Fall Semester 2010

Hello Friends and Family! After a bit of a roller coaster semester for Justin and I, we are finally getting around to an update! On the one hand, our updates involve fewer field studies now and will therefore have a different flavor… on the other hand, we ended the semester with 8 days in Egypt. So, we will provide you with 2 updates: 1 for the semester in general, and another for Egypt.

As you know, we now hold a staff position at JUC, in addition to being students, and it is a constant challenge for us to balance between the two. In addition to being available for the students, we also hosted weekly and special events for them throughout the semester, which of course involve additional planning. We work in the position with two goals in mind: 1) to be authentic and caring with the students, and 2) to focus on quality over quantity with the events, giving our best to doing a few things really well instead of a lot of things not very well.

For our weekly events, we carried on the tradition of a weekly “cookie night,” which we held every Wednesday, and JUC holds a weekly “vespers service” on Friday nights after Shabbat Dinner. The cookie night has always been a raving success (I have no idea why :0), and this semester, I was particularly excited to see how many students came to help me cook, in addition to enjoying the eating time. It was a special time for me to get to know the students a little better, and we made cookies in the comfort of my own tomby home, using my wonderful toaster oven (which can make 2 dozen cookies at a time!) We also organized the weekly vespers services on Friday night, and Justin worked with the worship teams and with booking a few outside speakers. We also had a Night of Worship once a month, which I think worked really well.

Our special events for the semester included a hike in the Yehudiya Nature Reserve in the Golan, north of the Sea of Galilee; a first-ever JUC Coffeehouse; a Fall Party; a ladies’ tea; and Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The hike was an interesting breaking in, both to our positions and the students to the level of difficulty with the field studies. We had never been to this particular location, but we were told it was a very popular place to go for the fall “Student Activity Day.” The hike not only involved climbing down a cliff and swimming across a pool in order to continue, but it was basically through a steep gorge’s river bed, which consisted more of marked boulders we had to climb through for hours, rather than an actual trail. For me (Mandy), it was beyond my comfort level for a day hike. One of the students also fell about 10 feet and landed on her side on the rocks, but was miraculously not seriously hurt. We did end the day, though, in an emergency room, and I think for next year, Justin and I will plan a different location for the hike. Yehudiya is great for the adventure-seeker, but not ideal for our group.

Our coffeehouse, I think, may have been one of the biggest highlights of the semester! We held it in our student lounge, which looks like something from a Crusader Castle. Justin and I were the baristas, along with the invaluable assistance of one of our students, Betsy, who was a barista back home. We worked with 1 coffeepot for the coffee, a hotplate for special drinks and for scalded milk, a series of spices and toppings, and, oh yeah, one breaker switch for the entire room (which meant that we had to keep alternating what heat-producing items were being used). We even created a full menu for our “Kelley’s Coffee.” We had performances and arranged the room to look like a coffeehouse with small tables. It was a great success, and we will definitely do it again!

Our Fall Party was also a wonderful success! Justin and I love Fall, so it was easy for us to prepare for this event. We had a costume party for all of the students, and we were so surprised at the high level of creativity they all showed with their costumes! We don’t have many resources to buy costumes here, so the students had to get creative. See our pics for some of the results! Dr. Wright gave his annual tour of the Protestant Cemetery, which is adjacent to the school, and once the students returned, they came to our home for a “Movie in the Tomb.” Fall just isn’t complete without Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin. :0) The students ended the evening with a campus-wide game of Mafia (google this if you don’t know what it is…very popular with college students).

At the point in the semester when papers and homesickness are together at an all-time high, we ladies decided to have a girly tea at Diane Wright’s apartment. We made finger food, and all of the girls got dressed up for the event. It was a wonderful and relaxing afternoon, and we got to hear from Joyce Helyer, who was here this semester with her husband, Larry, who taught one of our classes. She and her husband came to JUC in the 1970’s as students and were here for a year. In lieu of this, she spoke to our girls concerning, “Seven Things I Wish I had Known as a JUC Student.” It was so good and so appropriate for this point in the semester.

At the end of the semester, several weeks ago, we celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas (early). Everyone pitched in to help with the cooking and cleaning for Thanksgiving, and Justin and I helped Paula and Dan, the lead dinner cooks, with making the turkeys. No pressure. :0) Everything turned out really well, though, and we had a food-filled evening with fun and games. The very next week was finals week, and on Friday, after finals were over, we had our last Shabbat dinner and then walked to St. Anne’s Cathedral in the Old City, to hear our very own JUC choir. Dan and Paula organized the choir, and Justin and I were absolutely amazed at how wonderful it turned out! The choir sounded so amazing, especially with the world-famous acoustics of St. Anne’s. We returned to the school afterwards for desserts and a slideshow and to celebrate the end of the semester.

In between events, Justin and I have also worked on our own studies, which we tried to reserve specific days for, and volunteering at Hebrew University, to continue to work with the Tel Rehov excavations, now in their lab. We really enjoy these days, because it reminds us of the main reason we are even here. We have currently been working on assembling pottery for their “plates” for the Rehov publications. It is a lot of digging through boxes of pottery and matching numbers to get the right piece, and we are loving being up to our elbows in it all.

The semester has been challenging for us in so many ways. Many of you who know us know that the position isn’t quite an ideal fit for us, but we have tried to tackle the tasks on hand with diligence and authenticity, to give as much as we can to it all, for the benefit of the school and the students. It gives us many, many high points, and many, many low points, and we plod ahead through it all, knowing that we are here for a reason.

Now that the semester is over, we are working to try to turn the campus around, to get ready for the short-term programs that will come in January. We will have over a hundred people on campus at that time, and our role will be more of a support role to whatever is needed, be that helping in the kitchen or cleaning bathrooms, not to mention trying in January to also prepare for the Spring Semester, which starts in February. Before that, though, Justin and I are excited that we will be going to England for 2 weeks after Christmas! Not long into the semester, we realized that we really needed a break from the Middle East. It has been a long, hard journey, and we have missed friends and family back home, not to mention western culture, which is simply a part of who we are. We couldn’t afford to go home, but we wrote to some family friends in London, to see if perhaps we could stay with them for a couple of weeks, to rest and get out of Israel. They have welcomed us with open arms, and we are so humbled and grateful for the opportunity to be able to get away.

So, for now, we are enjoying a quieter campus and getting caught up on a million little things (like the blog) which were sorely neglected over the semester. We welcome your continued prayers through our time here, to have endurance to finish. We also welcome your continued prayers for finances, especially the funds to go home for a month next summer. We originally were going to pay for the tickets through the funds we receive from Justin’s online class back home, but we recently found out that he will not be teaching this coming spring. We will still be going home for that time… that isn’t a question… but we need the resources to pay for the tickets. So, we appreciate your prayers for that provision.

We hope you enjoy all of the tidbits from our semester! Our next blog entry will be specifically for our Egypt field study, which we just got back from. It was an intense eight-day journey, which we can’t wait to share with you! So stay tuned… :0)

Justin & Mandy