I woke up today feeling pretty darn good but also quite sad. The lice experience made me very excited to be home so soon but knowing that I was begining my second to last day at the shelter was hard to admit, espeically because it was Ariel's last day. The morning started off as always with mentoring. But, Hannah and I decided to collaborate a bit. Both of our girls had requested to bake but each wanted their own thing, which was understandable. But, space in the shelter for cooking is limited and so are ingredients. However, I had a plan. Since my mentee had picked out a recipe for brownies, but we couldn't find all of the ingredients for the chocolate sauce for them I decided we would just make the brownie portion. Shiran had told Hannah she had an easy cookie recipe and had the ingredients for her and her girl to make them. Even though the girls wanted to do their own thing I knew that having that many sweets around was simply a bad idea so I found a way to combine the idea. I saw it as a good way, especially since the girls are sisters, for the girls to see that despite their 5 year age gap they could work on separate projects but bring them together at the end. And so Hannah's group made their cookie recipe and we did the brownies but when we baked them we combined them to make a 2 layer bar with cookie on the bottom and brownie on the top. And it turned out, according to the fact that several of the kids ate 3 each, to be pretty tasty.
Baking didn't use up our entire 2 hours which I was very happy about because we had barely started her scrapbook. Luckily the time we had provided time for her to decorate the covers and pick out all of the pictures she wanted to have included. Then it became my responsibility to print the pictures and put everything together (but again I don't mind). Of course I was also in the midst of the other book as well and a slide show (well two of them) so I may have taken on too much but oh well.
Shosh came to the shelter to meet with Shiran, have lunch with us, and do a final women's shelter check in. We had a good conversation about what we liked with our experiences and even learned that because of the work we did at the shelter and how much everyone appreciated us, our help, and our attitudes, the shelter wants to create a lasting relationship and trend for Yahel volunteers to work at the shelter. I was overcome with joy and happiness. Seeing as we are pilot program overall and at the shelter it is really nice to hear that we have made an impact in the success of the program. From a shelter standpoint alone it excited me because, as I've mentioned before, often times I feel that volunteers come and go without making an impact but this proved that we had made an impact and that we had done something positive. For the rest of the afternoon I maintained this excitement and I finally felt a connection to the shelter (but I'm getting to that). As the last part of our discussion, Shosh asked each of us what advice we would give to future shelter volunteers. I gave two pieces. The first was "Use your group". I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work with the 5 women I was placed with. Having 6 of us really was a key to our success and was the perfect number of volunteers. We always had a partner in crime but we had a larger group for support to collaborate with. For example even though I wasn't doing research, when I was in the conference room while mentoring I was able to help Jordana and Ariel come up with successful phrases to use in their presentations. Or when Sarah and Miriam made a new vocabulary sheet for the mothers they always offered them to us to use with our kids. Plus, we weren't going through the emotional toll alone and we had issues we were all okay with sitting down to have a mature conversation to fix the problem. My other piece of advice was "Expect to fall in love but be prepared to have your heart broken". For me, I wish I had been told that prior to starting my experience this summer. It is so easy to fall in love with the families in the shelter, but the fear of walking in one morning and finding out they are gone or are leaving is devastating. It is truly something that you need to be ready to deal with and again something that you need a strong support system for.
We only had an hour and half to be with the kids in the afternoon because the shelter was bringing in a bouncy house for them. As always we started off with the pages for the books Hannah and I are making for them. Some of our kiddos don't enjoy the book pages right away and often they become little adorable terrors running into all the other rooms but at this point it has just become my reaction to say okay, they will run away for a minute and find Shiran or their mother and they will be back soon. Honestly it has kind of gotten to the point where I am comfortable enough that I know it isn't worth my energy to follow them around because its unproductive. One of the girls dislike for working on her pages became my advantage though. I was working on one of the scrapbooks and she saw the glue and wanted to help me. Thus, she became my assistant putting glue on the pictures and papers I was putting in the book and making sure that they were always patted down onto the page. When 4:30 came around the kids got so excited and all ran into the courtyard to play. I sat out there for a while watching them and working on some of the scrapbook stuff but I wanted to see what was going on inside because the older girls were playing some good songs. The moms had just finished prepping all of their food for the bbq they were having that night and were watching the older girls, Jordana and Ariel dance and sing. Of course I had to join in as well. It was at the instant that for the first time I truly felt like part of shelter community and family. The moms started dancing and everyone was laughing and enjoying eachother's company and I just wanted to stay for as long as I could. Additionally, I could see that the older of my two mentees was getting bored so I asked if she wanted to work on her book. Originally, I had wanted to just finish it all on my own because I wanted to see her reaction on Sunday when I give it to her but I knew she was enjoy working on it. Her reaction made my heart melt. She didn't know about the quotes or anything I was adding to it and her jaw dropped and she just said wow I love it. She like the quotes all the recipes, everything. Other than feeling extremely prideful and joyful I was relieved. I was worried that it would just be another spec on her radar but her reaction made me realize she really enjoyed working on the scrapbook together. I felt successful.
After some grocery shopping and dinner we had a group session with the director of Onward Israel. We were all excited to see him again and ready to give him feedback. He asked about the general structure of our program, our placements, how our group sessions had influenced our volunteering and about our group atmosphere. I felt, and he noted, the maturity of our group. It was clear we had all taken something extremely impactful from our experience this summer. At the time I don't think I really realized just how influential our group sessions would actually be in my volunteering but as I think more about it I realize that even though a lot of the understanding wasn't always on my mind, the ideas were leading me in my daily life. Its kind of hard to explain but overall, I realized just a small bit of what I would be taking from this experience.
P.S. I'm sorry I can't include more pictures of our actual projects and the kids.
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