Throw This Rench in the Mix: Preschool, In Arabic

Last week, we had “service day.” This means we all signed up to do some sort of service in the city, and I signed up for the preschool. I didn’t know what that entailed, but it sounded like a party. We all gathered at the bottom of the Jerusalem Center gate and walked over there in one big mob as our leaders told us our task.

“Yeah, so basically we’re just going to play with the kids.” Okay, sounds easy enough. “Oh by the way,” they said, “these kids don’t speak English.”

When we showed up at the Palestinian school on what just so happened to be their last day of school for the summer, our leaders kicked us into a classroom with a list of suggested activities, and said “Have fun!” So there we stood with a bunch of little brown eyes looking up at us waiting for us to do a trick or something. We quickly looked down at our papers and saw suggestions like, “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” “London Bridges,” and more. We decided “Ring around the Rosie” would be a pretty painless one, so we got them all up in a circle and started running round and round ‘til we all fell down. Then as we were sitting on the ground, I was struck with panic.

‘Shoot,’ I thought to myself, ‘What’s the little song that makes us all stand back up?’ Then, I remembered they don’t speak English anyway so the new version of the song went something like this, “The cows are in the meadow the bees are in the hive, nahahha, something something we all stand UP!” It worked.

After that, we tried some hokie pokie and a few other songs. Combined, that all lasted about 3.6 minutes which was great except we were supposed to be there an hour. This called for game of leap frog. The kids didn’t understand it at all, yet somehow thought jumping over each other was a highly enjoyable activity. Just as I got them all riled up and out of control, it was time for me to switch positions and go face paint.

And by facepainting, I mean smearing cheap lipstick on their cheeks that vaguely resembled a heart or flower. They loved it though, and man those kids were cute.

After that, we played with the kids in their classrooms for awhile. This mostly entailed stacking up blocks for the sole purpose of knocking them down, or attacking one of the guys in my group which quickly became a mob of about 23 four year-olds against one. I’m not sure the teachers were thrilled about that one, but the kids thought it was fantastic.

We ended with a last day of school celebration where we all went in the hallway, cranked up the Arabic music and had a regular dance party. I think the real ones celebrating though were the teachers. At the sound of the music, they snapped their fingers and shimmied up a storm in their headscarves and everything until sweat dripped down their faces.

The kids, on the other hand, were bored spitless. That is, until I brought out my little point-and-shoot camera. It didn’t take long before they pleaded in Arabic, “Me! Me!” and needless to say, I know have about 30 blurry pictures at butt-level on my SD card.