Two days in a nutshell

Wednesday was Labour Day. School was closed and we needn’t to teach. We decided to take the bus at 9h15 and go on a trip to Haifa!  

One thing you definitely need to visit when you go to there, are the Bahai Gardens. When we arrived, we saw it was closed. The gardens close once in 5 years…

After this disappointment we went to the German Colony. We had our first alcoholic drink in weeks and a nice lunch in a cosy ‘German’ restaurant, Stroudl.

After lunch we decided to go to Stella Maris. We had to search a long time and go on three different busses, but after two hours we finally found it. We all said a prayer and Bryan even sang a little song.

Bryan, Heidi and I began to feel a little tired, so we decided to go home (Heleen en Bert wanted to stay and go to the beach). We arranged a cab to go to Tamra for 150NIS.

Next time we’ll need to be more thoughtful in choosing a taxi. The taxi we took was a ‘Jewish’ taxi. The driver was a Jew and he also had a lot of Jewish symbols in his car. When we arrived in Tamra we got a lot of strange looks of the locals. Although the driver suggested going to Tamra himself, we could feel that he wasn’t comfortable with the whole situation. Luckily nothing happened!

Today (Thursday) we went to school without preparation. Normally we were going on a trip, but Wednesday evening Aisha got rung up by Samia. She told her that there was a problem with the insurance and that we couldn’t participate the excursion.

We needed to teach religion and ethics in separate groups. Not all pupils were as enthusiastic as the others. The group of Fauve and Heidi was reluctant when it came to getting to know different religions. They weren’t able to argue about Christianity, because they believe that the Islam is their only true religion.

Things got better in the second lesson about ethics. Fauve and Heidi improvised and gave different situations in which they had to decide what they would do and in what way they would show compassion. They compared Islam to Christianity and found out that both religions have ‘compassion’ as one of the headliners.

Leonie, Heleen and I had a whole different group who was curious about Christianity. We started our lesson by explaining our religion to them. They had a lot of extra questions and ambiguities we needed to clear out. In the second lesson we talked about their religion, the Islam. They got the opportunity to explain everything to us and tell us why their religion is that important to them. At the end of the lessons we compared both religions and found out that they actually have a lot of similarities. These pupils were definitely more open-minded towards other religions!

The teachers were pleased with our lessons and are very eager to use this kind of working method in the future.