So it’s been a while since I posted here! I’ve been busy, but I guess that’s no excuse. I thought about it a lot, and decided not to write the last part of that series. I don’t feel in a position right now to expound upon Lech Lecha (go to yourself/to this place), because I’m feeling really uncertain about just where ‘myself’ is in this place.
But I’ve been up to other things besides existential quandaries. I’ve learned a few things since I last posted, among them:
1. The Israeli Post Office trumps Dick Cheney, Kim Jong-il, Ann Coulter, and Satan, for (current) most evil presence in the world.
2. Don’t believe the massive global conspiracy that tells you Eilat is beachy paradise. It’s cold and horrible. Maybe just in December. Still.
3. You can have Jew-Christmas in the Jewish homeland if your madricha is really cool.
4. “Ani Kar” (I am frigid) should not be confused with “Kar-li” (I am cold).
Nofim continues to be just awful. Sylvia is the most burned out person I’ve ever met. She hates teaching and is mean to the kids, and they give it right back to her. Twice this week girls were crying in the hall- one because she thought the other kids didn’t like her, one because she got a poor grade on the test and didn’t want to study English anymore. These are 3rd graders. What did Sylvia do? Scream at them to get back in the class.
In the 6th grade, I’ve kind of taken over the education of a girl whose mother was in prison and thus her childhood/education has been kind of unstable. Sylvia doesn’t even know her name—she calls her ‘that girl,’ punctuated by an eye roll. We started working out in the hall, but I decided to take her outside and sit in the sunshine when we can. We do exercises and play games, and she’s made so much progress. When we started she couldn’t recognize any letters at all. I gave her a test on Monday and she got 11 out of the 16 letters I gave her right. I was so proud of her. She’s having so much trouble with E, I, D, B, and T. We’ll repeat for an hour and she still won’t remember it. Anybody got any bright ideas as to how to fix the sound with the letter?
This last weekend Zeke and I went on a retreat to Shlomi, up north, with the kids from College for All, their parents, and the other Arab madrichim, who we hadn’t met yet. It was really an interesting experience. I was glad to see a lot of fathers there, and especially fathers with their daughters. Jaffa has been getting more conservative in recent years, to the point that 2 of our girls in CfA veil. According to our madricha, this was previously unheard of with pre-pubescent girls. The mother of one, we learned this weekend, is completely covered so that only her eyes show under her burkah. When she stepped out of the car she had a black scarf tied over her veil like Hamas gunmen you see on television, and my breath kind of caught in my throat, but she took it off when we got on the bus and didn’t wear it for the rest of the trip.
The parents were all really warm and welcoming to us, and we had a great time, though it was completely exhausting. Zeke and I were told to prepare an activity, and we assumed they wanted an English instructional game like the ones we always have for the kids. However, standing before a class of the younger kids who haven’t started English yet, and their solely Arabic speaking parents, some improvisation was required.
One thing I wanted to ask, but wasn’t sure how, was whether they considered themselves Israeli. If a peace were to be brokered and a Palestinian state created, would they want to stay here, in this country that for some justified (though unfair) and some unjustified reasons treats them like second class citizens?
I learned how to count to 10 in Arabic- wahad, hnan, telaten, arba-ah, chamsa, sita, sab-ah, temanya, tesa, ashara. I learned cold, hot, good morning, good night, I, and strawberry. “Tut” (strawberry) was already my favorite word in Hebrew, but knowing it’s identical in Arabic makes me love it more. I’m hoping to be able to master the alphabet by the time I leave, but it looks pretty damn challenging. The letters look so much alike compared to both print and script in Hebrew. Maybe that’s just because I haven’t been looking at them since the age of 5.
It was an amazing trip. I’ve never been quite so obviously in the minority before—Zeke and I felt like the world’s biggest honkies. This is an important thing, I think, for any upper-middle class white person to experience. But the important thing is that they didn’t treat us any differently than they treated each other: smiling, with respect and friendship.
48 hours later Shlomi was hit with 2 katyusha rockets from Lebanon. That, friends, is the way it goes in Israel.
