Our second semester in Yeruham has kicked off quite eventfully, which, while maybe a little bit stressful, has been very exciting for everyone. We arrived at around 6 p.m. on Wednesday, after our booster shot adventure in Be'er Sheva, quite a few hours later than planned (also much darker than planned). The bus dropped everybody at their respective residences, and the truck, which had been waiting for us for a few hours as well, came by, and we unloaded and brought everything upstairs. Our apartment number is 11, and we're either three or four flights of stairs up – I can't remember which one but I think the former. When we entered, things were chaos – we immediately identified a broken table, there was a table awkwardly positioned behind a couch, and things quickly ended up all over the place. One of the first moves we made in my room (which is Seth, Jesse Lender, Ethan (MoMo) and me) was to move a bunk bed against a different wall to create a more open area in the room.
We didn't do too much when we arrived at the apartments. At around 8, we went to the Afikim schul right down the block from my apartment for Ma'ariv, pizza, and a quick orientation. The pizza came from right next door, and we were happy to know that there is some good pizza in town. I don't remember too much what I did for the rest of the night – I was definitely tired, didn't unpack too much, and we also didn't have our laptops because while Yossi was planning on bringing them with him from Jerusalem, he didn't want them in the car while we were all in Be'er Sheva with the mumps issue. We had an apartment meeting to discuss shopping lists and general apartment issues (the other room in the apartment is Gelb, David, and Seffi).
A little bit about the apartment: not the nicest living accommodations in the world. A medium size living room, a small but decent size kitchen, small rooms (though other apartments have smaller rooms), and cheap bathrooms. With a bit of decorating and cleaning up, however, it's much better.
Thursday was a good day in accomplishing stuff. We all davened together in the morning, and then we had most of the day off from then on. Yoram, our Yeruham liaison, brought us around to our worksites. I'm working in the Yeshiva high school in the English department; other people are working in other schools doing English, as well as in a graveyard, soup kitchen, kindergarten, Magen David Adom… I feel like I'm forgetting something. We basically saw the school, met a couple of people there, and left – and of course learned the way to get there. I'm hoping to have a bike to get around, especially for work. I unpacked, bought more drawers for my clothes (I had very little shelf space), had some pizza, Cori came to talk to us about kashrut, and we did our first shop (including grilled cheese/waffle maker, cereal, bread, pasta, eggs, mac 'n cheese, chicken, other essentials – 700₪ bill). Our first dinner was chicken breasts in pita with BBQ sauce and was delicious. Yoram and Moshe stopped by at various points throughout the day to check out the issues in the apartment, of which included: minimal hot water, a broken refrigerator, a broken table that I already mentioned, not working lights…
Friday morning, we met at the park (about a minute walk from my apartment) to flesh out some details about the upcoming days. Shortly after that, Yoram took us to a storage place to pick up a new refrigerator. We loaded it onto the truck and rode with it back to the apartment. I'd like to keep this blog as politically correct as possible, so I won't mention the connotations apparent to us as we road in the back of the truck. It was a bit crazy back there – we were flying everywhere (we includes the refrigerator, too) and we caught a few good bumps in the road. Crazy fun in Yeruham. Getting it up to the apartment wasn't any easier. We cleaned things up and made grilled cheese for lunch.
I'll end this post here, for length's sake.
Kol Tuv,
Judah
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