Time

I’m here in Baltimore, escorting my colleague Ofer Glanz, JDC’s Director for the former Soviet Union. 

It’s been a fascinating day, meeting inspiring leadership from the Associated, and sharing our work together in Odessa and across the former Soviet republics.

There was an interesting conversation about how many time-zones we cover in the FSU. In the past we’ve said nine – since the eleven time zones of the Russian federation were reduced to nine in 2010 by then-President Medvedev. But you could still go far East and not everyone “got the memo” about the time-zone change. So even though it was nine, eleven was still a good answer.

But, since the Russian state extends to Kalingrad (the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania) eleven is still, formally, the correct answer. 

But - at the same time - so is nine (since they skip two between Kalingrad and the west of Russia). 

With me so far? Airports follow local time … but all train stations, no matter where they are, follow Moscow time.

But then … as Ofer pointed out in a meeting this afternoon … we work in 24 time zones.

Because what we do in Odessa, for example, has a ripple effect – in Ashkelon, in Baltimore … and around the Jewish world. 

How we build community, empower new role-models, pilot new enterprises – these will ripple throughout twenty-four time zones.

Better Together Ashkelon

Better Together improves services for children and youth in disadvantaged communities such as development towns on Israel's periphery and poor inner city neighborhoods, by maximizing local resources and forging partnerships between residents and service providers.  It improves existing services and creates new programs, ac companying children from birth to 18, morning till night, school to home. The program focuses include early childhood development and academic assistance and enrichment activities, while engaging parents, teachers and community leaders in strengthening communities.

Location: Matnas Shapira, Neve Alonim, Ashkelon

BT is in s even locations in the South today. Sivan is the brand-new (this week) BT Ashkelon coordinator. We do a tour of the neighborhood. Shapira is a large neighborhood in the ‘middle’ from a socioeconomic standpoint. 16,000 residents, including many FSU olim, Eth-Isrs, veteran elderly. The stronger younger families move up to Barnea. Elderly and weak stay in Neve Alonim. The streets are fairly clean (the municipality emphasizes street cleaning) but empty and neglected. This is the southernmost area of Ashkelon, which developed north. Vaknin was born here.

Outside the kindergarten it’s nearly all fathers, recognizably Ethiopian or FSU.

David is Matnas Director, he has a good reputation. January 2010 BT came to Ashkelon, there's been less vandalism, more pride in the neighborhood. You can see more energy here, more activity. The school next to the Matnas also improved its infrastructure. (BT doesn’t invest in physical infrastructure but it’s important to encourage and strengthen the local authority to do so; BT focuses on the programmatic and social ele ments).

In the photos: Room 6 is the early ch ildhood room

The moadon room was redesigned by an architect from Hatzeva. It was officially opened last week, though programs have been running since the summer. It’s very comfortable, well-designed chairs, original art, two brand-new computers, good lighting, clean walls.

CHELI is a social work student doing her training here  (black shirt and pink)

RAVIT is the mother in brown

LOREN is her daughter, here for English classes

BELLE is the educational coordinator

MARGALIT is the youth activities coordinator

SIVAN is the BT coordinator

Margalit: the youth activities coordinator has to pull everything together, cooperate, create new opportunities and an informational structure that allows us to know what's happening with each youth, so that no one falls between the chairs. We have Noar B’Aliyah youth movement garin and we integrate the parents into the activities. It was difficult to bring the parents and children together. There are groups for cinema, communications, meeting professionals, sports instructor group, and more.

There are several older madrichim. Margalit is from Jerusalem, decided to live here with her Garin. They finished the army a year ago and settled right here in the neighborhood. We’re creating a continuum of educational service, focused right now on the 9th grade, and will be expanded.

JENNY is an 11th grader, born in Ukraine. Started volunteering in 9th grade. She says that this week there were 100 youth taking part in activities; we’ve undergone a massive change this last year. I’d rather be here than wandering the street. The 11th grade is responsible for activities like the forum, chanuka party, summer camp. Jenny is also an artist – she drew the main mural on the wall of the early childhood room. Wants to go for officer training in the army, has learned about leadership and personal example from the program here. My volunteering here has helped me in life.

BELLE is in charge of the educational center for math and English. 51 kids come to the center, they have 6 teachers (4 from the commune/garin). Loren is here to study English and math, she's very serious, highly motivated.  Belle notes that the center allows us to identify needs and behavioral difficulties not just in the subjects being taught. Loren’s mother takes part.

