A New Phase

Hello and Shabbat Shalom!

I hope that you all are having a weekend as relaxing and needed as mine. Somehow even before a heavy workload, the first week of school is always the most exhausting. And that, dear readers, is what I have just completed - my first week of school!

After some intense schedule-tweaking I am now happy with the outlook of the coming semester. I will pause to comment about said schedule-tweaking and the hilarity (if you're a masochist) of Israeli bureaucracy. At the end of the summer I completed level Bet of Hebrew, putting me in level Gimmel for the current semester. I went to class on the first day and found out that I was accidentally placed into Gimmel Intensive, which requires 2 extra hours of Hebrew class per week. I gave this class a try but found that waking up early to fit in the extra 2 hours per week was just too much. I figured switching from Gimmel Intensive to regular Gimmel would not be too much of a problem, and with this naive nonchalance I went to the Office of Academic Affairs to make the switch. I was then informed that there is only one woman in the entire university who can perform such a change, and that she only works 2 days a week. What a joke. I was about to leave with my head bowed in disappointment and suffer through a few more days of early mornings when I remembered that I was in Israel, the land of endless, completely breakable rules. I then proceeded to bug everyone who's office door was open, asking if they had any authority to switch me to my desired class. Eventually, a lovely man who works on Student Visa problems overheard my griping and asked if he could be of assistance. He then proceeded to shuttle me from office to office until we found a woman who was willing to make the switch. This is just one of many examples that here in Israel, if you bug the right people, anything can happen. This fact is both liberating and terrifying to us folks who are used to rules being rules.

Anyway, I finally made the necessary switches and here, for your viewing pleasure, are my classes this semester:

1. Hebrew (it never ends)
2. Jews and Palestinians in Israel: Identities in Conflict and Dialogue - Social-Psychological Perspectives. This class should be pretty neat because it is basically the academic, theoretical version of what I did at the Arava Institute. I'm really excited to learn about the psychological mechanisms behind ethno-national conflict and how we might use that understanding to resolve said conflicts.
3. Israel Case Studies - Academic Internship. This is the class that goes along with my internship which I will speak about shortly. The course seems to be focused on Organizational Studies, or gaining an understanding of how organizations successfully operate. The professor is a retired helicopter pilot from the Israeli Air Force which means he's brilliant. Unfortunately, he is really boring and talks at the speed it took for frogs to evolve into humans. So that's a shame, but hopefully it will be interesting to hear about the experience of the other interns.
4. From Pioneer and Sabra to Contemporary Israeli Identities. This course starts at the foundations of Zionism, explores the idea of the New Jew in Israel, and concludes with the question of whether there truly is an Israeli Identity today. It's not necessarily the subject that I would gravitate towards first, but the professor is hilarious and British, and clearly quite brilliant. So I'm very excited about that.

Before I speak about my internship, I will take a quick break to tell you all about the adventures of riding the bus to school. Each day I walk to the crowded bus stop across the street from my apartment and wait. Without fail and regardless of what time it happens to be, 2 or 3 #19 buses (the bus that goes to Hebrew University) pass by that are so full of people it would be physically impossible to get my body onto them. When the 3rd or 4th bus arrives and I am starting to panic about being late, I resolve to get on the bus regardless of any possible losses of limbs or backpacks. I run to the back door (don't worry folks, I have a yearly bus pass so I've already paid for my rides), elbowing others out of the way, and hurl myself into the sea of bodies. We're talking about the kind of bus ride where you don't have to hold on because the smelly bodies around you are keeping you quite snug and safe. This is what it's like. Every day. Twice a day. And it will be like this for the rest of the school year. So that's great.

One other comment about transportation in Israel. I've noticed this thing about the traffic lights here that I think is quite clever: the light turns yellow before it turns red AND before it turns green! So you know when it's about to be green, which is nice because you can be prepared to go. There are only two minor problems with this situation. The first is that if you aren't already driving at full speed when the light turns yellow before the green, someone will be honking at you as if you just ran over their child. The second is that even though they have some innovative traffic light engineering going on here, the color of said traffic lights doesn't seem to matter to anybody. After the light turns red there are usually 2 if not 3 rows of cars that continue through the intersection. I don't know if this will make you all feel more or less nervous, but the number one risk living in Israel is traffic accidents, which far surpass any conflict-related violence. Good thing I don't drive, and the bus drivers seem to be as close to superheroes as one could get.

Now for news about my internship, which is really pretty fantastic. I'm working at an integrated K-12 school that is sponsored by Hand-in-Hand, a non-profit organization here in Israel. By integrated I mean that each classroom has both Jewish Israeli and Arab Israeli students, at least one Jewish teacher and one Arab teacher, and that starting in 3rd grade they learn both Hebrew and Arabic, about Judaism and Islam, and about the culture and society of Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis. They have one Jewish principle and one Arab principle, and they get vacation for all the holidays. This idea is extremely rare in Israel, where most Arab children go to separate schools that are taught using the Jordanian system (some have recently switched to a Palestinian system) and Jewish kids go to national Israeli schools. So in general, this school is quite amazing and right up my ally as it believes coexistence and learning about the "Other" every day. I was assigned to work in the kindergarten (which is called the גן or Gan) with a special-needs girl named Yana. When I got to the classroom I was told that Yana is not "100%" but that when she works 1-on-1 she can be quite successful. Right away she started speaking to me in Hebrew, so I threw myself right into it and started speaking back. That's one of the best things about this internship placement because I am forced to speak Hebrew for 8 hours a week with kids who don't speak about politics but instead give me a chance to practice practical, useful language. I'm also learning a bit of Arabic! Anyway, I assumed that Yana was Jewish because she spoke to me in Hebrew, until her older brother came to pick her up and he spoke to her in Arabic. It turns out that she's an Arab Israeli, and that at home she speaks both Arabic and Russian, and that she learned fluent Hebrew from watching TV!! I seriously think that this girl is a Savant, because she's obviously developmentally behind but also clearly a language genius. Either way, she is totally adorable and told me that she loves me, that I'm her best friend, and constantly kisses me on the cheek. What a cutie. Overall, I am super pumped to be involved in a school that is putting the ideals of coexistence into practice and to really get to know this little girl and the other cute kids in the Gan.

And that, avid readers, brings us up to speed with the activities and observations of the first week of school. Other than that, a lot of our friends from the Kibbutz have moved to Jerusalem for this school year which has been really fantastic - we had a lovely Shabbat dinner last night for my dear friend Tamara's birthday and it's been great to have everyone around. I look forward to what this school year has to bring, and will be back soon to share it all with you.

Many נשיקות (that's kisses),

Kate/ קייט - my name in Hebrew, which I realize I've never posted here. Goodbye for now!