Yerucham!!!

So for the 2nd semester, Nativ was split up into 3 different tracks. There were 30 kids that lived and worked on a youth village in the north called Kfar Chassidim. 29 others lived in another city in the north called Karmiel. Lastly, there was the last 30, including myself, who lived and worked in the development town of Yerucham which is locat. ed roughly 45 minutes outside of Beer Sheva in the dessert in the south.
The town has a population around 9,000 people and has one main road with everything stemming from that road. There is this area called Yerucham Park which has a lake which goes with the rain, so this year, it was actually more full than usual due to record rains in January and February.
Our living situation was 4 different apartments, 2 guys apartments each with 5, and 2 girls apartments, each with 6. There was also one house with the remaining 8 girls (yes, the ratio of girls to guys was 2:1 on my track).
Deciding who would be in which room was quite the adventure. We were allowed to pick our own rooms. So for the guys, we just decided to use a random number generator because we didn't want to get into fights like everyone else on each track was, and it turned out to work well for each of the guys.

Identity Towers

Things in Yerucham that we normally would see or used are a super market...just 1 super market. There were also 2 pizza joints, although we normally only went to one because it was cheaper and better. Speaking of that pizza joint, Benjy (one of my apartmentmates) and I somehow ended up having weekly Brian and Benjy pizza dates just to talk about anything and everything, they were pretty awesome. There was also a good shawarma restaurant, a falafel place, a general town center that was used for anything really. There were also many playgrounds, a small turn soccer field, and tennis courts. Something cool was also the Identity Towers that you'd see as you drove into town. Something that is fairly common in Israel, but not really at all in America which was cool is that there are workout playgrounds. They are essentially what they sound like. They are playgrounds with things to play on, but the things to play on is very basic workout equipment, but stuff that even little kids can use, and just play on.
Some of the jobs that people had were working in the kindergartens, working in the middle school, the religious/secular high schools, working as volunteer paramedics, working at a senior center, and then my 2 jobs, working in the community gardens which was basically weeding and cleaning, and then working in the archives which was helping create a digital history of the town.
We always had work Sunday-Thursday, except for Tuesdays, and had weekends free to do whatever it was we wanted, which for me usually involved traveling.
Tuesdays was Yom Nativ, which literally means Nativ Day. On Yom Nativ, a group of 3 of us planned an entire day based on some theme or topic. My Yom was Yom Other. In the morning we talked and had programs about Moroccan, Ethiopian, Russian and Indian Jewry. We also talked about women in Judaism, but not famous women, more of the generic women's role and rights in Judaism. In the afternoon, we focused on something unrelated to Judaism. We played a game which helped demonstrate other socioeconomic groups, and how they live.

That is the basics of what went on in Yerucham.