oh yes, wait a minute mr. postman

mail works differently here. while there is still a mailman that walks around and delivers mail daily (except with saturday rather than sunday as the day of rest), said mailman's job is only to deliver. anything you want sent must be brought to the post office, making mail duty one of the least desirable chores in our office (who wants to wait in a line every day?).

i tried to explain to someone how in the states, the mailman who delivers the mail also picks up outgoing mail. apparently, this model makes too much sense for Israelis who seem to pride themselves on convoluted bureaucracy (i.e my experience at the bank).

march 1st is the deadline of a very important grant application. yesterday, february 27th, i came back from 4 days in istanbul straight into the madness of getting this application together and to washington d.c. in less than 48 hours. it was written, but a couple sections needed editing and working with our wheezing printing we struggled to manually print double-sided. then the original copies of the many forms, attachments, booklets, and the proposal itself had to be assembled in the correct order, as well as 9 copies of everything.

around 6pm we finished this and began our next challenge: getting these several kilograms of paper across the atlantic. by this time, the post office was closed so we began to look into fedex options. when fedex quoted an estimated price of $200, i began looking into flight options. i found a flight for $489 to washington which would have allowed me to hand-deliver the application (and perhaps visit some friends) but you had to buy the ticket 3 days in advance (and that price must have been before taxes).

so back to fedex. unlike the normal postman, they said they would come pick up the package between 8pm and 11pm. no one wanted to be sitting in the office until 11pm, so being such good problem solvers, we found an excellent solution: we gave them the address of a pub in tel aviv and celebrated with beers while waiting for the mailman to arrive. the fedex man almost joined us for a round, but he had other pickups to make.

“and I don't care that you're bowlegged and I don't care that you're bilingual”

last night I attended what I would consider to be a model bilingual meeting. everyone had at least a basic understanding of both languages spoken, so rather than repeating everything spoken in 2 languages, every person spoke in whichever language he/she felt most comfortable in. it was refreshing to be in an environment where everyone’s fluency was enough to understand both languages so that people could speak freely in their mother-tongues, yet still be understood by the entire group. additionally, there was pizza and cookies making it a model meeting regardless of lingualism.

however, this was no sadaka reut hebrew-arabic staff meeting, it was a holylanders ultimate team meeting and the languages were hebrew and english.

at sadaka reut staff meetings no one pretends that there is a pretense of bilingualism. since my hebrew is the weakest of anyone around the table, we uni-lingually go about business in hebrew, trying to make the meeting as quick and painless as possible. sometimes at more ”formal” events like board meetings and the organization’s annual “general assembly,” introductions and welcomes will occur in both hebrew and arabic, but as soon as its time to get down to the nuts and bolts, everyone switches into the dominant common language.

everyday i find myself more frustrated with my deteriorated arabic skills and more convinced that I need to invest significant time and energy into learning this language. i don’t think it’s the fault of any individual jewish israelis that they weren’t raised bilingually with arabic. yet, even though all the jews in the office are working on learning arabic, they are a long way off from being able to conduct a bilingual staff meeting. and as much as the people I work with, both jewish and arab, believe in equality and bi-national cooperation, ive spent a good deal of time wondering; in a bi-national society, can you have equality without bilingualism?