Year Three in Israel, or the Year that Brunners had to Grow Up a Little and Stop Messing Around

I haven’t blogged in so long that I’ve sort of forgotten how to do it (rambling on always seems to be the best way to start) but now that the summer holidays are once again upon us I’m free to read books, sit in the sunshine, stay out late and take a moment to think back over the last 12 months.  It's interesting to me that this year's review is less concerned with what it's like to live in Jerusalem and more focused on what my life has turned into; I'm by no means local but having been here for three years you start to feel a little bit like part of the furniture.  I'm on such good terms with the eponymous owner of Shmoula, my favourite Friday Iraqi eatery, that when I complained recently that my cash card wasn't working he offered to lend me money (declined, obviously, but isn't that lovely?); the guys at the supermarket I've been going to in the shuk for three years have finally started talking to me; I can navigate my way out of the back roads of Bethlehem and across the Golan without the need for a map.  These things (and others) make Israel seem like home now, as much as anywhere ever is home for me.

Anyway, firstly and most significantly, huge changes at work.  At the start of the academic year I was busy settling into my new role (and new office) as Dean of Students – basically in charge of pastoral care for the school, running the team of homeroom teachers (tutors we’d call them back home – silly American school language) and overseeing behavior and attendance and other sorts of things.  In November we had an inspection by the body that accredits us to give students High School Diplomas, the Middle States Association – similar to a UK Ofsted inspection but more comprehensive in some ways and more filled with twiddly, pointless paperwork which consumed me from the minute the new academic year started.  I basically worked solidly from August to November, getting used to being Dean and preparing for this visit (which, it should be said, we passed with flying colours).  Then in November there was a management shuffle with the retirement of our lovely Director Owen and the appointment of the then Head of Secondary, Lawrence, as his replacement and so the school board held interviews for the Head of Secondary position.  For reasons known best to the interview panel, they appointed me.  And this one thing has dramatically changed my life here in every possible way.

I took on the role at the start of February and soon discovered that it wasn’t so much a steep learning curve as it was a sheer cliff-face that presented enormous challenges on every possible level.  Helpfully, both my boss and his boss would sit me down at least once a day and give me management tips, though there were some days at the beginning when I felt like my brain was frying and it was all I could do to not interrupt them and curl up on the floor in the foetal position.  Actually, even four months into the job there were days where I wanted to do that; I spent much of the last week of term asking anyone and everyone who came into my office if they wanted to do my job and have a vivid memory of walking to work early one morning thinking “Ooh, I could murder a gin and tonic.”  At 7.00 a.m.

So, a learning curve andd then some.  Here’s what I didn’t know about Senior Management that the past few months have taught me - sometimes kindly, sometimes like a slap in the face:

§  The ubiquity of meetings.  I never knew it was possible to spend an entire day in meetings, bouncing merrily from one to another and having to get my head around their various purposes.  But it is.  It really is.

§  I do not like meetings that go on for hours but sometimes you have to let them just run their course.  Apparently my style is to get stuff done as fast as possible, without shilly-shallying around being polite and having long discussions.  However it turns out that my approach, economical though it is, doesn’t take into account the need that people have (a perfectly valid one) to discuss things in full and feel heard.  Sometimes of course you have to cut through the crap and get things done.  But sometimes you need to be patient.  When either of those approaches is appropriate is still a bit of a guessing game.  I’ve had some awkward moments, let’s just leave it at that.

§  People expect you to deal with their problem first.  They really do.  People come into my office with a thing and expect me to sort it straight away, regardless of whatever it is I’m actually doing at that time.  Again, it’s all about learning how to deal with that in a way that makes everyone feel valued without distracting me from the bigger picture.  At our final staff meeting of the year, in the last few weeks of school when I was swamped by preparations for graduation and general end-of-year stuff, someone asked me a question that I couldn’t answer there and then, but they pressed me for an answer as they (quite rightly) needed one.  That was the point at which I said in front of my entire staff and on the verge of tears, “Look, this is my first year doing this, I’m drowning in work and I just don’t have an answer for you now.”  Good thing my colleagues are so supportive – I felt like a right prat.

§  My expectations of how my time should be spent are not the same as everyone else’s.  This can, occasionally, cause conflict.  In those moments I imagine myself locking my office door, hiding under my desk and taking a nap.

§  Coffee is my best friend.  We have a Nespresso machine in work.  It’s a massive luxury.  I’ve had to restrict myself to two (sometimes three) cups a day – any more and I’d be a gibbering, caffeine-dependent wreck when the weekend kicks in and I’m not at work – but those moments when I sit and drink my coffee, all alone, are my favourite.  Although I liked them more before someone STOLE MY FAVOURITE MUG (a present from Celia and Dave which had ‘I’m silently correcting your grammar.’ emblazoned on it).  Still haven’t got it back.  If you know me well, you’ll know how attached I get to crockery and I’m finding this one hard to shake.

§  People expect you to sign the weirdest things.  Really.  It’s like taking out a mortgage.

§  The buck stops with me.  That’s an actual thing now.  No matter the times that I try to back-and-forth with my boss (“Ooh, that’s a question for Lawrence.”  “No, he said to ask you on this one.”) there are decisions that I have to make that will have consequences that only I bear responsibility for.  Eek.

