It is beautiful here.
almond blossoms on Tu B'Shvat- a good sign :)
Waiting outside, we heard the school “bell,” which is actually a medley of ice cream truck songs. Still, several times a day I expect to see an ice cream truck driving by. We got our rooms (we already figured out roommates- I’m with Lucy, Maya, and Deena; we share our bathroom with Sarah, Leah S. (not my past roommate), Arielle, and Netanya) and began unpacking. It doesn’t look like a lot of space, and the rooms are clearly made for 3 inhabitants, but with drawers under our beds we have no problems.
At dinner, we discovered the food is good! We were expecting much worse food. We did not want to assume all meals would be good, but they have proven to be pretty consistent (just some dairy meals are very unsubstantial). It was also healthy, and we didn’t have desserts like at Beit Nativ (but we soon learned that nearly all of the vegetable dishes are full of oil, so…eh).
After dinner we met with the kfar director, Benny, and decided to no longer call ourselves kfarmers or kfarniks but The Jets. We have not stuck with this at all.
Some things about the kfar:
· Dati- The kfar is religious, and though many of the students here do not come from religious backgrounds, in public we are required to show a specific amount of modesty. Though girls do not need to wear skirts at all times, as we once thought, only those volunteering in the gan (preschool) do. We really just cannot wear very short shorts or tight pants. We also cannot be publically affectionate- this goes for the 4 couples in our track and everyone’s general hugging and jumping on each other- in order to be role models and prevent students from thinking they can act this way towards us.
· Duration- We are here for 3 months. While many groups have come to volunteer here before, none have stayed longer than 3 weeks. We are the guinea pigs with this, but I think this is good because it is even more worth our bosses’ times to teach us how to do our jobs. The students here are used to groups coming and going quickly, so it will be interesting for them for us to be here so long.
· Inter-Interest- The students who live here are ultra-Orthodox yeshiva boys and boys of Ethiopian/Indian/Russian descent. There are a lot of cultural differences between us and these groups, which can make us all uncomfortable at times. It is definitely a learning experience, and soon we will have programs with the students (not the yeshiva- they really just rent space here) to break down these boundaries.
Day 2: Elana, our kfar coordinator, gave us more information about the kfar and a tour. We learned about all of the different jobs on the kfar and ranked our choices for Rachel and Ira to decide who goes where. My top choice: the petting zoo (not really a petting zoo…the animals are in cages…it’s technically the Pinat Chai, Animal Corner). [Other potential jobs: gardening, refet + fields + greenhouse (the most desired job among us, and only space for 5), kitchen, gan, maintenance + laundry, shadowing students in English, Marom (school for special needs), yeshiva (maintenance in the area with potential opportunity to study), and beautification]
Later in the afternoon, most of us went to the makolet, which is a bigger store than we expected and very inexpensive. Internet had yet to be established for us, so we spent a lot of time hanging out together. I kept on thinking the whole day how much I love just being with our group. Still, we found we could get internet on the stairs outside of the girls’ building, so we took advantage of that and everyone walking by pointed out how funny we looked doing this.
Day 3: We did awesome stuff that people in Karmiel and Yerucham were definitely not doing. (I later learned they spent much of this day learning about kashrut because they need to take care of their own kitchens.) First, we went to “Yankel’s Shtetl,” just outside the Kfar Hanoar gate. Here, a man named Gadi showed us paintings and things that made their ways out of Europe. The way he presented everything was a lot of fun, plus we took a break to eat delicious challah. Then we went to the goju. A goju is the hut that Ethiopians lived in, and one was built just past our cheder ochel (dining hall) to teach people about Jewish Ethiopian culture. The Ethiopian rabbi’s wife, Tami, cooked for us a lot of traditional Ethiopian food and told us about life in Ethiopia and coming to Israel. We learned that when she came to Israel (20-something years ago), there was no question about Ethiopian immigrants’ Judaism, but those coming now are coming from intermarried and assimilated families and there is question.
So far, the day was breakfast, Yankel’s Shtetl with challah, and the goju with Ethiopian foods, so clearly we hadn’t eaten enough food and went to lunch. Then we prepared for our first Shabbat on the kfar. We showered, cleaned our bathroom for the first time (we’re switching off weeks with our bathroom-sharing room), and got dressed for Shabbat (but I resented this a little because I was ready to not need to be clean, like how it will be for our work).
Shabbat: We had services together as Nativ, and I really don’t think that if other tracks were to do this they would be as spirited. Then we went to dinner, where we had a lot of good food, but everything was brought out slowly (I don’t know why they found this necessary, but students working in the kitchen brought the dishes to our tables instead of our typical buffet). Most of us stayed together for a tisch, too. On Saturday, we had services together, lunch, menucha (rest), a dvar Torah (sermon) by Benny, and our final services to conclude Shabbat.
Motzei Shabbat (Saturday night after the Sabbath), nearly everyone worked out. All of the guys plus 3 girls started “Insanity,” a 60 day strength and agility workout program of which Jake has a video. A lot of girls did a few of Lucy’s 10-minute workout videos, too. I’m really proud of our track for this. Most of us are trying to eat more healthily, and nearly everyone has stuck to working out every day, even after our physical labor at our jobs, which I will tell you about in the next post (feel the suspense!).
Trivia: The cat at the petting zoo has been named Matilda.
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