Sunday, May 22, 2016

Workshop 9: mental and logistic preparations for Israel with the ISS staff!

Workshop 9 
Contributed by India Jeremy

This Diller workshop last Sunday was really fun, and although we were missing a few members of our cohort, we still learned a lot and got a lot done.
               
The workshop started just like it usually does, and we around saying our “tovs” and “rahs”. Lara wasn’t there this week (she was at a coordinator seminar in The South) so we were led by our amazing JC’s. We also had three guests – Adam Weisberg, who works in Diller (and right above us, even though we never see him), Elana White, who is a Diller alumna and will be taking us to Israel this summer as well as leading us in our first few days, and Ilan Vitemberg, who has worked with Diller in the past and will be leading us for the rest of our trip this summer (we are so excited!) After we went around, we walked around the room and looked at different posters, each with a single word on them. The words were “mental health” and “self-care” (there were about six other words having to do with wellbeing). We went around and wrote phrases or words we thought of when we saw the big words in the middle. After a couple of minutes, we came back together and read all of the sheets. We discussed how taking care of ourselves and each other will be crucial for the Israel trip, and a lot of us agreed we will really need our “me time” after a while. It was good to talk about this, because if we do stress during the trip, all of us are now prepared to be there for each other.

Next, Elana gave us questionnaires to fill out about an emotional time we had. The questions ranged from “what did you do as an outcome of this emotion?” to “do you regret feeling this emotion?” and we talked about our moments in partners.
               
After that, we had about fifteen minutes to ask Elana and Ilan anything we wanted. Since we haven’t really gotten time to get to know them, the purpose of this was to learn more before we spent three weeks with them out of the country. They each gave an “elevator pitch” of their lives and who they are, which was really interesting and cool. The best question (in my opinion) asked was, “If you are given the aux cord in Israel on the bus, what will you play?” Ilan first said he would ask us what we wanted to hear, but then after we told him that wasn’t an option he said he would play something off of his water aerobics playlist. After a few minutes of freaking out, we begged him to teach us some of his moves. He played the song “Happy” by Pharrell, we all stood up, and he gave us a mini lesson. It was amazing.
               
Finally, we got a break. For a change of scenery we went to the roof, and luckily it was a hot and sunny day in San Francisco. We ate snacks, talked, and enjoyed the view of the bay. After returning back inside, we got into our community day groups, pulled out our computers, and planned. The Sababa committee introduced our next deadline and a new format our schedule has to be in, and we all started formatting it in that way as much as possible. I am working on day 3, and in our group we planned a skype call where both we Americans and the Israelis can meet.
               

Then it was close to 6:30, we had a word whip, and left. It was a good workshop!