Has this been one or two days today?

Today has been quite long feeling, at times as if it should have been Wednesday already. Six kids went home today, homesick and otherwise disinterested in being here, despite the beauty of the place and the awesome educational opportunity. Further, we’ve observed some extreme differences in mind maturity between this week’s fifth graders and the sixth graders we see every other week.

Food waste is one example: the past groups have enjoyed developing a consciousness for the amount of food they can eat during a meal and decreasing the amount of leftovers. This week, waste has increased at least once already from one meal to the next and some kids have expressed specific interest in opposition to the concepts discussed.

Meanwhile, Noam and I this afternoon met with the Heschel staff to talk about their first ever Bring it Back to Our School program. They are very enthusiastic about their students starting an energy conservation program at school and, as a future initiative, are driven to work out the kinks preventing a school-wide recycling program, especially for paper. In the morning, I need to work up their summary sheet to get ready for the student BBTOS session before lunch.

Finally, I have further proved my worth and usefulness by spending almost two hours tonight helping Noam reconstruct his résumé, which has gone untouched for about six years. We made tremendous progress, activating verbiage, fixing grammar and style, and improving layout. Noam is now very happy that this major part of his application to the Environmental Leadership Program is complete.

Time to go to bed, now. Got to be up in six hours to hear from Nili, who needs to rent a car in the morning due to a second emergency of the week. The first was the laundromat I found for the Achdoot group after they got swamped by the thunderstorm that hit yesterday afternoon. Then, a vehicle broke down and couldn’t get fixed in time for their departure tomorrow.