An accredited course (SOC 110) studying the history, practice, and philosophy of volunteering - an exciting part of Young Judaea and FZY's Year Course.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Journal Week 3
I am looking forward to reading your improved journal entries. Please submit by 5 PM on sunday. Again, if you are not sure what to write, consult pages 206-207 in the sourcebook.
This week was a little bit of a disappointment for me. I have come to enjoy Wednesdays and Thursdays the most because I get the chance to work face to face with people that need the help most, unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to be down stairs in the center this week. I was put in the office to label food stamps. Lame, I know. I was really disappointed when I was asked to do so but of course I didn’t say anything since I am there to help them when they need it. I labeled 3 packs of 600 for 4 hours, it was torture knowing all the things I could be doing instead. While I was up there in the office though, I did get a chance to see how everything really operated which was really interesting. Every now and then people would come in and “interview” to see if they in need of A Caring Hearts services. One at a time old men and women came in and they were taken into another room where from where I was sitting was able to hear and of course with my excellent Hebrew level of 6 I could over hear much of the conversation. I heard people being asked how much their apartment was worth or how long they haven’t worked for or if they still did work, financial questions. It was really interesting how hard it seemed to get help. The people sounded so nervous as if they wouldn’t get the help they were looking for. After that I got the opportunity to meet the founder and CEO of the organization I’m volunteering at, A Caring Heart. He was really nice and really sounded like he wanted us there. It was a nice surprise. He explained to us how long he has tried to get Young Judaea to have volunteers there and was happy to see that we were finally there. He later told us he would like to have us also going to his other location, which would be really cool. I think this week was good because it gave me a chance to see a different side of my volunteer placement and the people that make it all happen.
Now that I have been steadily working at my volunteer placement, things are starting to fall into place. Mainly me. The supervisor is scheduling myself and the other volunteers with specific students based on each of our abilities. I am working with women who speak French because I know so little Hebrew. This started out as a means for me to be able to do my job because some women were getting frustrated with my lack of Hebrew skills. What it seems to have turned into is that women wanting to pracitce their French also come to see me. This makes me feel useful and more confident about my volunteering placement. Today things went a lot smoother. I worked with an 84 year old woman who is learning to read and speak English. She knows the alphabet which is a big plus. Most of the women know phrases they've been taught but can't say a letter you point to. I taught her the different "ow" sounds (grow vs. how). I noticed that she would look at my mouth when I said a word and then would copy the same shape my mouth took when saying that word. Because of this I grew more conscious of how I announciated. She caught on very quickly and I was quite impressed because other women I've taught have yet to grasp simple concepts. I'm sure the French factor played a big role in this. When I first started my volunteering, I thought: "Why are these women getting so angry at the fact that I don't know Hebrew? They're supposed to be learning English." But now I understand where they are coming from. It's easier for them and for me to propose an idea or address a problem in a mutual language. I can really relate to how these women are feeling because of my own situation. I'm trying really hard to learn Hebrew as quickly as I can, but my brain is moving at a much slower pace than it needs to. Sometimes I wish I was here alone for full immersion to expedite the Hebrew learning process. Having Americans around is like a safety zone. I'm comfortable with speaking English and Hebrew is out of my comfort zone. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be comfortable, but through my volunteering I've learned that the only way to get what you want is to step out of your comfort zone. If I want to learn Hebrew, I have to take risks, make mistakes, and be okay with it. If an 84 year old woman is okay with that, I should be too. Aside from challenging my patience, my volunteering has showed me how much I like working with the elderly. All of these women come from different backgrounds and have numerous stories to share. I find it really interesting that such diverse people can come together for the same purpose. Overall, I feel like myself and the other volunteers are making a positive impact at the Ulpan. When I was standing at the bus stop to go home, a woman who has a friend who takes Englsih at the Ulpan asked which days I come in because she'd heard we are really nice and good teachers. For tomorrow I need to make a lesson plan for one of the students I am seeing and I'm trying to decide if I should do a lesson with commonly used verbs, or similar sounding words. I hope the rest of the week goes as well as today went.
