First Couple Days of Volunteering

Before I talk about volunteering at College For All, let me tell you a strange thing that happened to me yesterday. In the morning I had Ulpan class with my Hebrew teacher Yifat. We were learning about the days of the week by linking the creation story to it. While we were discussing the story, the subject of God came up and with it the whole issue of not being able to the write God in Hebrew (it being too holy to write down). Yifat, being a secular and defiant Jew, writes down אֱלוֹהִים Elohim (God) in the middle of the board. But instead of writing with erasable marker, she accidentally uses a PERMANENT marker. Sign from God? It spooked us all and she was quite embarrassed (see pic).

College For All was an interesting experience to the say the least. I was picked up by Abid, an Arab Israeli who is in university and teaches English. He invited me over to his home and I got to meet his brother, sister and mother. Their home is full of Muslim and Biblical iconography, including a verse in the Koran and a stain glass drawing of Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. His sister married a distant relative, which I also found to be interesting, to say the least.

Upon entering the school, the kids immediately gravitated to Abid and then started laughing at me. "What's your name", I was asked hundreds of times, and each time I would patiently say, "My name is Sam. What is your name?". They would respond with their Arabic names and then quickly run off with their friends, laughing at their responses. These kids are so full of energy-- some express their energy in the form of being loud and obnoxious, others are physically aggressive. To combat this, teachers are generally much more vocal with their students than I am used to in Canada. Teachers will yell at the students to get them to quite down to the point where the more forceful the teacher yells, the more respect they will gain from the students. What a balagan (mess).

I also had a chance to venture outside the classroom and look at the English work some students had done. One work in particular struck me-- a poster board made by Grade 6 students about the Gaza conflict. It contained some alarming inaccuracies, including a reference to babies being targeted by the IDF for death. I was shocked to see such blatantly anti-Israel material in a school that is in Israel proper and funding directly by the municipality of Tel Aviv. One wonders why this could have ever been allowed as a project. How scary is it to think that these teachers don't know any better or just don't care? I thought about saying something, but I think my thoughts are best expressed here for now.

I may be doing more advanced English work with the high school class. Hopefully, I'll be of good help to them.

On Tuesday, I had an appointment at Beth Hatefutsoth with Marta, the coordinator of the Geology project. We discussed the purpose of my volunteer work and we both concluded that my help would be most needed toward the end of April and intensively in May when they get the most submissions and really need the extra help. With the extra time that I'll have over the next couple of months, I'll be trying to improve on my Hebrew.