By Avital Ludomirsky, Kefiada Volunteer, St. Louis

With all the planning that went into it, Partnership 2000 (P2K) day turned out to be incredibly successful.  I can honestly say that the kids all have a great sense of what camp is like in America.  I felt as though all of the campers were having a fabulous time throughout the course of the day and even their counselors seemed to be enjoying themselves.

In order to prepare for P2K Day (or America Day as it was referred to throughout the camp), we had many planning sessions with several different people.  We made the collective decision that we wanted to run this day from start to finish and so we held meetings with the administration as well as amongst ourselves.

We began the day with a typical American camp song of "Boker Tov".  We taught the campers how to sing it and they loved it! They then split off into their separate stations which we had designed weeks in advance.  We ran eight different stations during the course of the day.  These stations included creating your own "pet rock" in order to reflect the St. Louis Zoo, creating animal masks in order to represent the Atlanta Zoo, a sports station to represent the importance of the various sports teams to each city, "create your own flag", the St. Louis Arch, a water-balloon toss, jump-ropes and sidewalk chalk, and creating dream-catchers.  Each station was modeled slightly differently.  For instance, at the sports station, the groups watched a film about "sports bloopers" and seemed to really enjoy themselves even though most of them do not completely understand English.

My personal station was the St. Louis Arch.  Since we had planned this program as a group before we left St. Louis, we were able to bring supplies from the US in order to aid us in running this program.  As a result, we brought mini Arch-Building kits.  There were three of these in which the arch is made of small wooden pieces and the kids have to put it together similar to a puzzle.  When the campers arrived at my station, I explained to them the significance of the arch to St. Louis.  They were then split up into three groups and each group was given one Arch-Building kit in order to attempt to piece it together.  The kids seemed to have a blast and even their counselors joined their campers in helping them build the Arch.

As for the water-balloon toss, the kids loved it to begin with, but the fact that they were playing for prizes made them that much more enthusiastic.  With Morgan running the station, he decided to give out Atlanta hats to all of the "winners" of the balloon toss.  The kids loved it and were so excited about playing.  While this only represents a few of the stations, all in all, most of the campers were fully engaged at every station.

One of the most amazing things about the day was that we were literally able to run an entire day of camp on our own.  We made all of the important decisions including the group pairing, the exact schedule, and the rules of the day.  It was amazing to see how well they were followed and how successful this day was.  With sixteen groups, we decided to pair them off so that no groups would ever have down time.  Thus, we had about forty campers at a station during each rotation.  Though we only had time for six rotations and so not every group was able to be at every station, the stations that the groups were able to get to ran smoothly and were enjoyable.

At the end of the day, we were asked to put on a small show for the camp.  As a result of the incredibly high number of campers at the camp, we decided to split them up into two groups and simply do the show twice.  The first show began with a very nice presentation by Mayor Simon Alfasi of Yokneam.

We gave him a gift and thanked him and he gave us gifts and thanked us.  It was a very touching ceremony and he really did make us feel at home in Yokneam.

The next stage of the show was our personal performance.  We decided that it would be nice to write a short little song about out impressions of camp and our experiences in general.  We ended up writing a lovely medley which included tunes such as The Brady Bunch, Summer Nights, At First I Was Afraid, Lean on Me, and so many more.  It was highly humorous, lots of fun, and not only did the counselors enjoy it, but several of the campers even asked us to perform it again.

The show went on to include a small performance by the Israeli counselors and then a nice song in which Morgan played the guitar while an Israeli counselor named Elia sang.  It was a great performance and though we were dreading it, I think I can honestly say that we all ended up enjoying it.

Thus, though the day was incredibly exhausting, it was a lot of fun to see all of our planning carried out and it was even more amazing to see how much everyone enjoyed themselves.  That day at camp was by far one of my personal favorites and one of the best organized.