Life Lessons You Learn While You Are in Palestine: Spending time in Palestine is an amazing learning experience that will open up your mind and your heart to a wonderful new world. Taking the decision to volunteer, meet its people and get a deeper understanding of the area is an even better idea. There are many levels to volunteering, and most of you have hopefully done a version of it at some point in your lives.
But traveling across the world, to the heart of the Middle East to volunteer is not a decision to be taken lightly, especially in this time and age, but we recommend it nonetheless (especially in this time and age).
Cultural differences
Cultural differences are a reality that most of us travelers and volunteers recognize and to a certain extent admire. Why do we travel if not to get to know other cultures, to experience those differences or as most volunteers and students at the Excellence Center, to learn from these differences?
Traveling and spending time with people that are culturally different from us, that have different traditions and beliefs is the best way to expand our minds. This is the reason why many of us travel, to live first hand the cultural differences and perhaps bridge this great divide that our time and age.
The great cultural divide seems to be growing, the media seems to be showing us pictures that do not help in bridging the differences, separating more than uniting. Therefore rather than writing about the cultural differences you might encounter when volunteering (as you are aware there will be plenty) in Palestine, it is better to think of the diversity, of the richness these differences bring to our lives, and the lessons they teach us.
Remember that just because you are used to something being a certain way it does not mean that is the only way, or that is the “right” way.
Here are the three life lessons you learn while you are in Palestine:
- Patience
- Sharing
- Respect
- Patience is one of those lessons that you will learn, as with any other “difference”, it is all relevant, we are only comparing it to what we are used to, and that is what can make it a problem, our own expectations for how our time should be used. Consider this: ¨Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting¨
- Sharing is reinvented, in Palestine, everything is shared, the food, space, the time. You might think this is all a breach of your own privacy, but really it is a lesson in sharing. Most people here grow up in big families, rarely being alone or having their own things, what makes us think that privacy is really that important? Expand privacy to include noise and silence. You do not come to Palestine to enjoy the silence, here is the complete opposite.
- Respect for gender roles must be adapted. Think that however you are used to relating to the opposite sex must be taken down a notch. Many of that gender roleder roles are socially constructed and in the West, these roles have balanced at a faster pace. In Palestine, they are still quite different and that does not necessarily have to be a negative thing. Think of it as a chance to experience how your grandparents related. The biggest thing to consider is perhaps no physical contact and a much more conservative dress code.
The life lessons that you will learn while in Palestine are many (like the diversity), but in the end, they all boil down to opening your mind and hearts. We think that is the biggest lesson you will get out of this experience.
