and you can go back to high school

planning began months ago for the sadaka reut year opening arab-jewish youth seminar. some meetings and preparations seemed normal and expected: finding a place, hiring buses, recruiting kids from the youth groups, writing workshops, etc. other preparatory discussions caught me a bit off-guard: 20 minutes debating whether or not the high school kids can drink during the seminar (no), another 20 minutes on if they can smoke cigarettes (yes), then 15 on whether or not they can smoke nargila (yes), and finally whether or not we should give them a curfew/time they have to be in their rooms (no).

but despite the lack of rules which are normally imposed on american high school kids, the seminar ran smoothly and successfully (so what if a bunch of the kids stayed up all night smoking nargila and hanging out? hey, there was even a staff member hanging out and smoking with them). and during the day, the kids (except for a couple who were falling asleep in their seats) participated in workshops about getting to know each other, identity and social change.

unlike my model bi-lingual meeting where everyone understood both languages, the weekend involved lots of translation, which may have been redundant for many of the palestinian israelis, but was quite necessary for the 2 girls from east jerusalem who spoke no hebrew/the jews in their discussion group who spoke no arabic. regardless of language, there was definitely communication and fun had, so much so that our educational directors wanted to remind everyone at the end of the weekend that this kind of encounter is not a normal occurence and they are completely right. these things, which for those involved are easy to take for granted, dont happen nearly often enough.