First Days of Volunteering

This past Sunday was my first day of volunteering as a participant in Tikkun Olam in Tel Aviv. I am volunteering at a soup kitchen called Lasova. There I serve the people that come in for a meal. I then clean up after the people. I will be volunteering there every Sunday and Wednesday for 4 hours each day. At first it seemed like something that I did not find interesting until we ran into one of the volunteers at the shouk after our preliminary visit. He told us to think about it and that just stuck with me. You see a lot of the problems that society worldwide faces. Homeless people, drug addicts, and whoever does not have the means to buy food for themselves. It was a crazy experience because I was joined by this group of evangelical Christians from Alabama. They asked my friend Jeremy and I if we were here in Israel on a ministry visit and I had no idea what that meant. They had very thick southern accents and did not have any understanding of Hebrew. It was pretty funny because the Israeli volunteers that knew English had no idea what these people were saying.

Today I volunteered at an afterschool program called Kadima Oz Florentine. It is a afterschool program for children of African asylum seekers, and migrant workers. Hearing a young African girl and a Filipino boy converse in Hebrew was very amazing to witness. Only in this country and under the circumstances that these children are under would they be speaking in Hebrew. I basically played with the children, made sure they were supervised, and made sure that they did their homework. I helped a young Filipino boy named Gerald with his English homework. I know I will be having a great time every Tuesday afternoon. להתראות