Saturday, March 21, 2009

SERVICE - JUST DO IT!!

So I know it’s been a super long time since I last posted, which is probably a relief to many of you, but it’s time for me to catch you up on all my happenings whether you like it or not. This week was filled with some wonderful opportunities to serve right here in Jerusalem and provide relief to children not too far from my current home. Although it was crazy with finals in four of my classes, one of the favorite parts of my week was getting the chance to do Humanitarian Service as well as work with children in the community. For Humanitarian Service, we make hygiene kits for children in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It’s an ongoing project that happens once a week and it’s great fun!!! We have races to see how many bags we can make in a certain amount of time, which is totally lame I know, but we try to bring excitement into the process in any way possible. The following day, a group of us went to the Gypsy Community Center where we were able to teach English lessons to Palestinian children one-on-one. I worked specifically with this 13 year old girl Laila who was absolutely hilarious! My job was to come up with simple sentences that had the words who and which in them and you wouldn’t believe how hard it was! We played Hang Man also, after helping her finish her homework first of course, and we laughed a ton about the ridiculous words we both came up with. I am definitely going back to spend time with Laila (and the other children too) because it was awesome to be amongst the kids in the community that have such a sweet spirit about them. It made my week less stressful and it was better serving others than being wrapped up with my own concerns. I LOVE serving and believe full heartedly that it makes everyone a happier people.

2 comments:

Brooke and Aaron said...

That must have been hard to communicate with her as you were trying to teach English. Sounds like you had a great time.

Anonymous said...

How fulfilling to have the hygiene kits going right to your back door & helping people who have become dear to your heart! Glad you found a way to bring some joy into a very stressful finals week.