Bet-Sefer Ma’agalimLast week at the elementary school, Miriam, the English teacher I assist on Mondays, asked the students who needed extra help whether they had their books. They didn’t. So, she returned them to their gym class and she returned to the classroom to jot down a review I could do with them to prepare them for their English test. She promised them, after getting their hopes up, that she would take them out for the next period. They returned to their noncompetitive games, jumping through hula hoops.
“How on earth will they learn the fierce Protestant work ethic they need to survive…oh, wait…they don’t need to…”
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At ten years young, with his chubby, olive-skinned face, and spiky black hair, Adir needs only a turban, wide genie pants, a greasy, sticking-up wisp of hair in the center of his head and ten more years to be perfectly cast as Ali Baba. He has a throaty, cacophonous laugh, and constantly points at his classmates and yells his favorite line in English,
“Hey, you are a monkey! You are a monkey!”
As he’s standing on a chair yelling, three boys I taught the day before pop their heads into the classroom to ask me again how to say “nipple” (pitmá in Hebrew).
In my next class, I am teaching farm vocabulary to some of the younger kids, and one of the boys, probably 9 years old, gets noticeably excited when I say, “
Agvaniot…tomatoes.” He tells me that his dad is a tomato farmer in Sharsheret, a nearby farming moshav, and that his dad lets him drive the tractor all by himself. He is intently focused, writing his list of new vocabulary in forest green magic marker on his blank paper (which I always have to pass out, because the kids never bring their notebooks!) When class is over, he leaves his list on the table, and when I go to hand it to him, he refuses. “These are words that will be really good for you to know,” I tell him. But he crumples the paper and tosses it. I wonder how to motivate students in elementary school who are going to be farmers like their fathers, whose families don’t really care if they get a higher education, and they won’t mind if they’re assigned a modest position in the army. The principal walks by, a deservedly-admired male presence at the school, with a handgun stuck in the back of his khakis, a kepah on his head, and a disciplinarian’s stern look. The kids slow their run to a saunter and say hi, before they kiss the mezuzah on the doorpost and run across the campus to their next class.
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Kdam Atidim at Bet Sefer Mamlachti Chiloni (the secular high school in Netivot)
Teaching in the Atidim program is like being a dentist. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth, and sometimes it’s like the day you take a kid’s braces off. I think I would be a skilled, compassionate dentist. The process of pulling teeth makes everyone cringe and the prospect of removing braces is universally liberating. But knowing that you’ve done your utmost with the training and tools available to you is all you can hope to do.
Atidim (lit. “futures”) is an initiative of the Ministry of Education and the Jewish Agency to select the brightest students from periphery high schools, and provide them with academic enrichment that will help them perform at the highest levels in the army and university. The hope is that they will return to the periphery after their university studies to help its build its economic and social capital. Yesterday when we talked about where we would be in ten years we got responses that only one of the group would actually serve in the army, and that everyone would reside in Ukraine, Spain, United States, and Russia, but none were actually planning to live in Israel, let alone the development cities such as Netivot. Then again, where we’ll be in ten years is not exactly something I can lecture about :)
Here is an article some students wrote about their summer experience in the southern Israeli desert at a two-week English camp…
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“An Oasis of English”
By: Roman Kataev, Slava Rybka, Dmitry Prihodsky, Katia Gerchikov, Sophia Godler and editors Jeffrey Roman and Jennifer Holzer
It was an oasis of English in the middle of the Negev Desert, This was Nitzana English Camp: 2 weeks, 100 students, ten teachers, and a lot of sand. We took English classes every morning and spent the afternoons at the pool, riding camels, learning shiatsu, hiking near Ben Gurion’s tomb, and just having fun. We were native speakers of Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian, all here to make friends through English.
We woke up at seven in the morning, ate breakfast, and spent the morning in English classes. We learned English using games and computers. One of the most memorable activities was making a movie about “Oepidus Rex” with a lot of ketchup in the eye gauge scene. “My face was covered in ketchup….and I hate ketchup,” said Slava Rybka. Amid the laughter, we learned a lot because we were thinking and speaking in English the whole time.
After lunch and swimming, we did a lot of other activities. One day we rode camels nearby. “It was a little bit scary, but exciting,” said Katia Gerchikov, “Riding is not as easy as it looks. My friend almost fell off.” Another day we traveled to a Bedouin tent and learned the secrets of shiatsu. “My friend cracked my whole back during the lesson,” said Roman Kataev, “I was feeling great after that massage.” All of these activities were great relaxation after the hard morning.
Engaging in English put us all on common ground. The shy people opened up, and the rowdy people gave others a chance. “I danced for the first time at Nitzana,” Rybka said. “Yeah, he just went to the dance floor,” his best enemy Dmitry Prihodsky added.
Some found love. Some found trouble. Some found new friends. Everybody learned something new about English. It has already helped us to communicate with people around the world. Thanks to Nitzana, we have written this article for you.
