Education and also a lot of fun!

Written by: Leoni Groot

It has been a long time since I last wrote for ENP’s blog, but this is because I went to China for 3 weeks! It was a great experience and I had a really good time. I am so happy that ENP gave me the freedom and opportunity to take a break and travel somewhere else in the world. Now I am back with even more energy and enthusiasm!

So what has been going on since I came back? The day after I got back I immediately went to the office to resume my everyday routine again. Even though I “suffered” from jetlag, coming back to ENP that day was a good choice: it was great to see Grace after more than a month (she went to the States before I went to China) and to be involved with ENP again.

In the office, I continued working on the website. I am collecting all the data about the cities where ENP is operating in that I will put, eventually, on this webpage. It can be time consuming because I have to gather information from different sources (the Internet, ENP reports and other research reports), and there is not always a lot of information about the Ethiopian community in the smaller cities. However, it is still really interesting to read ENP’s reports and to realize how successful they have been so far. For example, they found out that after implementing the Scholastic Assistance program in schools, Ethiopian-Israelis have gotten significantly higher grades in the subjects in which they are receiving help. Not only that, but the average grade of the Bagrut exams of the youth that attend this project in some cities (like Afula) is higher than the average grade of other Jews. This is fantastic news!

Last Sunday I went back to the Youth Outreach Center in Petah Tikva. Even though there were only few kids there that day, I enjoyed it very much. I gave a class to just two girls this time, but it was so much fun, because they were really willing to learn. I created an exercise where they had to listen to a song by Tupac and fill in the missing words on the paper with the lyrics. Even though it was a little bit difficult for them, they were really trying their best. After playing the song a few times, I saw that they had done really well with the exercise. I explained words that they did not know by putting them in a different context or by explaining them with different words. One girl said that she had learned so many new words since she began taking these classes with me; I was really happy to hear that.

            After that, we discussed the lyrics more deeply and compared what this rapper said about the USA with Israel. Even though we finished the exercise after fifteen minutes of discussing, I stayed longer with the girls in the class. Later, another girl joined the class as well, because she was looking for a place to do her homework, and one of the girls helped her with it. I had a conversation with the other girl, and we drew cursive on the white board. I started to explain her that I am not living in Holland, but in the Netherlands, and I clarified the difference: Holland is made up of two provinces (North and South Holland) and the Netherlands is the name of the country as a whole. She wrote a summary of what she had learned with drawings on the white board (see photo). She finished her summary after I showed her a YouTube movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_IUPInEuc) to help clarify even further. She found it really interesting to learn this, and she then explained it proudly to the youth coordinator and the other girl from the class (in English!).

Yesterday’s experience made me aware that I do not go there to teach them only English, but also to enrich the knowledge of those who are willing to learn more than just what is in their schoolbooks. Their happy faces after learning something new and their enthusiasm make me even more enthusiastic to go the this Youth Outreach Center twice a week to do something meaningful in the lives of these youths.