DAY FIVE: The Youth Village

On Day five we didn't do a ton of activities but we were very busy. After leaving the Bedouin oasis we headed for Hadassah Neurim Youth Village. We were there to be willing servants for the staff there. We ended up doing a variety of jobs around the property. You are all probably wondering what on earth a "youth village" is so I'm going to do my best to describe it.

Hadassah Neurim is really like a small village where 230 students between the ages of 14-18 go to boarding school along with another 270 students from surrounding villlages that attend the school as well. The students at this school are a varied group of people there for different reasons. the village takes in teens that have made aliya from Russia, Ethiopia and other countries. Aliya means that they are Jews returning to their homeland, Israel. Some of the students are from troubled backgrounds. The village's highschool offers a wide variety of academic and technological tracks for the students as well as many extra-cirricular activities.

The village is jointly owned by Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America and the Jewish Agency for Israel and is run by a non-profit organization. The boarding school has live in councilors, social workers, psychologists and teachers. They are constantly striving to make the Village a safe and supportive place for the students.

"New Immigrants and their children face tremendous challenges in Israel. Hadassah Neurim offers its students a bridge from the difficult circumstances of their childhoods to the responsibilities of independence and adulthood. In many cases this is the first safe and supportive home they have known. We have a tremendous responsibility to give our students new opportunities to make positifve chances in their lives and help them aspire to their greatest potential" (from info on Hadassah Neurim in our tour binders)

So I was on the "Kitchen Team". I didn't want to spend the day outside because the day before in the desert had been a lot of sun and I was feeling it. We ended up cleaning windows in the cafeteria. It sounds pretty easy but it was a huge job. There were 18 sections of 8 sliding windows and screens that came out as well as a row of stationary windows underneath. Dude that's a lot of windows...big windows. I ended up doing the dirty job of cleaning the tracking. It actually wasn't too bad, not many bugs, mostly sand. I also helped clean the bottom stationary windows. We didn't have it too bad though because there was a gardening team that unloaded something like 2 tons of garden rock!! Glad I wasn't there!

That night we had a BBQ with some of the youth which was cool but was difficult because most didn't speak any English. Lisa and I went for a walk that night and ended up sitting outside talking until 12:30a. There were others outside on the lawn at that time, which happened to be the time that the sprinklers came on! We laughed as everyone screamed and ran inside then realized that we had to either wait out the sprinklers or go through them to get inside! Luckily we didn't get too wet.

The next morning we had the opportunity to do some more work if we wanted to or we could go to the beach and swim, I volunteered to do some gardening, which was fun because we were planting flowers. We worked for about an hour and a half, then showered and piled back on the bus. We were off to our next destination...