There is no denying that these last four months have been the most challenging of my professional career to date.  I have had vast amounts of work to do – sometimes really more than I could handle, leading to more curling-up-in-the-foetal-position moments – and had to prioritise things that seemed (to me) of equal importance.  I’ve had to learn how to deal with parents and students and staff and make everyone feel supported/listened to but also act appropriately and do the right thing for the school.  I’ve had to make all sorts of decisions connected to both the job itself and the role (and perception of the role); for example, out and about in town for Purim which this year happened to be a Sunday night and realized at about 11.30 p.m. that I could no longer hang out and party all night long with my friends, but had to go home in order to be fresh for a 7.30 a.m. meeting  with some parents.  I went home, got into bed and lay there bitterly resenting the fact that now I have to be a grown-up, but trying to balance it with the knowledge that this job is something I have wanted and worked for since the start of my career in teaching and so sacrificing a few nights out here and there is hardly the end of the world.  This is what I want to be doing and where, I believe, God wants me to be.

New office - enormous, full of light, sometimes full of stray cats

When I haven’t been totally consumed by work, there have been other highlights worthy of mention here.  Firstly, my attempts to master the Hebrew language have continued, despite being seriously hamstrung by my massive workload and being frequently ridiculed by my classmates for forgetting basic stuff.  I’ve now completed my fourth set of night classes (ב+ - חשבתי שאני לא הצלחתי את המבחן הפעם הזה) and am more than able to get by, including being able to rebuff the guy at the bread stall in the shuk every time he tells me I have a beautiful smile and asks for my phone number, and fooling the chef in our new school kitchen for at least a month into thinking I was Israeli.  It wasn’t until he heard me speak English with another member of staff that the penny dropped.  Not going to lie, I felt pretty good about that.

Other highlights include:

- Going to see Avicii in concert in Tel Aviv over Rosh Hashanah on a night only mildly less sweaty than the previous year’s RHCP concert.  It was a belter of a night.  Other good nights with the lovely Tamar and other friends (namecheck: Mario, Helen, Matt, Juliayn, Alistair, Charlie, Chris, Dan, Steve, Allison, Brittany, Amos - grovelling apologies if I've missed you off this list but you've made my life here infinitely better).

With the lovely Tamar - don't know what I'd do without her.

- Finally making it to Masada in time for sunrise, although I was fighting some sort of chesty cough so struggled to keep up with Matt as he paced it up Snake Path.  We stopped about a third of the way up and spots were flashing before my eyes, so I told him to go on despite his protestations (“No, no, you go, don’t worry about it, it’s important to beat your PB when it comes to this") and managed to hide my total breathlessness.  He didn’t notice that but did insist on making snotty comments about how children were over-taking me (not true) and how my parents had done it faster the week before (also not true).

Got my breath back by this stage, fortunately.

- Hitting the top of Mount Hermon with Matt and Alistair in the spring, looking across the border at Syria and nearly being blown off the top by the howling wind, then spending the rest of the day driving round the Golan as the sun set hunting for the abandoned mosque I’d found 18 months previously (with Damien, Alex, Steve and Dan) – to no avail, alas.  I’ll find it again one day.

- A lovely visit from the parentals who are now old pros at visiting Israel and swanned off without me for a week, living it up in Tel Aviv (I did at least get some good dinners there) and Haifa before joining me in Jerusalem and gently mooching around.

- A trip to the Samaritan Passover with Mum and Matt – a once-in-a-lifetime thing, not least because the Samaritans are a people group on the verge of dying out and there are only 1,000 or so left.  It’s a traditional sacrifice celebrating Passover as it was done in Biblical times (though I’d imagine people 2,000 years ago didn’t have plastic onesies to stop the blood staining their clothes) and it felt positively medieval to watch as the sun set, sheep were killed, rivers of blood flowed and skins/entrails were burned in flaming pits.  My heroic Mum survived the whole thing, standing up for at least 3 hours and nearly coming to blows with the pushy Russians who were trying to shove us out of our viewing spot.

- The final goodbye to my homeroom.  My class graduated this year, after 2 years of tears, morning drama, constant grief and laughter, rants (on my part), wind-ups (on theirs) and general amazingness.  They've made me crazy but they somehow all pulled through and their graduation ceremony this year had some very emotional moments for me, though I managed not to cry.  Some classes you forget easily.  That is definitely not the case with this one.

- Snowmaggedon.  I’ve blogged about that already so feel free to read it here if you haven’t yet: http://abrunskillabroad.blogspot.co.il/2014/02/the-latest-from-jerusalem.html.

Despite the fact that my focus has been on my job, this past year has been every bit as challenging, interesting, crazy, noisy and wonderful as my first two in Israel.  Right now, the next one looks a little different.  I’ve finally moved out of my little Nachlaot apartment (bye bye balcony, bye bye Allison) and am moving in to a new place all by myself in September.  A lot of my friends have moved on (stupid ex-pat merry-go-round) and I’m missing them already, as well as wondering who will blow in on the wind with the new academic year.  I'm still profoundly grateful to God for blessing me with such good friends here (you know who you are) and for the stability of the Church of the Nazarene.  I’m still having conversations with God – some days more, some days less – but remain convinced of His goodness and the fact that He had a purpose in bringing me here and has good plans for me too. 

I’m heading home on Sunday for a month – I like to think of it as furlough, even though I’m not in colonial India – and am looking forward to British things: going to see cricket at Lord’s with my dad; eating pork; Radio 4 on in the background at mum and dad’s; seeing my beautiful godchildren; reading The Times every day; the New Forest in the summer time.  Things here are very strained at the moment, with the recent murders and the escalation of the conflict in Gaza.  To quote Jed Bartlett from The West Wing “we are, as always, one bad bottle of tequila away from all-out war”, or at least it often seems that way.  Maybe things will simmer down.  Maybe they won’t.  I’m in no position to judge and certainly my limited wisdom doesn’t allow for much commentary, though I could tell you my opinions at length (and maybe I will one day).  All I can do for now is pray for this city and the country that I live in and have come to love greatly, and trust in the God whose love never fails even when it seems that everything is falling apart.  It seems trite, but the truth of His love is the one thing that keeps me going.  Here’s to the next year.