Lesson learned. Never save something you’ve written for more than a week or it’ll just never get posted. No matter how much I like to write, I often end up hating things I’ve written, and as such the post I had nearly completed several weeks ago is now going in the scrapper – far too much shmaltz, I think, so we’re going to try this again with a minimum of cheese, but fair warning: I am prone to sentimentality and schmoop, and it’s been two weeks since I left Tel Aviv and I miss it and miss everyone terribly, so that sort of thing is probably going to eek its way in here.
Anyway. It’s been two weeks since I’ve been back in the US, longer since the program ended – exactly a month ago today, actually, was my last day of volunteering. I know I haven’t talked much – or at all, really – about my volunteering, but I’m easily distracted by flashy things like trips out of town and holidays, apparently, and time got away from me. (sidebar) I had a dream several months back, around March or the beginning of April, in which it was suddenly July and things were over and we were all leaving and I remember thinking in my dream, “I knew it would go by quickly, but man, it went really quickly!” It’s starting to all seem a bit like that dream now. It seems like time goes faster and faster the older you get.
I could go into a drawn out explanation of the places I worked at – oh lord, could I, I am so very, very long-winded – but I’ll spare you. In short, I worked at a community garden located in my neighborhood in South Tel Aviv, at a therapeutic riding center providing horseback riding classes to children with Autism, and at a prison working with detained kids who have crossed the border into Israel (mostly from African countries) illegally and without a parent or guardian.
It’s this last place that I’m going to focus on for a moment. The kids come to Israel for work, trying to make money to send home to their families. Some arrive with family already in Israel while others are totally alone. As many of the kids are coming from places like Eritrea and Sudan (countries in the midst of political and cultural turmoil), and have come without guardians, they can’t be sent back to their own countries. It’s a relatively new occurrence, and as such the authorities in Israel have struggled to come up with a better place to house these kids while searching out family members to send them home with or boarding schools and kibbutzim to for them. So they end up in a prison in Ramla (a town about thirty minutes from Tel Aviv).
ANYWAY, before I ramble too much on the how’s and why’s, so these kids, almost entirely boys (the numbers are always in flux, but at the moment the ratio of boys to girls is somewhere around 40 to 6), aren’t criminals in any way aside from crossing the border illegally, but are stuck in this prison with little to no stimulation and crazy amounts of energy. The prison directors do the best they can for them, providing teachers and a classroom so the kids get English, Hebrew, math, and science classes, but there’s only so much they can do and most of the time the kids are stuck in their rooms watching TV or out in a yard that’s not really a yard (more of a medium-sized room with an open-air roof) with nothing but benches and pay-phones in it.
Again, ANYWAY, so we each come once or twice a week in pairs or threes basically to hang out with the kids and give them at least a little stimulation, both mental and physical – one day we brought a huge map of the world in and talked about different countries, another day we sat in the classroom with a few kids and did word games with them on the blackboard, most days I ended up just hitting a ball around the yard with a few boys. With the girls (who are quite a bit more calm and relaxed than the boys), we did English and Hebrew lessons, made jewelry, did word searches.
Sometimes I wondered how interested they actually were in us being there. In such a dire situation – separated from their families, alone in a foreign country, little to no stimulation all day, every day – is there really much that we can actually do for these kids? Sometimes I wondered if the boys were just indulging me by playing ball, if it really mattered to them at all that we were there.
The thing is, I think many of us came to Israel with perhaps grander expectations than are really possible, or at least different expectations than are reality. We all tend to build things up in our minds sometimes, right? Most people who do a program like this want to make some sort of an impact – on the country, on the people here, on the world – and I think it was hard for most of us at first to get here and really be faced with the problems we were jumping into (rather than read about them as a concept before we left home), to realize how difficult it can be to get involved, especially in a foreign country, and hard to know that when we left Israel the issues would still be there.
And everyone finds a different way of adjusting their views of things, adjusting their views of themselves, to find the greatest effect they can have while there. For me, it was about letting go of what I came here thinking that I wanted to do and embracing what I could actually do and what I was doing. Appreciating the impact of simple things and realizing that though you may sometimes feel minor and insignificant, even the simplest actions can have a great effect.