I finally realized the importance of my specific volunteer placement. Once again, I work at the special needs Gan. I have talked about in past journal entries that playground time is mixed with a regular Gan, but until this past week I was unaware that the two Gans are actually planning to mix more than just playground time. We had our first activity this week which we mixed with the other gan. We celebrated Booba the Dolls birthday and went to the other Gan for songs and dancing. Afterwards, some of their children came back to our gan for arts and crafts while some of our children remained in their gan. For the first time, I found myself sitting on a two foot high chair at a table in between a 4 year old child who is slightly autistic and deaf and another 4 year old child who knows much more hebrew than I do. More importantly, these children found each other at this one table. The two gans are aiming to bring the children together despite their differences. I believe this to be some of the most important interactions of their young lives, for if you teach children at a young age then hopefully they will grow up to be truly accepting of all people. I noticed immediate results from morning activities spent together because that day on the playground the children mixed like I had never seen before. It was a good day for me because I finally realized the importance of my location. I have noticed myself more patient at work and even though we are over staffed, I know to sit tight at those moments of boredom because any moment they could really use my help. I also took the initiative to mention the teacher that I prefer the arts and crafts activities, and I also offered to make artwork for future activities that she will be doing. (When I say artwork, I mean things like signs and posters that the children look to for reference.) Now that I have made work sound all dandy, I will still confess that the boredom can be painful. Today, they had us rake leaves in the back garden for a while. I was glad I could be of use, but I couldn't help but feel a bit used. I'm a volunteer though, which means I'm there to help and do what they need.
The most notable thing that has happened at my placement since last week's entry, apart from the infamous teachers' strike, was a huge messy balagan on Monday while tutoring students in the library. I became extremely frustrated with my co-volunteers, who are fun people to be with but apparently not at all suited for working in the community. In short, they were lazy and didn't do the work asked of them and conducted themselves very crassly. I read the assigned paper stressing the emphasis of role models in informal education, and remembering the poor behavior of the other volunteers, thought about how their behavior and mine affects our ability to teach our students.
On face, a large part of our value lies in the fact that we were born and raised in the US, and as such our native English becomes a massive asset. Even those of us who were poor English students have the benefit of being native speakers, with naturally correct grammar and vocabulary. Israeli universities don't accept students who are not fluent in English, with higher entrance standards than in Hebrew. Schools in low-income cities with high immigration like Bat Yam particularly benefit from exra English instruction, to help students achieve more, integrate more fully into society, and end cycles of poverty.
A common lament among volunteers in class has been that students don't seem interested in learning, and a more tacit part of our value as volunteers is that we are older, hip, good-looking foreign kids. Most middle- and high-school students find us cool and want to get to know us, to hang out with us. Surely this is an incentive for them to learn English; the faster they learn the languge, the better they'll be able to communicate with us. I've noticed some enthusiasm from the kids I've worked with, as have some of my other friends.
This brings me back to the thesis of my reflection- our value as volunteers largely stems from our ability to speak correct, natural English, but because our effectiveness is exponentially higher because of who we are as people, the way we conduct ourselves is directly related to how much the kids benefit from our time spent working with them. My co-volunteers are brash and loud but a lot of fun, and attract attention from the kids. I consider myself to be a nice, fun person, but when I'm trying to help children with their assignment, I can't hold a candle up to the allure of the rowdy American boys, who are a welcome distraction from schoolwork. It seems to me that their fun characters are a huge asset to our job as volunteers, but the message they send is that the schoolwork is unimportant. If they were to show enthusiasm for their jobs they could harness their personalities to become great role models and genouinely excite the kids about learning English. Unfortunately on Monday their behavior polarized their goofiness from my love of learning and work ethic (which is not in the least an extreme one), showing the students that they don't need to work on English to be with the cool kids. Hopefully the situation will improve, otherwise I might have to separate from the other volunteers to fulfill my potential as an English tutor and role model.
