Kibbutz Lavi / Tiberius / Safed / Tselafon / Jerusalem / Jordan Valley / Galilee / Galilee Sites / Tel Aviv

What's Engliyada?

Every spring, the Jewish Federation's Partnership 2000 Engliyada program sends volunteers from several U.S, cities to Tiberius to give local adults practice in conversational English. Classes are held for 3 hours each evening so the students, mostly from the "Sovev Kinneret" area can attend after work. (In Israel, this means Sunday through Thursday evenings.) As the only professional ESL teacher in the Milwaukee group, I gave a crash course in ESL teaching before we left.

Here are my friends Shelley and Marcia outside the Mercaz Klita (absorption center.) The complex contained apartment buildings where we lived, a classroom/activity building where we taught, a little synagogue, plaster statues, fountains, and a lot of stray cats.

Entering and leaving, everybody had to go through this locked guard house. Sometimes this led to serious pile-ups (like when the guard had to go to the bathroom) but it made us feel safe and we were all willing to wait. And everybody was very happy to meet the English teachers.

Moving-in day. My suitemate and good friend, Shelley, in room 4602 on the 5th floor of building 4 at the mercaz klita. Most of the other residents were high school students from Ethiopia and families from Argentina.

People "making aliya" (immigrating to Israel) typically live at an absorption center for their first few months to study Hebrew intensively and get adjusted to the country.

The protrusion on the left is the air conditioner. And when you open the outer metal shades, you can see...

Lake Kinneret, sometimes called the Sea of Galilee. At 200 meters below sea level, it's the lowest freshwater lake in the world. Kinneret is based on the Hebrew word for lyre (kinor) and denotes its shape.

The city of Tiberius extends upwards from the western shore into the hills. These hills (Harei Naftali) are where the tribe of Naftali lived during Biblical times.

From the Mercaz Klita, it was an easy walk to downtown Tiberius and the lakefront; coming up was usually deserving of a sherut ride.

Sherut? The Hebrew word means "service" (not to be confused with "sherutim" which means "bathrooms.") They're little vans that follow many bus routes according to no particular schedule. If you see one, you get on; they cost about the same as a bus, are more convenient, and occasionally a driver will go out of his way to take you to your destination. So why do people take the bus? I don't know.

Marcia and one of the stray cats that we shared our dinners with. Everybody in Israel seems to have "outside cats" that they adopt, even those that have "inside pets" also.	This is the ESL class that I shared with Rosalie. The students were all Israelis living and working in the area.
Tamar and Ilan preparing a class presentation.	Galit was Shelley and Leila's student. She invited us to a delicious dinner at her home in Tiveria. Here's Galit and her husband Meir.

All the students were fluent in Hebrew, but at home many of them spoke Arabic, Amharic, Spanish, and Chinese. Some needed English in order to advance at their jobs (in hotels, for example) and a few wanted to be able to speak with American or British in-laws or grandchildren. Their main interest was speaking, and we did little reading or writing. The students were interesting and motivated, and I really enjoyed teaching them.