As always, we opened our meeting with
Avodaat HaLev, or Prayer of the Heart, where we have the
opportunity to learn something unseen about a person in our group. Afterwards,
we pieced together a gigantic puzzle from our Israelis, one that would end up forming
letters and notes from them to us, in anticipation for the quickly approaching
North American Seminar.
As we began the first workshop to
our meeting, we were all given pictures, and under them were a set of
instructions. We really had no idea what we were doing as we bumped into one
another, just trying to match ourselves to the picture. As we continued to
arrange ourselves in the formation of the pictures, we realized we spelled out
"DILLER!" Through this, we were able to understand the idea that our
missions aren't always obvious from the ground, but when we see it from above, everything
becomes clear.
Our second activity pertained to
the concept of seeing life through "rose-colored glasses”. This means that whenever you're faced with a
problem or something bad happens to you, you, as a leader, look for the best
way to resolve the conflict. For example, if you’re in the middle of getting
thirty dollars’ worth of food from Dunkin Donuts for your friends, and you drop
it all, what will you do? When you put on your “rose-colored glasses,” what
will the resolved solution look like? What is the vision?
These two activities were part of
something Diller called “The Journey of Bread and Water”. This means that you
look at a problem, whether it is something like $30 of dropped food on a
sidewalk or a lack in volunteers at a nursing home, you identify the steps that
are necessary to take for problem to be resolved. You begin with a mission, a
why, a reason for the problem to be solved, a reason you're set out to fix.
Next, you see a vision, going back to the “rose-colored glasses,” you try to
see what the conflict will look like in the end. Then, you have goals, what
needs to be accomplished in order to get to that vision, and lastly there are
objectives, kind of like a check in to see how we’re doing on reaching that
vision.
This led us into our next activity:
Committees to prepare us for the North American Seminar. We split into 4
committees: the Welcome Committee, who will prepare a welcome for our Israelis,
the Chupar Committee, (chupar, meaning treat,) who will prepare
gifts each day for the Israelis while we are apart from them, the
Shabbaton/Rituals committee who will prepare the Friday night service and
Havdallah for us during our Shabbaton, and the Farewell Committee who will
organize a goodbye - for now - to our Israelis. We created our mission, vision
and goals for each committee and we all are going to take a big part in
planning for the NAS.
With the North American Seminar
quickly approaching, it was clear that Diller 6 needed to organize our time
wisely, especially with our new committees and tasks. In everyday life, we all
struggle to maintain a certain schedule. Whether it be homework, chores, or
Diller, we devout certain amounts of time to certain tasks. But sometimes the
constant juggle can be hard and leave us in a difficult situation. As
exceptional teens, we have a responsibility to juggle all of our commitments
without dropping the ball. As a way to show this responsibility in a real life
situation, our Junior Counselors set up a game of Twister for us, but with a
twist. Instead of plain red, yellow, blue, and green dots, a series of colored
tasks such as school, homework, and sports were arranged on the floor like a
game of Twister. We were told to place different body parts on different tasks
and this proved to be a difficult task. As we tried to keep our right hand on
schoolwork and our left elbow on SAT tutoring, we realized that it was very
difficult to stay steady. This symbolized how hard it is to juggle the many
responsibilities of being a Diller Teen Fellow. We concluded with discussing
the differences between “importance” and “urgency”. It is important as busy
high school students to be able to know in what order things need to get done.
We were given a list of 10 examples of things that a typical person would need
to do. These ranged from things like calling the admissions office of a college
or calling a friend back because they have something funny to tell you.
Individually, we had to rank the ten things in order of which we would do first
given that we only have a certain amount of time. Then, we broke into groups of
four and had to come up with one common list. This helped us realize that with
our busy schedules, it is very important to know how to classify things as
important or urgent. This will become especially important as the Israelis are
coming soon and we have much to prepare for them, and ourselves!
Afterwards, we met up with our
parents to discuss the orientation for the North American Seminar - the rules,
the schedule, and the Israelis. We just can’t wait!!!!
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Today,
everyone had an amazing time at Good Deeds Day! It was an amazing day full of
volunteering, eating, and just enjoying time with our Diller counterparts from
half way across the world. Every Diller
went to volunteer with their family and their Israeli different places: such as
the Jewish Relief Fund, planting flowers, painting a nursery, and much more. It was exciting to be able to volunteer for
the first time with our Israelis as it was something that we have never done
together before! For example; my
Israeli, another Diller and his Israeli, and I packed boxes with food for
Passover for families. Then, after all
the boxes were packed, the family went to deliver the food to a house. It was a wonderful feeling to give the box to
the household and to hear them say thank you for our deed.
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