ShnUpdate - Savyon 01.11.18

This week we said goodbye to our volunteering and joined the rest of the azyc shnatties for another seminar just like when we started. This may have been the most emotional week of shnat for some of us because it’s finally coming to an end, the last few weeks have been spent trying to tick off our lists of goodbyes, travels and program writing. Amongst the stress we’ve had an incredible time making the most of our year.

To start our week we went to our respective volunteering options to say goodbye, I ran my final English class at Nitzan and paid a visit to the thrift store and was sent home with a recorder and a new jacket. Jess ,Nathan and Tahlia had lunch with their friends at Robin food and got a personalised cake from the resident pastry chef there, Sal and Michael said an emotional good bye to their furry friends at the dog shelter.

After such an emotional start to our week we started the next day with a 6:15 bus from Haifa to Tzofar, we finally arrived to a beautiful moshav in the middle of the Arava desert. We excitedly moved our stuff into the tents all 120 of us would be sleeping in. After happily greeting all our friends from the year we sat down for lunch and our first of many programs. The first night my friends from Betar, Bnei Akiva and I were playing with a small plush ball on the footy pitch of the moshav when a teen ager who lives in Tzofar comes over and asks if we would ’like to play footy’, we assumed he was asking about a soccer ball and said’ we’d love to play soccer’, he says ‘No i mean your footy, AFL’. The boys from Melbourne were very excited for their first game of AFL since they’ve been away, it was a great start to the seminar.

The next 2 days were filled with great programs and some activities in surrounding desert, Michael took some great photos of it you can see at the bottom. The closing activity of the seminar was attending 2 ceremonies commemorating the 101st anniversary of the Anzac light horse brigade charge that captured Beer Sheva from the Ottoman empire, I was lucky enough to be able to lay the wreath during the ceremony. For lunch we were joined by students from a mechina for what turned into a hebrew lesson.

For our weekly closing we had a day of reflection with our madricha Hila on our last 3 months and some delicious frozen yoghurt at the end, it was an amazing day to finish off our time here and we’re all excited for our final closing week and looking forward to a grand lunch on thursday with our favourite educators from the year. It’s safe to say we are all ready to come home and excited for our studies and work at uni and in Netzer.