We are waking up super early this morning to head down to the desert, to a town named Arad to finish up our Winter Seminar in a congress with other Diller partnerships. The last couple of days in Haifa have been jam packed with community service, encounters with different groups of people who live here, and time to reflect and grow as a Diller community.
This post reflects specifically on our community service experiences (other stuff to come later). We can definitely say community service was quite a challenge for all of us – the work was demanding, exhausting, and rewarding at times.
Those of us teaching English at the Gabrieli School (Erica, Carly, Caleb, Liat, and Liza) struggled with creating appropriate lesson plans for young children who spoke little English. We also had to deal with students who didn’t want to listen (who knew it was so hard to work with children????) We ended up teaching English through song, physical games, and word games. Often times we got the sense that the students were upset with us for attempting to teach them but on our last day we received many letters (written in English) from the students telling us how much they were going to miss us and how much fun they had with us.
Those of us who volunteered at the Ofakim School (Brynn, Daniel, Noah S., Hannah L., Ryan), a school for mentally and/or physically handicapped children, had a mentally exhausting week. We struggled with remaining positive throughout the experience and we questioned some of the educational methodologies of the teachers - but our reward came in the connections we made with the students (when they were excited to see us the next day) and the smiles we provoked from them.
Those of us volunteering at the Senior Day Care Center (Noah S., Halle, Benyamin, and Tova) learned how to play rummy cub and card games in a different language and perfected our bingo skills. We also listened to the personal stories (in Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic) of the participants even when we didn’t quite understand them and learned some new ballroom dancing moves. And last, but not least, those of us who went to the Meyer Children’s Hospital at the Rambam medical facility (Alyssa, Gregory, Lizi, and Hannah F.) visited with sick children in their hospital rooms and in special classrooms. We painted and glued and created puppet shows and played memory with the patients and tried to give their parents a little bit of a break.
It was interesting that none of us felt that we had amazingly fun experience doing community service- weren’t we supposed to have fun while doing this? Isn’t that important for us? Isn’t that what keeps us coming back for more and encourages us to continue doing it? Someone in the group suggested perhaps if we would have built something we would have felt more accomplished and we wouldn’t have had to struggle with the language and cultural barriers. But, on the other hand, maybe community service is not about us having a good time, perhaps it’s about responding to a void or a need in our community? Maybe building things without human interaction is an easy way out, of not dealing with tachlit (actual) realities of the needs of the community?
We’ve just started to think about what we’ve learned about ourselves through the community service experiences – how did we deal with our frustrations? Did we find positives as well as negatives? What would we do differently if this was our project? What was the impact of our behavior on the rest of the group? What are we taking away from this experience? Can we use these experiences to help us grow? We are looking forward to starting to craft our own projects for next year with all these questions in mind.
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