ENP Welcomes a New Intern from Aardvark Israel Immersion Program
Sylvia Miller is a new volunteer at the Ethiopian National Project. She is from Illinois and is in Israel for the year with the Aardvark gap year program. At ENP she works with BBYO projects, summer camps, funding and more! She is grateful to be learning from and working with the Ethiopian community here in Israel. Sylvia wrote the following article on her reflections on becoming an ENP intern.
My name is Sylvia Miller and I am a volunteer at the Ethiopian National Project. I am from Glencoe, Illinois. I spend every summer at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin. I decided to take a gap year before I head to the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the fall. I wanted to take this year to explore new cultures, societies, walks of life, and Judaism. From September to December I participated in an ARCC Service Learning program in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Some highlights of this experience include: working at a rhino sanctuary, study education by living with students at East Africa’s first free all-female secondary school, install solar power systems into rural Tanzanian homes, and spent 30 days camping across Kenya. This experience itself was transformative and inspired me to continue volunteering. While this trip was not
religion-based and the majority of the ten participants were not Jewish, it still inspired “Tikkun Olam,” a Jewish concept defined by acts of kindness performed to perfect or repair the world.
Originally my plan was to head to Berlin for my second semester to intern in marketing or something of that sort. However, due to problems with this second-semester program I was left with a week to find something new to do. I was not planning on spending nearly five months in Israel, however, after finding the Aardvark Gap program I received the last spot on the program and was in Jerusalem a week later. I knew I wanted to spend my time in Israel making a positive difference. That is exactly what ENP allows me to do. My work at ENP consists of programming for BBYO groups who choose ENP as their service project, working to send members of the Ethiopian Israeli community who participated in their year-long SPACE programs to summer camp in the United States, researching potential donors, and more. Sending students to summer camp in the U.S. is so important to me because of my experience at camp, and how it has shaped me into the person I am today. The other day I was able to go to Afula with the Ethiopian National Project for an outing where members of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation met with the students who are involved in one of ENP’s SPACE (School Performance and Community Empowerment) Programs. There I bonded with the students, learned how SPACE impacts their lives, and more about the Ethiopian Israeli community from members of the community themselves.
My decision to come to Israel was not planned, long thought out, or a dream come true. However, my experience here has me confused on why it was not in my plans all along. The more I learn about Israeli society, the more I am inspired.