of the sands and the cliffs: going to ethiopians

I don’t think I’ve written at all about my community service project, and so I’m going to give a brief spiel now. Every student is required to engage in a regular CS project, Some are bullshitty, like working in the ARZA office (serving which community?) but others actually get people out there, like song leading once a month at a home for retired people, or for mentally challenged people, or teaching English to troubled Israeli youth. My project is great. Once a week, on Mondays, I go to an immigration absorption center in Mevassert Zion (a posh suburb just south of Jerusalem) and spend two hours working in a recently immigrated family. But since all of the recently immigrated families at the center are Ethiopian, and have been Ethiopian for years, we (the 11 of us) work with Ethiopians immigrants.

It’s a fascinating, rewarding, thrilling afternoon. We work in pairs; I work with Lisa and we make a really great team. Our family is wonderful. There are 4 kids: Koltroin, a boy aged 9; Yeshuruk, a girl aged 7; Aytnagev, a girl aged 5; and Avram, a boy aged 2.5. The family has been in Israel around 3 years, so their spoken Hebrew is pretty good; we’ve seen a marked improvement in the Mom’s spoken Hebrew and the older kids’ Hebrew reading in the past year as well.

We’re with the family for about 2 hours a week, and we do various activities with them. We help the older ones with their homework, we color with the younger ones, we do puzzles, we play Hangman and checkers and Tic-Tac-Toe, we sing some Israeli songs, we talk about upcoming holidays, we eat popcorn and drink juice. This past week we had a fantastic, impromptu dance party of Israeli and Ethiopian music. It was an amazingly fun time, universally agreed (but Lisa and I) as the best week we've had yet. Lisa and I have really bonded with these kids, and they’ve bonded with us. I’m really, really going to miss them next year.

When Tom was here, he came with us, and took some pictures. Some really great pictures (my current Facebook profile picture is with Aytnagev). Here are some:

little baby Avram