A few times a week I work with Gil, a special ed student, who has been making huge advances in his reading and speaking. Sometimes the class is doing some fun activity or game and I do not want to take him out, so we sit together and I speak with him in English as much as possible. Yesterday was one of those days, as the class was just heading out to the school garden as I arrived, so it seemed best to just join in--it was the best decision of my life.
The school garden is a new venture and rapidly growing, bringing some much needed greenery to a very urban and low income school, and we were making room for some new trees coming next week. We set to removing the weeds, which happened to include lots of the dandelion flowers that have popped up all over Beer Sheva in the past few weeks; all of the kids had either hoes or rakes and we worked for about half an hour clearing the planter beds.
Since I do not normally work with this entire class the children are a bit shy at first. Although it is a special education class, most of the kids seem to have mild lacking in social skills and I guess being around "the American" can be intimidating. But in only a few minutes we had ceased working and circled up, about 8 kids in all, asking me how to say things in English; "Mah zeh perach?" ("What is flower?"), "Eich om-reem...?" ("How do you say...?"). I was having a blast with them, enjoying the sunny weather (winter in Beer Sheva is a joke) and getting to know the kids. Later, as we began packing away the tools a girl named Sapir came up to me and meekly held out a bouquet of yellow dandelions she had picked for me. Needless to say I was speechless and struggled to deal with the cuteness just to thank her repeatedly.
That was one of the best moments of these six months here, and I will carry that memory with me forever. It does not get much more amazing than that, to see a child blossom into a conversation and giving flowers freely--words can not explain the elation of that moment.
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