Two Different Worlds

After our normal tutoring sessions, the English teacher invited me and the other two volunteers to come watch the class practice for a play they will be putting on. For this lesson, the students were performing skits they had prepared in advance whose theme was supposed to be the conflict between two groups.

While some were the silly, nonsense you would expect from a group of 6th graders fooling around most of them provided powerful insight into Israeli society, how the kids viewed their world and how differently children grow up here as opposed to in America. The most fascinating example was when a group of boys (who I could immediately tell were the trouble makers) began acting out a conflict that was actually taking place in Israel. They showed how Arabs were planting trees and then religious Jews would come at night to chop them down. The "Arab" boys called some form of law enforcement and had the "Jew" boys apprehended.

I was seriously impressed not only by the mere fact that this was a subject matter being performed by 12 year olds but they did not take sides in presenting the conflict. Whether the scene involved haggling over the price of something or a showdown between Arabs and Israelis, the children showed an understanding of a world that is much larger than the sheltered bubble that so many kids in America their age grow up in.