Hey folks,
So these past couple of weeks have been a little rocky. There have been lots of ups and downs and I'm hoping to turn things around within the next few weeks to make everything all-positive again. After the two month mark hit, I was definitely feeling homesick. Despite the 35 degree difference in temperature between Ashdod and Vancouver right now, I still miss you guys and the city of Vancouver terribly! Life in Ashdod can be awesome but at the same time, despite the large size of the city, there is not a huge amount of things to do. During the week, I am constantly busy with the demands of the program. Rarely do I end up at home and free to do what I please until after 8pm at night, except on Sunday afternoons, my one day of leisure. This means that I don't get out to try new things as much as I would like to. On the weekends, it's the opposite. Contrary to the Vancouver city atmosphere, which is overflowing with activity and commotion on the weekends, Ashdod is a ghost town, with no stores open, no movies playing, and no buses running after 3PM on Friday until Saturday night. This weekend, I'm heading to Tel-Aviv so I will get a chance to change things up, but normally, I'm hard pressed to keep myself busy in Ashdod on the weekend.
In addition to the homesickness and occassional boredom, I'm also experiencing some problems at school, most notably that the English teacher is trying to take advantage of our position at the school. I want to have a little more control over what we do at school but right now, we simply go through the same lesson plan with multiple classes, teaching the same thing that she is and completing exercises in a textbook. The whole point of us being there as volunteers is to make learning English exciting, to inspire the kids and show them that their time with us outside of the classroom is a privilege and not an excuse to miss class and goof off. I would like to teach the kids English through games, with my guitar, with interesting stories I have found off the internet, etc. However, the English teacher is forcing us down a road which is not to our liking. In addition, we teach outside the classroom in the hallway. It is not a conventional hallway like you would see in a North American elementary school. It's more like a big open rectangle, with the classrooms positioned around the outside of the rectangle. However, it's no classroom. On a daily basis, due to the overwhelming poor behavior of Israeli students, there are kids who are kicked out of the class within ten minutes of the start of the lesson. This then means that they roam the hallway and disrupt the lesson that I am trying to teach to the kids. Fights break out, garbage is strewn across the floor, and the noise level is about 10 decibels higher than I can handle on a regular basis. My teaching partner Boris and I are pretty much at our breaking point and it's looking like next week we will need to have a confrontation with the English teacher. We are volunteers but that doesn't mean we should be trampled on and this set-up is not benefiting the kids but simply the teachers who don't want to deal with the issues in the school, namely behavioural issues. That being said, the kids do love us being there and there is not a single student who does not know our name. Most of the teachers at the school are incredibly friendly, and want to help Boris and me learn to speak Hebrew. And finally, the school is considered well respected by our program advisors, which can only mean that there are worse schools out there and I should be glad I'm not working at one of them.
As for other adventures, our entire group made a trip to Jerusalem last week. It was pretty much a repeat of what Zack and I did last year on Birthright, however, the city is quite impressive and I definitely want to make a return trip in the future on my own. The problem with these organized trips is that we hit all the tourist spots, but I find the exploration of the non-tourist spots the most interesting aspect of getting to know a city. Jerusalem has a lot to offer so I will be adding it to my list of things to do in Israel before I leave. Boris and I also made a trip with our English students to the North this past Monday. We first made a trip to Habonim Beach, one of the most beautiful beaches in Israel which reminded me of some of the sandstone beaches on Hornby Island, BC. Next, we headed to the Mt. Carmel Caves which was my favourite part of the excursion. Here, we made a short climb to the top of a small mountain (I would call it more of a hill but the kids definitely thought it was a mountain; there were several injuries and some tears shed...) where we found a huge cave. Boris and I entered with some of the braver kids (the teachers and all of the girls stayed behind) and made our way a good 1/4 km into the pitch black caves. This is where the kids decided to stop, so unfortunately, Boris and I had to stop as well, otherwise, we definitely would have gone a lot further in to check out some bats and stalactites hanging from the ancient cave ceilings. Finally, we ended the field-trip (or tiyul in Hebrew) with a stop in a Druze village. The druzim are a religious community found primarily in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. They participate in Arab culture but have their own Druze religion and many are highly loyal to the State of Israel, with many Druze joining the ranks of the IDF for many years now. In the village, we went to a real Druze house where we were served zatar, an Israeli bread dish that is baked in wood oven with oil and spices, and given a talk about the Druze (although it was in Hebrew so I hardly understood a word). After this we headed home, a three-hour bus ride back to Ashdod with kids who somehow still had energy after their 13 hour field-trip. I managed to nap through some of the yelling on the bus and passed out for a good 11 hours when I got home. Last night, Boris and I made a trip to Rishon LeZion as well, which is the fourth biggest city in Israel. One of the teachers at our school made the offer to take us to show us a place we hadn't seen yet. Granted, the trip was short, and it was to a huge shopping centre, but any opportunity to leave Ashdod to see something else is an opportunity I jump at. In addition, Boris and I spoke only in Hebrew with her all night and added a hefty 20 or 30 new words to our vocabulary. This, accompanied by a delicious meal of chicken, mushrooms, olives, liver, potatoes, onions, pita, humous, eggplant, salad and a wide assortment of dips, made the night a success.
Other than these excursions, life goes on. I have been playing intense games of basketball with some of the guys in my program (to the point I'm a little bruised and longing for a massage) and last Saturday night, a bunch of us went to the doom and gloom that is Harry Potter 7, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Meanwhile, I'm still growing out my disgusting French mustache in a bid to raise money for cancer and have even memorized my Movember shpiel in Hebrew for the teachers and kids at the school. Mustache in Hebrew is safam, just in case you wanted to know...
I leave you with another segment of similarities and differences between Vancouver and Ashdod. Don't forget to say hello, and maybe search for me on Skype sometime. It would be great to hear your voice!
Differences:
- When you go to a movie in Ashdod, they stop the movie halfway through (in mid-sentence actually!) to let everyone go out for a bathroom/cigarette break...
- You can make a salad with normally expensive ingredients like pine nuts, basil, cherry tomatoes, avocados, and feta cheese for four people for the grand total of (drum roll please....): $12 CDN!
- When you walk down the street with a mustache like me in Ashdod, people don't say "Nice mo bro!" They just assume you're another kid entering the 8th grade...
Similarities:
- Everyday when I walk to school, there is a woman handing out free newspapers and tries to push one on me despite the fact that I have no prayer of reading it in Hebrew. This constantly reminds me of the 24 and Metro workers at the skytrain stations and university campuses...
- Justin Bieber is a household name for kids in Ashdod as well...
- Despite all the amazing food over in this country, even the stuff that is quite kid-friendly, like schnitzel and humous and pita, the most popular food for a ten-year old still remains: chips and candy. There was not one kid out of 50 on the field-trip without one of the two. Some things are universal...
Ciao for now,
Max
P.S. Once again, bonus points for who can guess which song the title of this blog is derived from!
Bloody well right...!
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