Loren’s mother loves it because at school there are 40 kids in the English class. Here there are two. Loren is progressing well, she loves it too. It’s my future success, it strengthens me, my grades are improving. Loren’s mom loves that she comes here now from her own free will, she enjoys being here.

DAVID what we have here is boosting the weakest sectors, narrowing the gaps, empowering, improving people’s self-confidence. There are solutions here that you can't get at the schools and people can feel at home here.

CHELI we have 60 families of kids aged 4-6 taking part in enrichment classes, improving parent-child communication; identifying development problems, referring to the right solutions, developing child skills. There are lots of parents especially here who don’t know how to play with their kids, we need to teach the parents, show them how to be caring, patient, understanding, give guidance, but retaining appropriate parental authority. It changes people’s homes and families for the better.

There's a process, but we see change and progress. We’ve often seen parents come with the expectation that they'd drop off the kids in front of the TV. That’s not going to happen here.

There's a program twice a week for kids under age 2. The mothers’ forum meets around problems, challenges, need to work through concepts, to speak, to discuss. Empower them with skills. How to move from diapers, how to talk to kids, how to play. What's interesting is that they have the ‘formal’ discussion but we see them continuing the discussion outside. There’s an added extra.

David: we’re sending out from here better citizens like Jenny and Victoria. There are quality people here, we can find them and help them. There were those who didn’t speak, we didn’t see or hear them. David tells the story of a 9th grade boy who didn’t speak, wouldn’t look you in the eyes, stammered. Now in 10th grade, takes part here actively, volunteers, smiles, looks you in the eyes, has confidence. It’s because of the learning center and the special attention.

Shemesh Ashkelon

The entire family is responsible for granting children with special needs the critical experience of growing up in a warm and supportive environment that accepts them as a full member of the family. However, often times the family has limited expectations for special needs children and thinks of them as a permanent burden. This attitude threatens to prevent these children from ever fully rehabilitating. JDC developed the Shemesh (the Hebrew word for sun) program in order to provide families with the tools needed to encourage their children to reach their full potential. Shemesh helps break the cycle of disappointment and provides families with a new ray of hope for their special needs children (age birth to six). It spreads the strengths and experiences gained by other families with similar challenges through mentorship, training and community programs.

Location: Merkaz Meyda, 1 Dibolt St. Ashkelon (a shelter building)

Shemesh is a program to empower the parents of children with special needs. It uses more experienced parents as mentors for new SN families

It takes place in three locations: Rosh Ha’ayin, Baka El-Gabiyeh and Ashkelon

Emphases:

Abuse and neglect among SN children is two to four times higher due to communications issues.

Integration in the schools, army, etc is critical, prevent loneliness

Strengthen the families, who often suffer greatly with an SN child. An SN child completely changes the family dynamic and balance. The parents see their child every day; the professionals don’t have that level of commitment, intuition.           

It took 10 years to set up Shemesh. The “kesher” NGO runs the program. The idea is also to have parents on the steering committee and professional committee. The parents have experience, knowledge.

MICHAL [amazing] is the Shemesh National Coordinator. Mother of 4 children, including a set of twins, one – Tomer – with special needs who was born without a functioning kidney. He fought and survived, at the age of 7 had a transplant but until then didn’t develop properly, lost brain and physical capacity, diminished speech and vision.

At the age of 12 Tomer developed lymphoma, pains and other side-effects to the anti-rejection medicine for the kidney. He did dialysis for two years, it was awful, we didn’t see the horizon. All this time he didn’t grow or develop. In 2007 he underwent another kidney transplant, this one caught well, he started to grow. We moved him to special education, he finished 12th grade and wanted to go to the army. Now he’s doing national service in the police. He lives in a special needs apartment, he lives on his own and I'm letting him flourish. I was very depressed when he left at first.

I studied social work. I didn’t want to work as a social worker, I had an MA in organizational management. When the twins were 3.5 I quit my job as a personnel manager because I wanted a sense of purpose in social action. Then I did an MA in social work. I set up a special needs center in Kochav-Yair. I saw an email from the Joint that they were looking for a coordinator for Shemesh, with one line that grabbed my attention, that preference would be given to parents of children with special needs. Within two weeks I was being interviewed and knew I wanted the job. I'm very happy.

The stories are the focus of the program. We want to transmit a positive message to the parents. It doesn’t matter what religion, culture, location – the grappling with this reality is shared.

