"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life" - Confucius

Local Staff, International Staff, and Interns at lunch today (photo: Tomorrow's Youth Organization)

Today was my first day of work. Doing something so rewarding and knowing that what I do will make an impact on kids and parents lives long after I leave makes what I can see rapidly becoming a chaotic and stressful schedule a more exciting than daunting prospect. But before I get too into the details of work here, a quick update on yesterday.

Yesterday we went out and got our phones all set up, got lunch for $0.63, and got the first official tour of the community center I'll be working in. I saw the interns office, which is chock-full of art supplies, sports equipment, markers and anything else we could possibly be interested in using to engage our kids. We saw our classrooms, although not which ones specifically will be assigned to us (I'm hoping for the one where the walls are painted with chalkboard paint), as well as everyone else's offices, the core programming (preschool) classes, and lunch areas. On the tour of the school, I learned that Nablus is situated between two mountains, Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal. According to Samaritan faith (a very small subset of the Judaism), Mt. Gerizim is the mountain where Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed. However, according to traditional Judaism, Islam and Christianity, that mountain was Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem. Nonetheless, it gives the city a particularly strong religious history. More religious history to come I'm sure following this weeks visit to Wadi Qelt.

Today, we spent the morning in trainings on professionalism and the various programs that TYO provides. We went over the volunteer program and YALLA, which is a leadership program for Nablusi youth. Each of the interns will have two assigned volunteers and an assigned translator for our classes. We also had a group lunch, where we met the local staff and played games, and on our afternoon break walked down to get fresh mango juice from the nearby juice store. In the afternoon, we went through Monitoring and Evaluation training, and finally we will be venturing into Nablus for grocery shopping in about a half hour.

Tomorrow we will go over the Women's Group programs, including the women's entrepreneurship program, and the psychosocial aspects of our classes, as well as the logistics of the intern program and how our classes will be run. The only potential hiccup in the plan would be that tomorrow there is supposed to be a strike from 7am to 7pm on behalf of the taxi cab drivers in Palestine, who are suffering from increasingly high gas prices but who are not allowed by law to raise their fares. In a small city like Nablus where everyone knows one another, a taxi strike means that there will be no cars on the road, public or private, as a show of support. Logistically, a strike like this could mean difficulty  getting to work for many local staff who may live in neighboring villages or in Old Town, which is too far to walk from, and if it lasts more than a couple of days could mean cancelled classes because our bus drivers would be unable to pick up kids for school. Classes are scheduled to start a week from tomorrow, so hopefully a resolution will have been met before then.