This week the school really got into full swing. During art class I worked with a girl in my class who I usually don’t work with. Her name is Imbar and she has very little use of her body. Her head usually tilts to the side leaning on her shoulder and her arms move minimally. She is in a wheel chair and simply doesn’t move much. She also is very quiet and her speech is very hard to understand. For all these reasons I thought she was severely mentally disabled. Between the language barrier and my assumptions I rarely made contact with her other than wheeling her out to where she sits during breaks. But, that day in art class I learned how capable she is. The class started out with drawing pictures and there were 7 kids so I was her partner. She didn’t just scribble like some of the kids; she drew hearts and wrote her name. I never realized how much she could do with her hands. Next we worked on yarn weaving and the teacher showed me to basically do it for her and just let her pull the string once it was through the hole. After a few minutes of this I saw that it was easy for Imbar to simply pull the string so I slowly let her do more and more herself. By the end the only help I gave her was aiming the needle. I never considered myself someone to make dumb assumptions, but with Imbar I obviously did. Over the next few days I worked with her a lot more and found out that she is very with it and though her hand-eye coordination is not as good as a fully abled person, she is definitely not paralyzed. Liza Mole
Dear Journal, Volunteering this week has definitely been exciting. Typically the staff doesn't visibly show their appreciation for our work, but this week it seemed a bit different. We did a ton of work including organizing and unpacking huge box's of food and folding and sorting bags of clothing. When the staff found out that we wouldn't be volunteering Monday and Tuesday because of Shalem programming, the seemed let down that we weren't coming to help out. I initially thought that a soup kitchen was really simple to run, but on Thursday, the soup kitchen was short handed because all of the normal Ohavim workers were on vacation.I started to see the challenges of running a soup kitchen. I realized that running the soup kitchen was like running a business, with bumps and surprises. We had to run to a nearby bakery to get a donation of pastries. We helped unload a shipment of donated salads, and searched for a grocery store to buy some tomato's, since ours spoiled. The people who come to the soup kitchen have also been opening up to me, lately. Many of them have been giving me the usual shpeil thanking me and encouraging me to stay in school and learn as much as i can. Moshe, a regular at Ohavim, had a long talk with me during his meal about always being happy, repeatedly saying, "if you don't laugh you don't live". He told me about how he has much less money than most of the people who come to Ohavim, but no matter what he will always be happy and enjoy life. Most people i help at the soup kitchen are unbelievably gracious- they shake our hands, thank us repeatedly, and occasionally try going for the kiss on the cheek. There was an elderly lady with a broken leg ( who for some reason didn't have a cast, but instead had gauze and a big sock) that was leaving Ohavim and was leaving as I was heading home, so i helped her walk out onto the sidewalk. The woman spoke in slow Hebrew so that i would understand her, and told be about how she broke her leg and also about her apartment. When we approached an intersection there was an awkward pause and the woman in a somewhat embraced tone asked if i would take her across the street to the bus stop. As i took her to the bus stop across the street, she would not stop thanking me. She said she wished everybody was like me, and that Israel needs more people like me. I'm really amazed at how thankful all the people I encounter are. At Ohavim, I feel like I am making a real difference, and when the work gets dull, i think of how gracious the people i help are. I'm discussing plans with my co-volunteers to initiate some sort of small project that we'll work on for the rest of our time in Bat-Yam. We briefly discussed the possibility of doing fundraisers or murals. We are going to talk to Yael, our supervisor, about what Ohavim needs most and with her feedback we'll continue planning.
Once Ilana left there was even less to do in the hospital. I needed to talk to the head nurse to be assigned to a different person, but she was never there. Even if I did get switched, it would still be unpleasant to work there. I could think of no reasons other people have for going to work that applied to me. I did not enjoy it, I was not helping anyone, I was not learning anything, and I was not getting paid. The only reason I was going was so that I would not be kicked off of year course. Clearly I had no other choice but to switch jobs. I was given the option of working at the agricultural school or working at an elementary school. I figured that the kids had probably already grown attached to some of the year course volunteers and that it would be harder to connect. I also figured that it would be more fun to learn a little about what it means to farm than to deal with little kids all day. Although it was a lot harder than the hospital, the agricultural school was also much more enjoyable. We did such things as picking avocados and wrapping baby plants in cardboard. Its hard work, and I’m in the sun all day. The first day I got a sunburn because I didn’t know to put on sunscreen. It’s much more rewarding than the hospital, because you know that you’re actually doing something. On the other hand, I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. I don’t really know how I could be helping anyone though. The farmers still have full days, and we don’t have any special skills that they don’t, our English isn’t useful to them.