MAZAL from the Ashkelon Municipality Welfare Department. We built this on the success of the accessible community program, we opened an information center, course for ten activists with special needs.

16 parents are participating. The group was set up quickly – we were surprised how much eagerness there was for this: blind, retardation, deaf.

[Better Together will also build a special needs track emphasizing youth at risk and their parents:

develop services

community forum

training professionals, workshops

Within these we want to develop a special needs track. In Rosh Ha’Ain there is a Better Together and Shemesh]

YAEL is the Shemesh coordinator in Ashkelon. She was the accessible community coordinator for two years; JDC provides the Hosen program for the community, and in the last two years I’ve seen the work of the Joint. I'm a single mother and adopted a child from Russia with special needs four years ago.

The current workshop is amazing.

ETTI (in orange): I didn’t think twice. I immediately said yes. There's so little knowledge. I had a girl with Downs Syndrome 30 years ago. I was in complete shock, I didn’t know what to do. They said it was a mongloid. It was my third baby, I had two healthy daughters and now this storm. I ran away from the hospital to my normal life. I couldn’t listen, people thought they could help but I didn’t want to talk to them. I wanted a normal family. I cried for several weeks, I decided to give her up for adoption. There was a social worker who said to me, ok, let’s go see her so you can say goodbye in the hospital. I thought, she’ll be ugly, scary. Ok, fine, let’s say goodbye and that way I can cut off. I was scared when I went in. The nurse took her diaper off and I saw that they hadn’t been treating her well, she had a wound near her diaper. I was angry, my daughter wasn’t being treated right, where’s my commitment as her mother, I should take her home.  Her name is Vered.

The first year wasn’t easy. I didn’t want any contact with other parents. I thought I was different. But slowly I met other parents, we set up a support group, we would meet once a week, things changed. Vered became the focus of the family. We would run from one treatment to the next, the whole family was recruited to this effort. It harmed the other girls (she had another daughter after Vered) – we invested so much in her and neglected somewhat the others. We didn’t really understand how to do this, we made lots of mistakes. I just wanted what was best.

Vered lived with us until she was 27 at home. Now she lives in a hostel, she's very happy. She comes every Shabbat for dinner, all the family gathers together. She has given so much to this family, taught her sisters so much. Thanks to her we’ve developed as a family, we’re a caring, emotional, understanding family thanks to her. The home is open, tolerant, we’re a good family.

ESTHER is the mother of Noa, aged 22 with shituk mochin. Got a phonecall from Yael four months ago about the program. 

Michal: there was a woman on a panel in a Shemesh discussion with two special needs kids, who said that she prays that if God takes her that he’ll also take the kids immediately because they won't succeed in living without her.

Shemesh stages:

Identify and connect to parents of special needs kids, with a little free time. Empower them in the escorts group. 21 meetings, once a week for 5 months every Wednesday evening. It trains them to  escort new special needs famil ies. The emphasis is that the escorts don’t give advice or solutions, rather to respect each family and the stage it’s in, to listen and to understand. The course has a syllabus: active listening, reacting to situations, judgementalism, identity, siblings, family functioning and much more.

During the course, they’re assigned to the families. Each has 3 families.

Yael is a hotline for assistance.

Yael is also trained at the same time

The families go through a process. There’s lasting impact

The program is for three years, the course is for a year. The Welfare Department has 1000 households identified as special needs (out of 40,000 total households in the city).

Merhav Ashkelon

Merhav aims to ensure that elementary school children from underprivileged communities are adequately prepared for junior high school. It does this by focusing on students, staff and city decision-makers. In schools, Merhav establishes cooperation between educational, psychological and welfare services. Through teacher training and supplemental resources, the school day is extended and in-school counseling, academic support and parent-child activities are made available. On a city level, Merhav places the needs of at-risk students firmly on the agenda.

Location: Harel School, Shai Agnon St. Shimshon Neighborhood, Ashkelon

RUT BEN-VALID is the school principal

School is usually open till 1pm. Three times a week they open till 5pm with activities, drama, youth movement. Here they have Noam (Conservatives). The school has won prizes. They have a psychologist once a week, social worker, therapist.

Animal therapy is especially for youth at risk, difficulties, children of drug addicts. Identified by their problems. Snake, hamster, rabbit. They learn to connect, to stroke, to be calm.

MIRI is the coordinator, I’ve seen and heard amazing things here. One boy’s father is in Assaf Harofe Hospital in Ramle, t he neighbors take care of me, he was crying. She explained later that the father is in jail, not hospital. It took four meetings for him to open up. They slowly open and share.

