volunteering

The last couple of days have been pretty busy for me. Yesterday, I woke up at 6 AM to go to a food packaging company for the homeless and worked for 4 hours in the exhausting heat. It was like a sweat shop- it was packed with people sweating and there was no room to move. It was very monotonous work- packing heavy foods in boxes and sealing them- but sometimes the "behind the scene" work for charity companys are the most important(although the least fun). Anyways, it felt good to work hard and be able to help. There was also an army section there volunteering which was pretty cool- I talked to a lot of them and exchanged numbers. Their job in the army is to produce and run the army radio station. Not all soldiers are on the battlefront fighting! One of the girls who is my age lived in Chicago for a couple of years and told me about a cool indie musical festival in the Negev coming up. Anyways, after we got back I went to the young judaea office and planned a hike for tomorrow morning to go to Yehudia up north and camp there for a night with a couple friends. I'll blog about it when I get back!! I was so used to Muss where they baby fed you everything but here you have to make things happen for yourself, you can't just sit back and expect trips to be made. No one was taking initiative to plan a trip so I did it myself and more and more people are calling me to join:) I'm very excited I'll let you know all about it. Eyal (my madrich) invited 30 kids over for dinner in his Sukkah last night and his mom cooked for all of us. His mom is so generous- she made AMAZING dishes (lasagnya, keesh, corn pie, salad, cucumber mix, patatoe dish, and 3 different desert cakes with ice cream), and now that I am paying for my own food and cooking for myself, I appreciate home cooked meals more then ever. After dinner we sang hebrew songs and then a lot of us went to the beach to go swimming. On the way to Tel aviv I saw a pro-palestine protest with signs saying "stop the ethnic cleansing!" There has already been some security warnings here because of the peace talks. This morning I got up early to work with special needs kids! We did arts and crafts with them and even though I can't speak Hebrew, I did bond with a couple of the kids by communicating in other ways. And a couple hours later my apartment went to a 1st grade class and played games with them. Kids are way more patient with my hebrew then adults are! Even though I was supposed to be teaching them, they were trying to teach me words. During one of the games,one of the kid's cell phones went off and he politely excused himself and answered. What the heck! Since when do 1st graders have cell phones and bring them to school!! I was amazed. Am I so old already that the changes in society are scaring me?? Does this happen every generation??