Mid Week Update

We have been volunteering in the schools for the first time. Five of us went to a local high school to run an after school program that is going to be once a week for a group of students called the Ahtedeem. This means futures if you’re curious, and are the students in the top 20% of their class.

In Be’er Sheva and other locations around the periphery of Israel, many of the people are very poor and live lives similar to the ghettos of America. The gap between the wealthy and the needy in this country is huge, about 90% of the income made in Israel comes out of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. So the students that grow up outside of these large cities are under privileged and go through school without giving much thought to college. Creating programs like the Ahtedeem help to single out those with a high potential and give them resources and support to get out of this cycle and most are going to be the first to get a higher education in their families continued...

Our first group with them was this afternoon and we first played some name games and then did a group Mad Libs in English with them that I got off the Internet. This was sorta a hit and miss activity because as we were filling it all out it came to a point where we had to describe what an adverb was (um sorry Steve… I am troubled in the grammar department) and when we read the full story I think it might have been to confusing for their English level. We then did it in small groups, which were more fun, and the kids were excited to come up with funny things. It was really cute in the end. Then we played some broken telephone (ask your locale Sigma if this is unknown to you) and charades. All of the students were really happy that we came and even with a mild language barrier, we could tell that we made some great connections and they are excited to see us again next week!

Yesterday we did some fun volunteering as well. It was Transportation Day in Israel, which meant that the buses were free all day and we were to pass out fliers and get a petition signed to ask the government for more money to fund the buses rather than building more roads for cars. I knew this was a good cause and that people were not going to get annoyed with it as they tend to do when passing out flyers in Eugene on campus from some random thing, yet the language barrier was a huge deal for me. When I would hand someone a flyer and they would start talking to me super fast in Hebrew it was scary for a second. I couldn’t even tell if they were supporting or being annoyed with me! So in some ways it was a bit awkward, but a lot of people were excited after they figured out what my broken Hebrew a long the lines of “no money for bus” really meant and we got a lot of signatures by the end of the day!