AYAL is holding the rabbit. It’s nice, it’s pleasant. I'm usually on edge (atzbani), I argue. Here I can overcome.

It’s a weak neighborhood. Rut says that since she's been here, “the strong have left and only the weak have remained.”

We go to the ‘lighthouse’ structure to see the gifted students’ ‘planetarium.’ They're learning about stars and the galaxies. They built a nature exhibit last year. Now they’re building a supernova. ZOHAR is the teacher.

We’re watching a dance troupe for girls from first to sixth grade. They work very hard on this, they love appearing.

DITI (Ashalim Merhav coordinator)

The program was developed in 2 003 now works in 30 locations. The pilot was Ashkelon and Afula.

RUT (Principal)

Merhav came in eight years ago. The neighborhood is classed as 8 in the 0-10 socioeconomic neglect scale (i.e. very poor and neglected). Lots of children-at-risk with parents who are unemployed, in jail, taking drugs, single-parents:

45% are single-parents

20% are immigrants

40% are veteran immigrants who didn’t yet adapt

 

We had a problem with violent parents, children were beaten, tough homes. Even violence inside the school, even against teachers. There was a negative atmosphere. We had 220 children. Now we have 450 children. Merhav said to us “dream” and we opened the school till 6pm. The holistic view, everything under one roof, responsibility for the child and also for the family. We can bring the family here to sit with the social worker. Let’s break the paradigm, let’s solve this together. We mapped everything out; all the children here were basically at-risk, not a percentage but all of them. We had to give a solution for all of them. The school became the center, we didn’t send them away. Social worker, psychologist, clothing, hot meal. Every year Rut has a group from France who bring packages of clothes and sneakers.

 

Rut: I was very young, I was 30 years old. There were shouts, screams, threats, violence. I was afraid to come in. They threatened to burn my car and more. We received three years of close escorting from a social worker. The children are no longer wandering the streets at night, little prostitution and drugs. Now we have a framework and activities. They have nothing at home.

We’ve become like a school in the North, we’re one of the top 56 schools in the country, see the movie they did. Everyone wants to send their kids here.  They even change addresses so they're here.

Rut is being promoted to the Education Ministry so she has mixed feelings. We raised people’s sense of pride here, we brought in new flooring. My husband is a doctor in the emergency room. When people want to thank him, to donate something, he suggests they give something to the school: flooring, clothing, furniture. Now the children also look after the school, it’s their home. It’s been a dream fulfilled to show the State we can succeed.

Our graduates are very much in demand in the middle school. This is a Tali school, we have good values.  Tali at first didn’t want to come in here. But now we received an award from them for excellence. The school is elementary for grades 1 through 6. There are still difficulties, it’s still a difficult population. But there's still a lot of pride. The parents now come with programmatic demands, they're proud of the school, it’s a successful model. Not because of the funds but because of the perspective. But you still need money.

There was opposition from the teachers, staying till 6pm. There was a strike, they were angry. But they saw it was successful. At lunch you see how the children are starving, they devour the food because it’s the only real meal they get all day.

The school is very influential now in the neighborhood. We have more parents who are teachers, doctors, police. About 10% are now stronger population, it strengthens us.  But at-risk isn’t just poverty. There was a family where the father was a policeman but the children were beaten. Even without financial problems you can have risk.

Merhav comes straight to the children without filters. The kids were amazed, they'd never been in activities, music, drama, dance. They didn’t know how to play an instrument, to listen to classical music, never been to theater.

We’ve won ten international prizes, the kids have won prizes for art and cinema. You have to believe in them. We became experts in building programs. They come from all over the country to see how our teachers work. We’ve learned how to teach. The kids are learning how to believe in themselves: I can do it, I can present, I can perform.

SHOVAL is one of 8 kids at home, 4 sets o f twins, 6th grade. There’s no father at home. He was violent and abusive. Today they're doing well because the pr ogram can help them. Elementary school is the base, it’s the infrastructure. It shapes the child. Without the activities we’d just be wandering the street, it’s so much nicer now. I can do music and theater; we put on a performance at the end of the last school year. We love the school, it’s like home. I want to be an

actress when I grow up.

[there are two special needs classes in Merhav here]

The parents don’t really have money, but we charge them 2 NIS per activity, so they’ll feel compelled. They also do a lot of fundraising for the school. Shuval received sneakers and clothes and a coat.

Neve Alonim Neighborhood schematics