Summer English Lessons: Kiryat Malachi

I’m Eliana and I absolutely love ENP! I’m from Nashville, Tennessee, I go to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and for two months this summer I’m lucky enough to be a Tucker Fellow volunteering with the Ethiopian National Project. I teach English in Kiryat Malachi (a small town about an hour from Jerusalem), and I get a kick out of it.

The girls I teach are 12 and 13 years old, and they’re participants in ENP’s Scholastic Assistance Program. That means that they’re eight of the 3,556 students throughout Israel who have ENP’s direct support in their academic lives. When they get distracted they can count on having an ENP worker on their back; when they want to go the extra mile they can end up with summer school and other supplementary programs. So here I am, with the summer school.

Work is a bit of an adventure, just about always. Even on the (comparatively) normal days I get back from Kiryat Malachi in the afternoon and just want to fall asleep on the sidewalk outside the Jerusalem Central Bus Station. (No, Mom. I don’t actually do that.)

Three weeks ago, I got the tiniest bit lost on the way to work. (Not because there’s anything wrong with my navigation skills of course).

There are three bus stops in Kiryat Malachi. I’m supposed to get off at the third and walk ten minutes to school. But the day before I had gotten off one stop too early, so it just made sense that when given the next opportunity I’d accidentally get off one stop too late. The bus left Kiryat Malachi, drove for quite a while, and then finally let me off waaaay down the highway.

Those weren’t my best two hours and forty-five minutes. I knew that the buses back to Kiryat Malachi were on the other side of the highway. I had a sneaking suspicion that highways are not meant to be crossed. I also figured that walking in the two-foot wide gap between speeding cars and the cement wall of the bridge was a bad idea. So I climbed down the bridge and landed in….

….a briar patch.

Daintily, of course.

(Because Dainty is my middle name, and because my dress and flip flops had been complaining for months that they never get to see enough wilderness action.)

It was unpleasant. There were a few miles between me and my students waiting impatiently in Kiryat Malachi. And I would’ve gotten there a whole lot sooner if I hadn’t gotten cut each time I took a step forward. (I think it may’ve been official Poor Judgment Day – once I had climbed down the bridge there really wasn’t any hope of extracting myself from the millions of evil thorns tearing me apart. Nor was there any end to my complete disgust with that darn Brer Rabbit, born and bred in the briar patch.)

But I persevered, as ENP volunteer English teachers must! (And really as most anyone must, if ever hoping to eat ice cream again or take a shower again or not get poked by thorns again.) By 1:15PM I made it to my 10:30AM class. And despite all my “seriously-guys,-go-home,-no,-really—I’m-IN-A-BRIAR-PATCH” phone calls, all eight girls were sitting around waiting for me. I taught them family/life-cycle vocabulary, they immediately employed it in near-identical “Dear Chris Brown (/Zac Efron/Justin Bieber/Yoni-of-the-Kiryat-Malachi-Pizza-Shop) Be my husband I will love you and our children” letters, we all left for home, I ate a popsicle, and the world got a whole lot better than it’d been back in the briar patch. 

I do things well, too. Really. I’ve gone to Kiryat Malachi every weekday since then, without much more bodily harm. (Not counting general battery from assorted instances of tripping over myself and not counting a bee sting, because I’m relieved to finally know I’m not deathly allergic like that poor kid in A Taste of Blackberries).

The girls have to walk a pretty long while in the heat to learn grammar in the heat and I still don’t quite understand how they’d choose to do that every day of the summer. I originally figured they’d just feel guilty if they didn’t come when I was bussing myself out every day from Jerusalem. But they killed that hypothesis when Reut got upset over my strict let’s-take-shabbat-off policy and when Lior insisted that the one day I had to cancel class I could’ve dropped off my really sick boyfriend at a clinic in Kiryat Malachi instead of staying in Jerusalem.

I couldn’t’ve asked for a better job, briars and all. The girls want to be there, and that’s only one of the reasons why I’ve got all the respect in the world for them. These girls actually asked for ENP to find them a summer English teacher, and ENP did. They correct (and giggle over) my Hebrew conjugations, they reveal more than I ever thought to ask about Justin Bieber’s love life, and they surprise me every day with their determination to conquer the quirky parts of English. I absolutely cannot wait to see what these girls teach me next.

English Class Ice Cream Trip (Shachar's 13th Birthday)