I’ve been taking care of myself for 71 days – cleaning up after myself, doing my own shopping, making my own food, doing my own laundry – and somehow, I’m still alive (I think everyone back home is kind of shocked that I’ve lasted this long).
It has now been over two months since I left home to live at midrasha half a world away from my family. Living away from home for the first time has its share of difficulties and I had a whole list of concerns when I first came to live at midrasha. Coming from a big family, though, one issue I never expected to crop up was figuring out how to live with other people.
I share an apartment with four other girls, three of whom are Israeli, two of whom do not speak a word of English. This significantly complicates our living situation; although I spoke adequate Hebrew coming into this program, my vocabulary was high school level academic vocabulary – not the kind that it is necessary to have at one’s disposal when communicating about taking out the garbage, or washing the floors.
Another complication that we have run into in our shared living experience is the issue of consideration towards others’ schedules. Three of my apartment-mates are slightly older, and have been living away from home for a number of years already. As a result, they have already formed habits and have their own schedules. It has been extremely difficult to learn to live with other people who have very different sleeping habits. One of my apartment-mates does not believe in going to sleep before three in the morning, which would be fine, aside from the fact that classes start at 8:00 a.m., meaning that we are supposed to be waking up around 7:00 a.m.
This situation is further complicated by the fact that I am a full three years younger than she is, so when we try to discuss ways to improve the situation, the conversation often ends with her bedroom door slamming in my face.
I am the eldest child in a family of eight children; coming to Israel, I never expected to have issues living with other people. Living at midrasha has taught me that there are many different types of people, and you can’t always reason with them. The hardest part of the experience, for me, has been the change in dynamic of going from oldest child to youngest child. When I bring up issues in the apartment, I feel that a lot of the time, the response is along the lines of, “Oh, that’s cute. But no.”
Bottom line: It’s very hard to be taken seriously when everyone sees you as the baby.
Although many parts of this experience have been frustrating – and tiring! – I would not change it for anything in the world. Although we have our issues, the girls that I live with are my family for the next eight months and I think we all realize that everything can’t always run smoothly.
In order to resolve some of the issues with our living arrangement, we have decided to have a family dinner once a week. We cook together and we have an open forum about the various difficulties that have come up. Our first dinner was last night; it’s too soon to see if our discussions are actually helping, but talking about the issues and actually being listened to really helped my frustration level and, with any luck, all of us will start to get more sleep soon.
My apartment-mates are all going to town tonight and hopefully they will get back at a reasonable hour. Yesterday, I set six alarms and… that didn’t work out so well. Here’s to hoping that the seven I’ve set for tomorrow will do the job.
Eliana Glogauer is currently studying on one of Masa Israel’s 200 programs.