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Stay tuned for poetry and the performance of a song we’re in the process of writing! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Magen David Adom (MDA) Ambulance CorpsAfter a 70-hour training course in Jerusalem in mid-September, I showed up to my first volunteer shift in downtown Netivot in at the beginning of December. I woke right at sunrise, threw on my uniform, and walked down Yerushalayim Street, my bag overflowing with reading material to keep me busy in my hours of waiting at the station. Yerushalayim Street is so named because in the 1970s, as new immigrants were overflowing Israel’s urban areas, the state used new immigrants to fulfill David Ben-Gurion’s dream of making the desert bloom. Immigrants were bussed here in the middle of the night after landing from all over the world at the airport in Tel Aviv, told that they were in Yerushalayim, and left to figure it all out. Today Netivot is a sizeable city, but when you’re walking near the outskirts of the city at sunrise, the blazing orange star practically fills the sky, reminding you that this is indeed a desert sun, and it is the reason you can exist at all.
I arrived at 7:01AM, and at 7:12AM a guy told me to get in the ambulance. We drove to someone’s house, put a hysterical, in-labor Ethiopian woman in the wheelchair, her husband in the back with her, and drove off driving as fast as I ever have, the sirens blaring. I was concentrating on keeping my cool with the woman screaming in the back, “Yeled ba! Yeled ba! Tafseek achshav! The child is coming! The child is coming! Stop right now!” The driver, a paramedic, told her that the baby wasn’t coming, but he stopped on the side of the highway twice, just to check. The second time he screamed at me to throw him a pair of gloves, and this being my first time in an ambulance, I couldn’t even do that very quickly.
“Ha-yeled lo ba achshav,” he said (The child is not coming now), and he jumped into the driver’s seat. “That woman is not having a baby in my ambulance. She’s got another few minutes,” he said to me in English, and he pushed the pedal to the metal another twenty minutes to Soroka Hospital, feet from the door of the delivery ward. He rolled the stretcher into the delivery room. I didn’t know whether or not to follow, and attempting to empathize with the mother, I thought it would be more sensitive to wait outside the ambulance. Just as I was asking some emergency medicine students how their studies were going, and they were telling me about all the emergency births they had done, my driver came outside, noticeably shaken, started to wipe all the fluids off the stretcher. “Do you want to see the little Ethiopian?” he asked. It hadn’t been more than six minutes since they had entered the delivery room, and after seeing a gorgeous, shiny, new black baby, I knew it had been easy and successful.
Yakir, the driver, was also twenty-three, and he told me he had never felt so traumatized by an ambulance call; the smell of the birth had nauseated him. We went to the regional headquarters in Beersheva, and he sat with another driver and smoked a couple of cigarettes in the main hallway, under a Smoking Prohibited sign. He wore a charm of a sand-colored state of Israel around his neck, and his hair was spiked up. When he asked me if I wanted a coffee, and I said no, he brought me one anyway. We went back to the station to sit and drink more Turkish coffees in the herb garden with the rest of the crew. They teased us and said it was time to get married. I went on two other calls that day, a Russian kibbutznik with a herniated disk, and one call I have no recollection of. That was my first day.
Later I consulted with other volunteers, and they told me it was incredible that I had had three calls on my first day, including a birth, that most volunteers wait over a year before they get to see one. “So I should have gone into the delivery room with the driver, then?”
“What! You didn’t get to see it!”
Too much excitement. Too much propriety.
* * *
Three weeks later, I was with Ze’ev, the Russian driver, for the second week in a row (I volunteer only one shift a week). Today Ze’ev had spoken Russian with two of our four patients. Two Thursdays before I had been with Avi, an Ethiopian driver; two of our three calls had been for Ethiopian-Israeli patients, and Avi had been able to speak Amharic with them. It seemed like one of those things in life that was not quite a coincidence. Coming back to the station at the end of the day, after another birth, Ze’ev decided to educate me in the different cultures of birth-giving here in the southern periphery, as it is called.
Iin translation:
“For these Ethiopian women, it’s one-two-three…pop! It’s out. It’s just hu-huh, hu-huh, hu-huh, moan-moan-moan, and it’s out! And they call us just about when they see the head, and they’re lucky if we can get them to the hospital in time.”
The Russian women sound like they’re reciting Dostoevsky---
insert diverse Russian vocabulary here--- but they’re stoic and orderly about it----uhhh…uhhh…uhhh, they get to the hospital in plenty of time, and I don’t know anything about it.”
The Ashkenazi women… now these are the ones who do it like in the movies… ‘oooh!!! ayyy! oy-va-voy!!! Get me the strongest drugs you’ve got! Help me! Help me! I’m gonna dieeeeeeeee!’ And there’s nothing you can do for them…they’re always gonna make it a whole production.”
So, just like Ze'ev has come to believe that women are genetically programmed to cry the specific cries of pain that they do while having contractions, I think there’s something behind the coincidences of personnel and patient coinciding the way they have been. Maybe that’s how one begins to think when she lives in a devout part of the country.
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Albert’s Place, an afterschool club for teenage boys at risk for violent behavior
after he pulled his hand away from
shaking mine, he took it to his cheek
and kissed it.
"you are like a queen,” he told me,
and i believed him.
This was one of the boys. But somehow, I can expect surprises like this everyd day.
