The paint spill so lovingly swirled on my classroom floor

I told you it was lovely! I wanted it to dry so I could just peel it right off and hang it on the wall or something but I think it would have stuck rather than come up and I didn't want my students trotting through it. Ah well. At least I got a picture.

GlobalGiving Challenge!

From today until April 26, we are competing to earn a spot on the GlobalGiving website, and earn up to US $6,000 from GlobalGiving by being one of the top fundraisers in the Global Open Challenge.


The organization with the greatest number of individual donations will get $3,000, and a separate $3,000 prize will go to the project raising the most money. The second and third place runners up for both achievements will get $2,000 and $1,000 respectively.


This is our opportunity to try the fundraising tools and services that GlobalGiving offers to organizations like ours. In order to keep our project on GlobalGiving longer term, and use their website for ongoing fundraising, we need to raise a minimum of US $4,000 from at least 50 unique donors during the Challenge. You can keep track of our progress on the leaderboard.


You can help us succeed by spreading the word!


Pass along this email to your friends and family and ask them to tell others.
If you are planning to make a donation this year to TYO please do so by going to our project on GlobalGiving between now and December 21.

Today I am mad at Palestine

Let's just keep this between you and me though ok?

I forget who but someone told me once that when you stay in a country for long enough, you will go through fluctuations in how you feel about it. Sometimes you will absolutely love it there and never, ever want to go home. Other days you will just not GET what is going on around you and why people behave the way they do and you will just want to go home where things are more familiar.

I think I hit that second one today.

Americans are particularly fond of order. In America, you wait in line, you are quiet in a movie theater, you cross the street at an appropriate interval and cars who see you in the street will keep a respectful distance. We even know which side of the escalator is for standing (the right) and which for passing (the left). I've been to a few countries where these rules either don't exist or are generally not followed.

In Palestine it's a bit different I've found. Some of what happened to me today is cultural and will involve me letting go of my American need for control and order, and some of it was just something you'd find wherever you went in the world. I guess this blog is my personal forum, though, so I'm going to vent to you, my dear reader.

It began this morning with my moms' exercise class. For no particular reason at all I am partial to having my students quiet and attentive while I huff and puff and call out the beat and spattered phrases of encouragement in English and Arabic. My ladies, however, are more content to use the time for chatting and dropping in and out of the workout as they see fit. Sometimes "guests" just enter and stand in the doorway and talk with the ladies and hold up the class. For me, as an American, this is disrespectful. For them, I could see how if someone enters a room and you know that person, it would be rude not to talk to them and engage them. This is an example where I should amend what I'm beginning to see as Type A habits to better fit with my surroundings.

In a university classroom, however, this is not the case. With just a few classes left before their second exam, I am stressing myself out trying to make sure that my students are prepared. I try to explain this to them, even drawing out the remaining days on the whiteboard vs. the amount of material we have left to cover. Still, students talk out of turn, talk to each other, complain that I give them homework, and say "khallas! khallas!" when there are five minutes left in their 50-minute class. When they stroll in 15 minutes late to the classroom and I am the middle of teaching, they knock on the door and shake hands with their friends. Someone's cell phone went off at least three times in the class. One student, who I swear I have never seen before, came up and complained about being marked absent so many times. I said, in English I know he could not understand "I don't know who you are. I don't even recognize you. You are *never* in my class." Ugh.

Then, at the end of the day, around 730pm when I'm about to set up my classroom, hang up the costumes I've purchased in the new closet I've had installed, I find a wet, sticky, rather lovely puddle of paint that some unwatched kids have swirled onto my floor. There are paint bottles in the pile of costumes, there is paint in a hat, there are crayons on the floor, there is general disarray. And I realize that unattended children in any country will wreak havoc but this was the icing on the cake today.

So I vented to my blog. Is that healthy or not? Please let's not post cultural relativist arguments on this forum saying that I am being elitist or some such. Today, today, I am mad at Palestine.

Things to do in a darkened room

My black box theater has manifold purposes!

While it has yet to host a play, the BBT was specifically requested for a film screening by one of my fellow teachers, Doris. Since I really want this theater to be something that lasts beyond my stay here, I am thinking of adding a white sheet over the window that can be lowered for movie viewing. I would have to add some lining to the crushed-velvet curtain because it is porous and lets light through, but I think that it is very doable. Exciting!

A great week for the kids' class

Yay! Puppets are the way to go :)

So since the puppets were so successful last semester, I decided to incorporate them again this semester, even though many of my students are veterans of my class. In fact, I'm not sure that they're even signed up for the class, they just come because they came last semester, liked it, and just show up twice a week at the same time! I don't have the heart to turn anyone away, not even the kids who come with 1 or 2 younger siblings in tow. Today I ordered 30 juices for my students (we give them boxes at every class) and had to scrounge around for 3 more! I take it as a sign that they are enjoying the class.

Last semester, as you'll remember from my beautiful photo (I promise to incorporate more photos soon!), I created a beautiful puppet theater that I was immensely proud of and that the kids enjoyed playing with... perhaps a bit too much in fact because it was nearly destroyed within days of its introduction and even after one repair attempt. For today's class I was going to built another one, but exhaustion and a bit of nausea (I've been eating just hummus and Oreos for some time because I can't be bothered to cook!) prevented me from making it in time for class. My sage friend and fellow teacher Doris offered some wonderful wisdom: why not just let the kids make the theaters?

Yes!

I managed to find about 5 or 6 boxes of suitable size and have them ready for class. Then, miracle of miracles, all FIVE of my volunteers showed up today. This was unprecedented. I was able to divide the students into five groups, each headed by a volunteer, and each with a bit of cardboard to cut, paint, sticker and glue into their very own puppet theater.

With all of my kids and volunteers engaged, I was even able to manage one student of mine who has been a bit of trouble. He is a great kid, very funny, but tends to get alienated and wander off with his yo yo. He and I built our theater together and for next class we'll put on a show with it together.

At the end of the class, most of the groups had time to tidy up their space a bit, though some will have to finish their project next week. I handed each a juice box and said "shukran! ma salaama!" and they headed home.

If one out of every ten classes goes as wonderfully as today's, I will be immensely immensely happy :)