Working with the Refugee Kids

Yesterday I joined Kamilah and helped babysit some kids. Their mothers were all refugees learning Hebrew, and so they needed someone to look after their children while they were in their lessons and their husbands were at work. Working with these kids was very different from working with the kids at Hand-in-Hand. First off, the ages of the kids varied quite a lot, and secondly, it was manned only by volunteers (including the teachers). I was lucky enough to work with the little little kids (something I don’t get to do at my school, since the three year olds are the youngest). I got to watch over a little one year old who cried every time I put her down, a pretty chill 8 month old, and a hilarious 6 month old. Every time I would distract my attention from him to the one year old, he would start crying until I turned back to him. He smiled very easily, especially when I let him hold one of my fingers. One of the best parts of my trip so far was seeing him smile wide (with no teeth!) and open his eyes just as wide. It was the cutest and most hilarious thing I have seen. The one year old was also very sweet- sometimes I would put her down and distract her with a toy (which would work for about five seconds before she started crying) and she would try to escape- not by crawling, but by literally rolling her body around until she moved. She was scooting!

After the mothers had come to pick up their children, an interesting discussion took place between the volunteers and the teachers. The teacher said that there were too many students and too many different levels of Hebrew, and therefore they should cap the amount of women who came. It was just very uplifting to see all of these people working together to try and make this work for the most amount of people. I look forward to returning, and hopefully seeing my babies again! Nothing makes me happier than being around children, as strange as that may seem.

Hannah