I am an educator who has been living in Israel since 2001. Since 2005, I have been collaborating for the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora
7 comments:
This week was a little bit of a disappointment for me. I have come to enjoy Wednesdays and Thursdays the most because I get the chance to work face to face with people that need the help most, unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to be down stairs in the center this week. I was put in the office to label food stamps. Lame, I know. I was really disappointed when I was asked to do so but of course I didn’t say anything since I am there to help them when they need it. I labeled 3 packs of 600 for 4 hours, it was torture knowing all the things I could be doing instead. While I was up there in the office though, I did get a chance to see how everything really operated which was really interesting. Every now and then people would come in and “interview” to see if they in need of A Caring Hearts services. One at a time old men and women came in and they were taken into another room where from where I was sitting was able to hear and of course with my excellent Hebrew level of 6 I could over hear much of the conversation. I heard people being asked how much their apartment was worth or how long they haven’t worked for or if they still did work, financial questions. It was really interesting how hard it seemed to get help. The people sounded so nervous as if they wouldn’t get the help they were looking for. After that I got the opportunity to meet the founder and CEO of the organization I’m volunteering at, A Caring Heart. He was really nice and really sounded like he wanted us there. It was a nice surprise. He explained to us how long he has tried to get Young Judaea to have volunteers there and was happy to see that we were finally there. He later told us he would like to have us also going to his other location, which would be really cool. I think this week was good because it gave me a chance to see a different side of my volunteer placement and the people that make it all happen.
Now that I have been steadily working at my volunteer placement, things are starting to fall into place. Mainly me.
The supervisor is scheduling myself and the other volunteers with specific students based on each of our abilities. I am working with women who speak French because I know so little Hebrew. This started out as a means for me to be able to do my job because some women were getting frustrated with my lack of Hebrew skills. What it seems to have turned into is that women wanting to pracitce their French also come to see me. This makes me feel useful and more confident about my volunteering placement.
Today things went a lot smoother. I worked with an 84 year old woman who is learning to read and speak English. She knows the alphabet which is a big plus. Most of the women know phrases they've been taught but can't say a letter you point to. I taught her the different "ow" sounds (grow vs. how). I noticed that she would look at my mouth when I said a word and then would copy the same shape my mouth took when saying that word. Because of this I grew more conscious of how I announciated. She caught on very quickly and I was quite impressed because other women I've taught have yet to grasp simple concepts. I'm sure the French factor played a big role in this. When I first started my volunteering, I thought: "Why are these women getting so angry at the fact that I don't know Hebrew? They're supposed to be learning English." But now I understand where they are coming from. It's easier for them and for me to propose an idea or address a problem in a mutual language.
I can really relate to how these women are feeling because of my own situation. I'm trying really hard to learn Hebrew as quickly as I can, but my brain is moving at a much slower pace than it needs to. Sometimes I wish I was here alone for full immersion to expedite the Hebrew learning process. Having Americans around is like a safety zone. I'm comfortable with speaking English and Hebrew is out of my comfort zone. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be comfortable, but through my volunteering I've learned that the only way to get what you want is to step out of your comfort zone. If I want to learn Hebrew, I have to take risks, make mistakes, and be okay with it. If an 84 year old woman is okay with that, I should be too.
Aside from challenging my patience, my volunteering has showed me how much I like working with the elderly. All of these women come from different backgrounds and have numerous stories to share. I find it really interesting that such diverse people can come together for the same purpose.
Overall, I feel like myself and the other volunteers are making a positive impact at the Ulpan. When I was standing at the bus stop to go home, a woman who has a friend who takes Englsih at the Ulpan asked which days I come in because she'd heard we are really nice and good teachers. For tomorrow I need to make a lesson plan for one of the students I am seeing and I'm trying to decide if I should do a lesson with commonly used verbs, or similar sounding words. I hope the rest of the week goes as well as today went.
I finally realized the importance of my specific volunteer placement.
Once again, I work at the special needs Gan. I have talked about in past journal entries that playground time is mixed with a regular Gan, but until this past week I was unaware that the two Gans are actually planning to mix more than just playground time. We had our first activity this week which we mixed with the other gan. We celebrated Booba the Dolls birthday and went to the other Gan for songs and dancing.
