Mike High Does The Kibbutz:
A Special Report Behind the Scenes for Gomideast
by Mike High
The Ulpan
I am on a five month long work study program known as an Ulpan. It
involves three days of study, three days of work, and one day off a
week (you have know idea how much one day weekends throw off your sense of time). The program only cost eight hundred dollars, so I have to work on the Kibbutz three days a week to pay for the rest of the program.
On the days we have class the classes are seven hours long with variously long breaks strung in between. It's one teacher to fifteen students and the whole program feels like community college with dorms, cigarettes, and liquor. The average age on the program is 19.
Throughout we take various trips on and off the Kibbutz and learn about Israeli and Jewish history, holidays, and culture. In class we do
worksheets, have conversations, and generally dick around. The people
running the program are idiots and the manager doesn't care at all
whether or not we learn Hebrew, she only cares whether or not we miss work so she can get the money for her budget (she is so ignorant that on the last program the students planted pot plants outside her office and she did figure it out for a whole month). The people living on the kibbutz generally hate the Ulpan students because they are loud and drunk but for some reason they don't cancel the program.
The Kibbutz
Kibbutzim are a phenomenon solely of Israel. They are large communal
farms run on socialistic and Zionistic principles. This particular
one is called Ramat Yochanan and is close to Haifa, right outside the
Santee of Israel know as Keiriat Ata in the north of Israel near the
Galilee.
Our kibbutz has avocado, orange, olive, palmello, grapefruit,
passion fruit, and wheat fields. They raise cows, sheep (insert
bestiality joke here), bees, and stray dogs and cats. There is a
library here (English, Hebrew, and Russian), a big dining hall, a pub,
a laundry, several schools, recreational courts, and an Olympic size
swimming pool (every kibbutz has their sport and the people here are
nuts over water polo for some unknown reason).
There is a spice factory and a plastic factory here. The plastic factory is a company known as Palram and it has branches all over the world and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, all of which go to the kibbutz. Some people who are born here spend there whole lives here, others run away as fast as they can, but all of the kibbutznik kids I have met have a strange naivety to them, as if they don't know that people in the outside world have the same crap as they do (one kid, Tzoch, hyped up his room for a half an hour before we went over there, just to show us a Metallica poster, a computer and some empty bottles of scotch. In general they all have a small town mentality with some crazy Israeli stuff thrown in).
next page---> The People
Page 3 ---> The Country, My Job, Hebrew
Page 4---> Drugs, Alcohol & Racism
<---back to Israel for Visitors Main Page
