72 יום

I finally got to go to my internship on Sunday. Just a little background, the organization is called Youth Renewal Fund (YRF) and they provide tutoring services for students in underprivileged schools in Israel. Three other students and I have been working on tutoring at a school in Lod, which is a town about 25 minutes from tel Aviv by car. It has been such a pain trying to set everything up. First off, everything here happens after the holidays. You can't start anything within two weeks of Rosh Hashanah because everyone will just tell you after the holidays aka a month from now. Even once that's over, Israelis don't plan ahead, so when you do get in touch, it takes another month to coordinate schedules and even once we arrived on Sunday, they still had to rearrange when they want us to come. All in all, we realized that we have about 5 more weeks we can go because of Fall break, our trip to the Galilee, and us leaving mid-December. We'll go twice a week, but only for about 2 hours each day. Now, not a big deal: except it costs 35 shekels ($10) to get there and back plus an hour when you use public transport. Needless to say, we were rather annoyed to arrive, have already had issues and still not be able to teach classes right away. Turns out the 8th graders have a big test coming up and their parents don't went them out of class, so instead of doing both classes during the day and the afterschool program, we're just doing the afterschool thing.

Now, all of this would be a hell of a lot more frustrating if it didn't turn out that we have the coolest kids ever!!! When we finally got to the classroom of kids, they seemed hesitant, but curious at the same time. We took 4 girls and split 2 and 2. Abby (who luckily speaks fluent Hebrew) and I got 2 girls who are 11 years old, speak pretty good English, and are the most charming, adorable girls you're ever met. It was so much fun just talking about our families, favorite food, book, movie, music, where we've been in Israel and around the world. Sometimes they had to translate what we said to them for each other, but then they always responded in English. I was really impressed. An hour passed really fast and we had to switch, even though none of us wanted to. Abby and I took a 13 year old boy who unfortunately, didn't speak such good English. He said yes or no to a lot of questions that weren't yes or no questions. But, Abby would translate and try to get him to repeat in English so he could make the associations. I'm not sure how much it helped, but I now know he loves cookies and really wants to come to New York to see the snow. Despite that, we could tell he really wanted to learn, but he was very shy and wouldn't say much. Eventually it was time to go and we basically walked out with the whole class, those we taught and those we didn't. They all wanted to talk to us even if it was "Hi, What's your name?" or "I'm going home now". It was so cool to see them that excited. It really made all the frustrations unimportant. Now I'm really excited too. I really can't wait to go back, but unfortunately, we have to wait until after we come back from Istanbul!!! O my gosh, I can't wait; I've wanted to go for so long! Gotta pack tonight, because The flight leaves at 4 AM so I want to leave class, which ends at 8 pm, eat and go right to sleep, although it's obviously not gonna happen. Either way, it'll be good for me to prepare in advance for once.