Afterwards, some of their children came back to our gan for arts and crafts while some of our children remained in their gan.
For the first time, I found myself sitting on a two foot high chair at a table in between a 4 year old child who is slightly autistic and deaf and another 4 year old child who knows much more hebrew than I do. More importantly, these children found each other at this one table.
The two gans are aiming to bring the children together despite their differences. I believe this to be some of the most important interactions of their young lives, for if you teach children at a young age then hopefully they will grow up to be truly accepting of all people. I noticed immediate results from morning activities spent together because that day on the playground the children mixed like I had never seen before.
It was a good day for me because I finally realized the importance of my location. I have noticed myself more patient at work and even though we are over staffed, I know to sit tight at those moments of boredom because any moment they could really use my help. I also took the initiative to mention the teacher that I prefer the arts and crafts activities, and I also offered to make artwork for future activities that she will be doing. (When I say artwork, I mean things like signs and posters that the children look to for reference.)
Now that I have made work sound all dandy, I will still confess that the boredom can be painful. Today, they had us rake leaves in the back garden for a while. I was glad I could be of use, but I couldn't help but feel a bit used. I'm a volunteer though, which means I'm there to help and do what they need.
The most notable thing that has happened at my placement since last week's entry, apart from the infamous teachers' strike, was a huge messy balagan on Monday while tutoring students in the library. I became extremely frustrated with my co-volunteers, who are fun people to be with but apparently not at all suited for working in the community. In short, they were lazy and didn't do the work asked of them and conducted themselves very crassly. I read the assigned paper stressing the emphasis of role models in informal education, and remembering the poor behavior of the other volunteers, thought about how their behavior and mine affects our ability to teach our students.
On face, a large part of our value lies in the fact that we were born and raised in the US, and as such our native English becomes a massive asset. Even those of us who were poor English students have the benefit of being native speakers, with naturally correct grammar and vocabulary. Israeli universities don't accept students who are not fluent in English, with higher entrance standards than in Hebrew. Schools in low-income cities with high immigration like Bat Yam particularly benefit from exra English instruction, to help students achieve more, integrate more fully into society, and end cycles of poverty.
A common lament among volunteers in class has been that students don't seem interested in learning, and a more tacit part of our value as volunteers is that we are older, hip, good-looking foreign kids. Most middle- and high-school students find us cool and want to get to know us, to hang out with us. Surely this is an incentive for them to learn English; the faster they learn the languge, the better they'll be able to communicate with us. I've noticed some enthusiasm from the kids I've worked with, as have some of my other friends.
This brings me back to the thesis of my reflection- our value as volunteers largely stems from our ability to speak correct, natural English, but because our effectiveness is exponentially higher because of who we are as people, the way we conduct ourselves is directly related to how much the kids benefit from our time spent working with them. My co-volunteers are brash and loud but a lot of fun, and attract attention from the kids. I consider myself to be a nice, fun person, but when I'm trying to help children with their assignment, I can't hold a candle up to the allure of the rowdy American boys, who are a welcome distraction from schoolwork. It seems to me that their fun characters are a huge asset to our job as volunteers, but the message they send is that the schoolwork is unimportant. If they were to show enthusiasm for their jobs they could harness their personalities to become great role models and genouinely excite the kids about learning English. Unfortunately on Monday their behavior polarized their goofiness from my love of learning and work ethic (which is not in the least an extreme one), showing the students that they don't need to work on English to be with the cool kids. Hopefully the situation will improve, otherwise I might have to separate from the other volunteers to fulfill my potential as an English tutor and role model.
