Potuguese+Spanish+English= Hebrew

Hi Again...

A few things have happened since last week. The biggest of them being the Yitzchak Rabin seminar and rally. We headed out on Friday to Nes Harim, next to Jerusalem, for the seminar. We got there, moved in and then split up into the groups. These groups were being taught in different languages, so earlier in the week you had to request which language you wanted to learn in. I chose Hebrew, along with the rest of my Hebrew class. We were six Americans, two Australians, two South Africans and a lot of South Americans. I feel a little naive because I don't really know which ones were from Brazil, which were from Uruguay, which were from Mexico and which were from Argentina. It was interesting because for all of us, Hebrew was a second language. Which meant that our Madrichim had to speak to us in Hebrew that we could all understand. We also all spoke to each other in understandable Hebrew. It was also good practice, because we pretty much had to speak in Hebrew because we all spoke different languages.

During the Seminar we discussed mostly democracy and whether Israel was a democracy. I'm still not completely sure how this topic is relevant to Rabin, but it was interesting. My group was very enthusiastic and we all really enjoyed each other's company. Coincidentally one of the girls in my group told us she had cousins in Ann Arbor and it turned out to be people that I knew. It's a small world.

I really enjoyed the rally itself overall. We got to see Shimon Peres, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barack, and Rabin's daughter speak. Since this year is election year, most of the speeches had to do with campaigning of one kind or another. Probably my least favorite speech was the one given by James Hoffa, the leader of the Teamsters Union. He was sent by the Barack Obama's campaign to give a speech at the Rabin rally. I have to say it was pretty embarrassing. It was completely unnecessary and irrelevant. He tried to get the crowd to start a chant of "Yes, we can!" but they were largely unresponsive. We were all slightly humiliated. Apparently my Madrichim weren't impressed with the rally this year. They say there were less people and the speeches were weaker. I still enjoyed it, probably because it was my first one.

The rest of the week has been relatively normal. I went to work for the first time at the cable drum factory on Tuesday. It was fun. It's basically a factory set up in a building that used to be a chicken coop. It wasn't like the last chicken coop and I didn't get a rash from this building like I did in the last one. We were working with two guys who were from one of the neighboring Arab villages. They didn't speak English, but I don't know if that's because they didn't know how or didn't want to. But it was OK, because they gave us instructions in Hebrew which we were able to follow. There wasn't as much lifting involved as I thought there would be. We got ice cream as a reward, so that was fun.

Today we took a field trip to see Har Herzl and Ammunition Hill. Har Herzl is the Israeli political cemetery. A vast majority of Israel's political leaders, soldiers and terror attack victims are buried there. It's really a beautiful cemetery. We visited the graves of a lot of Israeli big-shots. We saw the Rabins, Golda Meir, Herzl, Yoni Natanyahu, Chana Senesh...lots of people.

We also heard a story I really liked about a soldier who was killed in one of the wars (I don't remember which). An Israeli visited an Arab village and one of the Arabs told him about a cave called "Kever Yehudi" or "Grave of the Jew" but he wasn't sure why. So the two of them went there and found the remains of this soldier that had died. They knew it was this particular soldier for two reasons; One reason was that they took his remains in to be identified by the government, and the other reason was that this soldier really liked eating dates and would put the date pits in his pocket, and by the place where they found him, a date tree was growing because he had died with a date pit in his pocket.

We went to Ammunition Hill next which is a hill that was controlled by the Jordanians during the Six Day War. The Israelis had a really hard time conquering it and lots of people died there while they were trying to take over Jerusalem. We would've stayed longer and looked at the trenches, but it started to rain so we only really got to see the museum.

Last night we heard a talk from one of the survivors of the Entebbe hijacking. It was an American woman and her Israeli husband and they had a very thrilling story to tell. In addition to the interesting story, I loved listening to this lady speak because she reminded me of a mix of my mother's friends which in turn reminded me of Ann Arbor. It was very comforting to me.

Well, supposedly I'm visiting my host family on Friday. That should be good. I still have to wire money into my kvutsah's kupah account.

And, of course, my camera is still broken.

But I had a good week regardless.

All My Lovin'
-Phia