Two Moms

More Tales from Be'er Sheva. We arrived in Be'er Sheva and went to the NISPED/JEEV Peace Tent, their volunteer headquarters. The Jewish and Arab teen volunteers descended on us, introduced themselves to us and spent a very energetic half hour or so getting to know us. Many of the photos posted in Callie, Ben, Jazzy and Marina's entry were from those first few minutes of our stay there. The volunteers were so warm, so open and so incredibly skilled at engaging us. Then we all had lunch together in their courtyard. After lunch we broke up into our teaching groups. The Arab/Jewish team from each school took a few of us, and we spent a couple hours planning what we would do with a class of children the next day. Mainly we planned games and ice breaker-type activities to allow the kids to get to know their American guests and our group to get to see how Bedouin schools work in the Negev of Israel.

I went with Gracie, Evan, Eli, Beebe and Siena. We would be working the next day with a fourth grade class. All Bedouin children. I suggested we play People Bingo, which will amuse my MARE colleagues at Lawrence Hall of Science to no end. I'm sure they'll tease me when I get home, as it is our age-old, tried and true, never fails, workshop ice breaker. For awhile it was a running joke in my office whenever we got stuck on a project or were working with a difficult group of people, whenever we didn't know what to do to get ourselves out of a mess, someone would say, "I know. Let's play People Bingo." Here's how it works. You make a 4X4 Bingo board on a piece of paper. In each square is written a little challenge to get to find something out about someone. In our ocean sciences education world, we write things like, "Find someone who has vacationed on 3 different coasts." "Find someone who keeps an aquarium in their classroom." "Find someone who know about the sex life of a barnacle." Each person mingles around the room interviewing people to find out if they can sign one of the squares. They have to tell you their story, too, so you can report it later to the group, like, "I met Emily. She lives in Oakland, and she has taken family vacations to the coast in California, Cape Cod and Hawaii."

Everyone thought it was a good idea, but that between the children, the volunteers and the gringos, we would need each challenge to be written in Hebrew, Arabic and English. So we set about brainstorming the challenges: Find someone who owns a horse. Find someone who has the same color eyes as you. Find someone who plays Lacrosse. One of the Arab volunteers said, "Oh, I know one. How about find someone who has two moms." Craig from the Berkeley Bubble immediately thought of all the kids I know at home who have two moms. I was so surprised and impressed that someone suggested this as a question here. I said, "Wow. Are there children at the school who have two moms??" The young woman said, "Oh, yes. A lot of them. Some have four moms! My father has two wives." We decided to re-phrase the challenge, "Find someone whose father has more than one wife."

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Evan being turned into a cockroach