Biblical Zoos and "the Old Shool House"

Usually I’m not a huge zoo person. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all, right? But when a bunch of my JC crew decided to go to a zoo here in Israel, I couldn’t resist jumping in. It doesn’t take much to twist my arm for fun. I enjoyed hanging out with a new group of people. We got to really relax and enjoy ourselves. So naturally we were utterly ridiculous. Jonathan, CJ, and I took pictures as kangaroo triplets, and we quested to find a hippo from Noah’s ark. But hands down, the best part of the day was the lemur exhibit. We walked in to see adorable little lemurs everywhere! They came right up to us, and the worker relaxed and let us touch them. Before we knew it, we had lemurs on our heads, and I had a lemur climb on my back with its tiny hands! It was so different from a zoo back at home where the animals don’t move or do anything. Granted then a real worker ran in and shooed them away. Oops! I still don’t know if the first guy was an actual worker or not. Regardless, I loved it while it lasted.

But those lemurs had NOTHING on the energy of the kids I got to teach a few days ago. I went to teach English to elementary aged children at a nearby Palestinian school. And it was so fun! Kirk, Lauren, Cali, Ross, Sheri, and I played games with them at the beginning. We played “Red light, Green light” (which turned into “Attack Cali!”) and danced to the Hokey Pokey. It was crazy, fun chaos. I made friends with a 5-ish year old girl Sahad and we danced together. She is the cutest! After we played games with them, we split into groups of two and went to teach them English. It was really intimidating because the school didn’t tell us anything about what they wanted us to teach them, and the kids didn’t know much conversational English. But Team Kirk and Megan did our best! I was so glad to have him with me. It would have been crazy trying to handle them all on my own. I worked with the girls, and he was the muscle haha! We went over numbers and clothing. I was so proud of Sahad when she said “My name is Sahad.” It was a great experience, even though I don’t know how much help we were. There is a lot that can be done to help here. Livin' the dream!