but it's really too bad we didn't get a picture with them :) |
After the camp, we left for a break for Passover. On that Sunday, my family landed in Tel-Aviv, and I met them at the airport! We stayed at a hotel in Jerusalem the whole week, had seder with my Israeli family, and spent the week with family and getting ready for my sister Aviva's bat-mitzvah! The bat-mitzvah was great; the room was beautiful (with a view of Jerusalem in the background) and Aviva was amazing. Everybody was very proud of her.
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| My siblings and cousins after the bat-mitzvah! |
Just a few days ago, we got back from the West Bank (Yehuda V'Shomron, or Yosh יהודה ושומרון, יו"ש). We spent a week there learning about the political situation and touring around the area. I will start by saying that this was one of the coolest experiences ever, because I never thought that I would be able to do something like this. The West Bank sounds like such a dangerous place, but I was able to spend a week there in this framework and feel completely safe the whole time! I will highlight a few of my favorite things that we did. First, we spent Shabbat in Kdumim with host families-I was with Esti and the Schwartz family-they have 11 children! Only four of them were home, and they were all such sweethearts! We sat with them for hours at the table, both for Friday night dinner and Saturday lunch, and they openly shared with us how is it to live in the West Bank. Obviously, they are very right-winged (they think that all of the West Bank should belong to the Jews), but they knew that we were coming from a different background than them, and they did everything they could so that we would feel comfortable in their home. Of course, being with Esti is always an hilarious experience, so just a couple stories that happened at the dinner table....1. The father said that he went to school in Be'er Sheva so Esti asked him if he had ever been to the Forum (a club there). 2. Esti invited the 24-year-old son who is very very religious and I hadn't heard a word from the whole day to come to our "slumber party" at night. Hahaha
We spent a day and night in Hevron, a 97% Arab city. We visited Ma'arat HaMachpala, which is the cave in which Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Leah are supposedly buried in. This place is holy both to Jews and Muslims, but they are separated because of an incident that occurred a few years ago in which a Jew shot at Arabs there. Hevron's reputation is that it is a very violent and dangerous city, and many Israelis feel negatively about the people who live there because of how right-winged they are. It was very interesting to hear about Hevron from the Jews who live there and not from the media. Again, I never thought I would be able to spend a day in Chevron, let alone a night.
Some fun things we did-we met somebody who told us a story about a princess who is locked away in a castle through juggling and unicycling. It was so awesome! We also did the second longest zip line in the world-400 meters-in Gush Etzion!
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| Some of the group at a viewpoint |
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| The organization that organized the trip for us is making a movie to show on Jerusalem Day about their programs, and they interviewed me to be in the movie! They basically told me they were going to cut me out at the end of my interview, but if not, over 2,000 people will see it. ah! |
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| We stopped at a ma'ayan (spring) for lunch...the best part of all trips. |
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| Some of the most beautiful views I've seen in my life are in the West Bank. |
