happy neyeew year

Niki sent me an email that made me lol irl. She wrote, “Also, that's pretty exciting about you teaching english. Is it like an actual class with students and grades?”
Oh, Niki. Today was my second day “teaching” “English” at the Bedouin school. We had a lot of names for this volunteer site, among them Bedouin Tent, Devil Children etc. However, we have since been informed that we must refer to the Bedouin school by its proper name, Segev Shalom.
A little background info! I recently Wikipediaed Bedouin, and it says that they’re basically a Nomadic people from the Middle East who have avoided settling in actual cities, instead choosing to scatter in shanty towns across the Negev. The village we teach in happens to be inhabited by fully constructed houses, while other Bedouin villages are made up of trailers and metal-walled shelters with a plethora of camels strolling around the premises. Tourists love the Bedouins for their delicious feasts of shwarma and sweet tea, although there’s a lot that people don’t really know about them, like the fact that many of their settlements are not recognized by the Israeli government and therefore do not have access to running water or electricity. As you can imagine, this tends to be quite an issue for a people who choose to reside in an oversized sandbox.
Anyway, I can’t really say that I teach anyone English at this job. It’s more like babysitting violent, rabid animals with severe ADHD who don’t speak English or Hebrew – actually, that’s exactly what it’s like. Bedouins, by the way, speak Arabic, and while some of them are learning Hebrew and perhaps a few English words in school, I worked with the youngest group this week and they know even less Hebrew than I do. They’ve got a few important phrases memorized, such as “Ani rotzah shirotim” and “Ani rotzah lishtot mayim,” neither of which mean “I want bathroom” or “I want to drink water” as they might suggest, but rather “I want to run around the hallway and disrupt the other classes and perhaps kick and punch some children while I’m at it.”
One of the issues with the Bedouins is that they know a few English words, but they don’t actually know how to say them. For example, one of their favorite activities is the always exciting, “Head Shoulders Knees and Toes” song. However, it comes out closer to “Hay Shuldeh Nes Tes.” Close enough, right? That’s where we come in. Our job is to take over where the non-native English speakers left off, to expose the little darlings to spoken English without an Arabic twist. Little did we know, Duck Duck Goose was a terrible idea. The kids were running around the circle screaming, “Dick dick dick dick dick dick GAS!” I couldn’t have been more proud of our fine work.

In other news, I decided that after my experience with the Super Jews in Tzfat, it was important to balance out my religousness by spending Rosh Hashanah at the completely opposite side of the spectrum – i.e., Kibbutz Sha’ar Hammakim. Not that Sha’ar Hammakim is necessarily atheist or anything, but a Kibbutz is a Kibbutz and a Hippie Commune is a Hippie Commune, and we’re all comrades here so what’s the big deal anyway.
As I was saying, I went to a hippie commune about 20 minutes outside of Haifa for Rosh Hashanah. This was very important to me (and more so to my mom) because I spent the weekend with my mom’s adoptive mother from when she lived on that kibbutz about 30 years ago, thus completing the circle of life and connecting all loose ends from when she left the homeland for America in the 1970s. More importantly, I got to spend the Jewish New Year at a place that’s completely different from the horrendously boring synagogue I’ve grown to know and abhor back at home, instead wasting away the holiday on Ruty’s couch while gorging myself on pomegranates picked from her yard and watching American TV shows with Hebrew subtitles.
High point of the weekend #1: when Ruty’s 9-year-old granddaughter took it upon herself to tutor me in Hebrew.
High point of the weekend #2: In between songs at the hippie commune choir show, I was able to just make out the bassline of Sandstorm from a nearby wedding.
Low point of the weekend: no hippie sightings. Booo.