Getting it Right

Tuesday July 30th

This morning was another great morning with the older girl I mentor. We spent an hour and half reading and I swear she must have gotten ten times more confident because she was zooming through a lot of the pages she read. She was able to sound out and pronounce 95% of the words she didn't know correctly and the smile on her face was precious when she got it right. The only thing that is challenging about reading with her is that the book brings up so many good topics for discussion but I am afraid of personally bringing them up because I don't know if they cross any lines. But, I am hoping that I will read the book in its entirety this weekend so that I can better prepare and may be able to distinguish between the lines of getting to personal and just trying to discuss. 

During our lunch break Sarah and I decided to go to the mall because we needed to buy a couple of things. For the first time ever the mall didn't seem entirely sketchy; there were actually a decent number of people there (but don't let that fool you, the stores still make things seem a little weird). We did manage to find what we are assuming is the only normal clothing store in the mall though and it actually had some cute things, luckily Sarah and I talked ourselves out of needing to buy any clothes. 

Tuesday afternoons are always filled with a lot of down time because the kids have yoga and animal therapy. Today one of our girls didn't feel like going to yoga so I sat in our room coloring with her. Eventually Shiran came in because we needed a small bit of translating and in the process I asked Shiran if she thought it would be fun if we had a day where Hannah and I switched roles with the kids and had them teach us. She thought it seemed like a good idea so we asked the girl with me what she thought. She just started laughing because she thought it would be hilarious to try and teach Hannah and I Hebrew.

My Hebrew Lesson

But, we decided to give it a try. The girl who was teaching me is actually the girl Hannah mentors and she goes through theses phases of being happy and sad and is generally a little difficult to read. Hannah says they have been having a much better time in their sessions though and I could definitely see it as she taught me. She was so energetic and I think it was the first time I saw her actually enjoy something. Since the new family came a couple of days ago I have actually seen her step up. As the oldest in our group she has begun to take charge when problems arise or to help explain to the new girl what goes on everyday. When she began teaching me I saw a similar glow about her that she has when she takes charge. I like that she gets to feel empowered, especially because she is in an awkward place. Her older sister gets to do a bunch of fun more mature activities that she wants to do but she is 5 years younger and gets stuck with little kids which she doesn't always enjoy. I think Hannah has been a great influence in showing her that she deserves some time and is important as well through their work with mentoring.

Not the prettiest picture but this was most of our meal

As a group we were supposed to spend the evening in the garden but Shosh and Levi decided to give us the night to plan a bonding activity. We like to claim we had our real Israeli experience last night because despite having all week to plan we didn't have anything concrete until about 6:30pm. We finally settled on the idea of having a pasta bar. Two rooms made pasta, the boys brought veggies, a couple of rooms brought salads, one room made a veggie sauce, and we made fruit salad.
The food was all really good and we definitely pulled together to have a great night. We all sat in the lobby of our floor eating and going around the circle answering questions about where we got our names, our heritages, and our favorite food memories. It was really nice to just have a night to get to know each other and relax together with simple conversations as opposed to thought provoking discussions.