backlog of first week on kibbutz

Seeing as kibbutz has been so hectic and there has been limited internet connection I majorly flaked at writing for the last week. As a result of this, and to avoid falling even more behind, i'm just going to roughly outline the first couple of days and in more detail the last few. Apologies in advance for the lack of detail. Also the date on this particular post is not the date that I wrote it as I had no internet for a significant period of time so had to write it in word and up load it later.

Tuesday 19^th October -

• MASA Introduction
• Bus Ride to Kibbutz Yahel-lots of sleep
• Pomello Story-peace on the border
• Yitzak Rabin Memorial Service-entirely in ivrit

Wednesday

• Breakfast Together Outside-israeli cereal
• Walking Tour of Kibbutz-we saw COWS
• Shopping the the Kibbutz Supermarket-very stressful for many parties involved
• Shakshuka cooking demonstration-using minimal resources
• Cooking our own Dinners- omelette/scrambled eggs with red onion and cheese after discovering impossible to cook pasta in a slow cooker without a saucepan

Thursday

• 8 o'clock start at date packing factory -5 hours of sticking and folding date packet labels
• lunch at 1
• Hebrew Test- couldn’t answer a single question
• more forms to fill out
• Bus to Tel Aviv-4.5 hours!

Thursday Eve to Saturday Eve-lovely relaxing weekend with the parents

Sunday

• Breakfast with off milk-yum
• Chinuch morning –
  • Rabbi Benji Session
  • Lior session -Beseder / Lo Beseder
• Ulpan
• Dinner
• ASEFAH

After my lovely rested weekend away Sunday morning started with a rather unpleasant surprise. My much awaited and coveted Special K was totally ruined by the stringy off milk that was all that remained in our fridge after shabbat. After this minor setback we began our very first chinuch morning on kibbutz. Rabbi Benji kicked off the first session with an introductory game and then a trigger picture of what most people claimed to be David and Goliath. He commented that his observation upon showing this picture to people in a variety of different cultures was that each culture interpreted it differently and it represented different and yet very similar stories. Another interesting fact was that the picture had been drawn with a couple on David's head. Interesting and somewhat in correct for the Jewish interpretation as Kippot were only invented long after the story itself is said to have taken place. An interesting (slightly more in context than I can remember) fact was that the Chabbad do not exist in Malawi. We moved on to discussing a story by Rabbi Nachman of Breslaw (lived in the Ukraine, died roughly 200 years ago). Supposedly some people are insulted by discussing these stories as in 1808 Rabbi Nachman decided to tell them because he claimed his disciples were too stupid to understand the concepts otherwise. Some people also travel to his grave every year on Rosh Hashanah as he claimed, and I quote, “I will yank you out of hell if you come to see me on Rosh Hashanah”...or so we were told. Another 'fun fact' is that he travelled for months and months to Israel and yet stayed only 4 minutes on the land. Rabbi Benji also commented that the statement 'Jews believe...' followed by anything is in fact an incorrect statement. We then looked at a specific story 'The Portrait'.

Linked to this we discussed the concepts that in order to understand something you have to laugh about it (and a rather controversial reference to the holocaust was made at this point). We also considered which king mentioned is G-d, what the story represents about humanity, G-d and the Jewish people. Rabbi Benji claimed that asking someone if they believe in G-d is the most personal question you can ask. Our second Chinuch session was run by Lior and we played 'Beseder, Lo Beseder'. This basically involved a list of words or topics being read out and everyone had to respond with only Beseder or Lo Beseder with no initial discussion or explanation. The list of words mentioned were:

• Mobile phones
• Aliyah
• Capital punishment/death penalty
• Reality TV
• Christmas
• Plastic Surgery
• Brit Milah
• Britney Spears
• Jewish Educational
• Gay Marriage
• Plastic Surgery
• Orthodoxy
• Summer Camps
• Separation Wall/Fence
• Harry Potter
• Refusing to recruit to the army
• Abortion
• Inter-marriage
• Animal testing
• An Arab prime minister in Israel
• Euthanasia
• Downloading Films off the internet
• Releasing terrorist (murderers) in order to free captured soldiers

In the afternoon we had our very first Ulpan session. Thankfully I suddenly remembered a lot of the script letters I had already learnt (with Barney!) as we learn entirely in script. The lesson was good and I really feel like i'm going to at the very least give myself enough of a basis to learn more ivrit when in Karmiel. In the evening, after a dinner of RATTATOUILE (made entirely by myself and another girl in my room), we had our first Asefah of Shant Netzer. I felt slightly like it was a bit too early to have one and a lot of the issues brought up were time fillers or just pretty pointless.

Monday was split very simply into Uplan in the morning and 'Volunteering' in the afternoon. In Ulpan we are pretty much doing short sentences and plural words. Our first volunteering session in the place we will be for the next month was, to say the very least, an experience. We spent 3 hours in the mid day heat laying very large and dirty date nets into piles of 24 and then folding and tying them up. Give me label sticking any day!

This is just a backlog post and a bit of a mish mash so I will later update about Tuesday Wednesday and this weekend.