My day to day life:
Sunday through Thursday (except Monday) I have Ulpan (Hebrew Class) from 8:30 am - 1:30 pm. On Mondays, the whole group travels somewhere in Israel for an “education day”. Since I last wrote, we have had an education day that was about Israeli Politics and one about Refugees in Israel. In addition to Ulpan, I volunteer with a program called Atidim on Sundays and coaching basketball on Tuesdays. On the weekends, I have been going to Tel Aviv every weekend (minus maybe two or three).
Atidim is a program set in place for children who come from hard backgrounds and have a difficult home life, but that are exceptionally bright and have the potential to do well academically. The program provides extra tutoring for these kids 8 hours a week. For 1.5 of these hours, two other OTZMAnikim and I put together a fun activity completely in English to help them realize English is more than just boring grammar. For instance, this week we did “human bingo” and “categories”. Next week we are planning an activity to help teach them slang.
On Tuesdays my volunteer activity is “coaching” girls basketball. Really, I just practice with the girls and since they are 13 and 14 year olds they think I am an extraordinary player. I get to run around and help them learn easy techniques such as picks and zone defense. It is really fun and gets me back on the court. Plus, they love having Americans around. Its funny how they think we (the OTZMAnikim) are so cool just because we are American. But I can’t complain, since it makes my job of connecting with them much easier.
Education Days: Israeli Politics and Refugees in Israel
During the Israeli politics day we began by doing an activity introducing us to the 12 different Israeli political groups. After a brief introduction to the groups, we met with the Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Post (one of the largest English newspapers in Israel). The last speaker was a woman from the Israel Religious Action Center who spoke to us about how Israel deals with “Freedom from Religion” and “Freedom for Religion”. While the day was just a very brief overview, it was a needed overview as my knowledge on Israeli politics is very limited.
Our refugee education day started by visiting the Rigozin Elementary School in Tel Aviv (which happens to be the school where Abby interns) where we learned about the children of foreign workers and how the government is treating them. This is currently a hot topic in Israel, especially at the Rigozin Elementary School where many of the children could be deported due to their parent’s status as foreign workers. The principal of the school took an interesting stance on the subject. She stated that if the government doesn’t want immigrant workers to stay in the country after they have children, it needs to enact a law ordering them to leave. However since the Israeli government has not yet made an effective law, it needs to take responsibility and allow the current children (some who have spent their entire lives in Israel as Israelis) to stay in Israel. After leaving the school, we took a tour of south Tel Aviv, where the population no longer looks like Jews but instead like a piece of Africa. Lead by our tour guide from Africa Refugee Development Center (ARDC), we learned about African refugees from Eritrea, Sudan, Etheopia, etc. Since 2006, Israel has only given refugee status to 9 people, while there are currently 26,000 refugees in Israel (10,000 of which have come to the country since January 2010). Without giving refugee status to these tens of thousands of people, the refugees are unable to work, which therefore has a negative trickling affect on their lives. Overall the day was extremely informative and showed me a whole other side of Tel Aviv.
My Trip to the Golan:
This past weekend I took a trip up to the Golan area with Abby. I took Thursday off as a vacation day and we rented a car for the weekend. Since I am 23 (and she is only 22), I was given the exiting task of having to drive the car. At first it was quite scary to drive around Tel Aviv with the crazy Israeli drivers, but I got used to it and it was super fun. Who knew I could survive that?
Anyway, we headed up north on Thursday and went to stay with an Israeli family Abby knows from camp who lives on a moshav in the Golan. For those who don’t know a Moshav is similar to a Kibbutz, but is basically a community of people who live together and normally produce some sort of agricultural product. On the moshav we watched a beautiful sunset, kicked around a soccer ball, had some great food, and even when off-roading in the father’s truck. The next morning we woke up early and drove to the Yehudia hiking trail.
This trail was supposed to be difficult and take us 6 hours, but Abby and I completed it in 3.5 hours! While the trail was not very difficult, it was fun. There was a section in it where you climb down a 25 foot ladder to a freezing cold spring that you must swim across to the land on the other side. While the spring is only 20 meters, it is extremely cold and you have to carry your bag on top of your head in order to try and keep all of your belongings dry.
After the spring, we continued hiking to the “heavenly waterfalls” where Abby and I “cliff” jumped off an 8 foot cliff.
After hiking, we drove to Haifa for dinner. While we planned on staying in a hostile in Haifa for the night, we came across complications and ended up heading back to Tel Aviv for bed on Friday night. However, since we weren’t in Haifa on Saturday, we took a “day trip” to Jaffa (only 45 minutes away by foot) to explore the area a bit. Overall, it was a great weekend trip!
More to come soon, I promise to write more frequently now.
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