On our last day at the prison we had parties with both the girls and the boys. The boys’ party was, as expected, a huge, fun baligan – water guns, water baloons, buckets of water, just water, water everywhere for two straight hours. The girls’ party, just like working with the girls had been each week, was much more subdued, relaxed, calm – we sat with them and did makeup, painted their faces, listened to music. I spent about forty-five minutes blowing up tons of brightly-colored baloons, and a couple of the girls and I began hitting them around the room.
Bear with me for a moment while I indulge my sentimentality…
It was one of those moments when I felt an actual pain at not having a camera with me (not allowed in the prison). It sounds weird or obsessive maybe, but part of my insane picture-taking is that I want to be able to remember things easily and clearly, be able to return to these kinds of amazing or funny or lovely or interesting moments with ease, and when I don’t have a camera with me to capture this kind of moment it makes me a little nutty with anxiety at the possibility of losing this image.
I spent two weeks kyaking in Alaska two summers ago, and on our first day out on this little annoymous island in Prince William Sound, we were unpacking our gear and setting up our tents when a great humpback whale suddenly appeared in the water right in front of us, so close to the shore that I could see every ridge on it’s back, and swam up the shoreline – up and over the water, back down under, then up again, tail gliding easily along behind it as it dipped back down under. When we first saw it, my mind, of course, immediately went to “where is my camera??” but I quickly realized that if I dove for my bag and went on a mad search for my camera, I would miss the whole thing, so I sat and watched it with the others and tried to burn the image into my mind. There were other moments from that trip that killed me not to have pictures of, but I try to think of them often and make sure the memories stay with me.
That’s how I’ll try to hold onto this one. We hit these balloons around and I watched the girls smile and laugh as the balloons floated through the air, all these different colors hovering around them, and listened to the music surrounding us, looked up to see rays of sunlight shining through the metal grating seperating us in the yard from the outside world. It’s hard to really put it all into words, but here’s what I’ll remember of this specific moment: the sunlight, the music, different colored balloons falling towards me, Danielle (one of my fellow volunteers) with her sunglasses on, smiling brightly, the girls laughing with their arms raised up to catch the baloons. Such a simple, beautiful moment of intense contrast that I will try to keep in my mind always.
So, if you asked me how I would sum up my volunteering experience over the past five months in just a few words? I think it all comes down to those balloons falling through the air and sunlight filtering down on us and music in our ears and Danielle smiling and the girls laughing. The places we worked at weren’t always easy and things we saw weren’t always pleasant, but that’s the case with any type of work like this, right? I’m starting to ramble again, but point being that this has been such a huge, challenging experience, even in just learning how to navigate through trying to help people or help the community around us – how can you make a difference when problems and issues seem so huge? How do you make a little girl laugh when she’s seperated from her family and stuck in a prison? Like I said, everyone figures out their own way, but for me it was holding on to the good, bright, beautiful moments through things that seem hard or frustrating or sad.
There was one day at the prison. We were in the yard, Spenser and Becky and I and, at one point when I counted, twenty-seven kids. I have no idea how we all fit in there. Spenser was playing music for the kids and trying to get them to dance, chatting with them about pretty much anything and everything. Becky was doing flashcards of English and Hebrew words with different groups of kids, walking around to try and get the less interested ones involved. I was smacking a ball around with six or seven kids, and it was one of those days that I wondered how much they actually even noticed us being there and wondered what impact I was really having. As we were leaving, saying goodbye to the kids, one really little guy looked at me and Spenser hopefully and asked, “so you’ll come back tomorrow, right?” And it broke my heart just a little bit to say that no, it would be a few more days before anyone came back. But it was also one of those moments when I was reminded of how much of an impact you can have even when you feel insignificant and like it’s not enough.
So. That was volunteering. Maybe someday, years in the future, I’ll get around to updating this again, because there’s lots more to say about the last six months. But I’m a procrastinator, so who knows.
