Friday, August 31, 2018

Year Three(!) Wrap-Up

We just noted our three year aliyah-versary!!!  Wow--we're really doing this!

This year has had some highlights that I didn't blog about at the time, among them:

--Last year, I ran the local 5k race alone.  It was a really great experience for me and after hearing me wax rhapsodic about it, Penina took up jogging this year, and we ran the 5k together.  It was one of the best mother-daughter bonding things I think I've ever done with her and we're hoping that others in the family will join us next year (and I came in 6th place in my age group)!


--In a very different sort of highlight: On erev Pesach, a 7 year-old boy with severe autism went missing while shopping with his mother in the mercaz.  Just hours before Passover, the holiday that requires the MOST intense preparations of any of them, a giant search party was formed with hundreds of volunteers fanning out to search every nook and cranny of the city.  The search was complicated by the fact the boy is totally non-verbal and does not even respond to his own name, and also that the family wasn't from here, so it's not like he might know the people searching for him (although not sure that would have helped him, anyway). 

Chana, Penina and Ilana joined the search party (I kept on working in the kitchen so we would have food for the holiday).  Their job was to go up and down the street near our house that leads out of town and see if they saw him, or anything unusual in the fields and hills that line the road (we live at the very end of the city). 

b''H, shortly before the holiday began, the boy was found by members of the local volunteer EMT service which has an off-road vehicle for just such situations.  He had walked over a mile from the mercaz and gone out of town (likely walking right through our neighborhood, in fact) and ended up in the middle of a construction site and was stuck in mud up to his chest. 

While it certainly would have been nicer had the whole thing not happened, it was beautiful to see the people of our city coming to help someone in need, even at a time that certainly could not have been convenient for most of them....

--Ilana's bat mitzvah in Israel was also a year highlight.  At her school, the rule is that all the girls celebrate their bat mitzvah in the classroom.  I loved it.  We made tons of gluten-free cookies, Penina made a gorgeous cake, and we had fruit platters and chocolate fountains.  Ilana spoke for 20 minutes (in Hebrew) about the blessings for various foods and the girls did a project making a card with the blessings before- and after- each type of food.  We showed a slideshow of her life and then the girls danced to the set list of songs Ilana had put together.  It was fun, sweet and totally reasonable :).  I loved that no bat mitzvah could be "over the top" because how over the top can you be in a 6th grade classroom?!

The class picking Ilana up on a chair 

 and with their completed projects

--I'm not sure if this is a "highlight" or a "lowlight", but it amuses me that "new olim" moments, while (thankfully) less frequent, have still not ended.  For example, at Ilana's school, ordering school books for the next year can only be done through a company that uses a computerized system that is  in Hebrew.  I was delighted to see that I was able to order the books much easier this year than last year, until I got totally stumped trying to order the last item on the book list that the school had given out.  It didn't seem to exist on the system (and the system, of course, is totally automated and there is no way to speak with a human being).  Finally, I asked on the class mom's Whatsapp group only to find out.....that the "book" I was trying to order was not a book at all, but a required fee for using the system :) .

Or the time when, after Ilana's horseback riding lesson, we were all so hot (not that I'm comparing standing in the sun *watching* a lesson to actually riding the horse, but, hey, Chana, Penina and I were hot too!).  We were so hot that we decided to stop at a nearby supermarket and buy some popsicles.  While there, we noticed they had Italian ices and decided that, yum, they would be even frostier!  The cashier gave us rather an odd look when we check out with our lone product and asked if she could give us some spoons, but we didn't think too much about it....

When we got in the car, Chana tried it and said, "Blech!  This is terrible!  It tastes like really strong orange juice".  Penina tried it and agreed it was terrible.  And then they read the ingredients and found out that they were eating.....orange juice concentrate, straight up.  (In our defense, look at that picture--doesn't that look like orange Italian ice?!)