This week the school really got into full swing. During art class I worked with a girl in my class who I usually don’t work with. Her name is Imbar and she has very little use of her body. Her head usually tilts to the side leaning on her shoulder and her arms move minimally. She is in a wheel chair and simply doesn’t move much. She also is very quiet and her speech is very hard to understand. For all these reasons I thought she was severely mentally disabled. Between the language barrier and my assumptions I rarely made contact with her other than wheeling her out to where she sits during breaks. But, that day in art class I learned how capable she is. The class started out with drawing pictures and there were 7 kids so I was her partner. She didn’t just scribble like some of the kids; she drew hearts and wrote her name. I never realized how much she could do with her hands. Next we worked on yarn weaving and the teacher showed me to basically do it for her and just let her pull the string once it was through the hole. After a few minutes of this I saw that it was easy for Imbar to simply pull the string so I slowly let her do more and more herself. By the end the only help I gave her was aiming the needle. I never considered myself someone to make dumb assumptions, but with Imbar I obviously did. Over the next few days I worked with her a lot more and found out that she is very with it and though her hand-eye coordination is not as good as a fully abled person, she is definitely not paralyzed.
Liza Mole
Dear Journal,
Volunteering this week has definitely been exciting. Typically the staff doesn't visibly show their appreciation for our work, but this week it seemed a bit different. We did a ton of work including organizing and unpacking huge box's of food and folding and sorting bags of clothing. When the staff found out that we wouldn't be volunteering Monday and Tuesday because of Shalem programming, the seemed let down that we weren't coming to help out.
I initially thought that a soup kitchen was really simple to run, but on Thursday, the soup kitchen was short handed because all of the normal Ohavim workers were on vacation.I started to see the challenges of running a soup kitchen. I realized that running the soup kitchen was like running a business, with bumps and surprises. We had to run to a nearby bakery to get a donation of pastries. We helped unload a shipment of donated salads, and searched for a grocery store to buy some tomato's, since ours spoiled.
The people who come to the soup kitchen have also been opening up to me, lately. Many of them have been giving me the usual shpeil thanking me and encouraging me to stay in school and learn as much as i can. Moshe, a regular at Ohavim, had a long talk with me during his meal about always being happy, repeatedly saying, "if you don't laugh you don't live". He told me about how he has much less money than most of the people who come to Ohavim, but no matter what he will always be happy and enjoy life.
Most people i help at the soup kitchen are unbelievably gracious- they shake our hands, thank us repeatedly, and occasionally try going for the kiss on the cheek. There was an elderly lady with a broken leg ( who for some reason didn't have a cast, but instead had gauze and a big sock) that was leaving Ohavim and was leaving as I was heading home, so i helped her walk out onto the sidewalk. The woman spoke in slow Hebrew so that i would understand her, and told be about how she broke her leg and also about her apartment. When we approached an intersection there was an awkward pause and the woman in a somewhat embraced tone asked if i would take her across the street to the bus stop. As i took her to the bus stop across the street, she would not stop thanking me. She said she wished everybody was like me, and that Israel needs more people like me. I'm really amazed at how thankful all the people I encounter are. At Ohavim, I feel like I am making a real difference, and when the work gets dull, i think of how gracious the people i help are.
I'm discussing plans with my co-volunteers to initiate some sort of small project that we'll work on for the rest of our time in Bat-Yam. We briefly discussed the possibility of doing fundraisers or murals. We are going to talk to Yael, our supervisor, about what Ohavim needs most and with her feedback we'll continue planning.
Once Ilana left there was even less to do in the hospital. I needed to talk to the head nurse to be assigned to a different person, but she was never there. Even if I did get switched, it would still be unpleasant to work there. I could think of no reasons other people have for going to work that applied to me. I did not enjoy it, I was not helping anyone, I was not learning anything, and I was not getting paid. The only reason I was going was so that I would not be kicked off of year course. Clearly I had no other choice but to switch jobs.
I was given the option of working at the agricultural school or working at an elementary school. I figured that the kids had probably already grown attached to some of the year course volunteers and that it would be harder to connect. I also figured that it would be more fun to learn a little about what it means to farm than to deal with little kids all day.
Although it was a lot harder than the hospital, the agricultural school was also much more enjoyable. We did such things as picking avocados and wrapping baby plants in cardboard. Its hard work, and I’m in the sun all day. The first day I got a sunburn because I didn’t know to put on sunscreen. It’s much more rewarding than the hospital, because you know that you’re actually doing something. On the other hand, I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. I don’t really know how I could be helping anyone though. The farmers still have full days, and we don’t have any special skills that they don’t, our English isn’t useful to them.
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