With less than three months to go on Year Course, I am now in the third and final part of the program–Israel Experience. My five other articles in the last 6 months in Israel have left out much of even the most basic aspects of my life here, so let me attempt to fill in the gaps.

Year Course is a funny thing. With each trimester being an entirely unique and distinctive experience from the one before it, it's as if I've lived three different lives this year. One as a student in Jerusalem, going on organized field trips and sharing the same building as almost everyone connected to Young Judaea Year Course; one as a volunteer in Bat Yam, living in an apartment, going to my elementary school, the community center, and the grocery store; and one living in the desert at the Sde Boker field school, volunteering with three other Year Coursers with only a weekly visit or phone call by our counselor as our link to the program itself. What a year.

But wait, what is Bat Yam? This is an entire third of the year that has been skipped over in the world of JVibe entries, and unfortunately (and ironically) also in the minds of, I'd say, the Israeli people. You see, if you tell any Israeli that you're living for three months in Bat Yam, they will, without fail, look at you with very confused and sympathetic eyes and ask "Why?" I don't think the poor city even made it to the Let's Go Israel travel guide my roommate has, apart from the map. And it wasn't even in bold.

Bat Yam is still a special place, and the 70 of us who called it home this winter have told these skeptic Israelis more than once that the city is really shaping up, the people are kind and welcoming, and the boardwalk is not far from rivaling Tel Aviv's, which is only 45 minutes up the road.

Bat Yam is about 90% residential, with apartment building after apartment building lining the streets, separated by parks, bakeries, and other commercial centers. The people who live there are not rich, and for the most part, are first- or second-generation Israelis here from the former Soviet Union or neighboring Arab countries. We were scattered in groups of two and three to the schools in the area to help tutor students in the English classes. We were also assigned to various other volunteer jobs as well, like Magen David Adom, the fire station, hospitals, and community centers.

I loved Bat Yam. In the morning, I took a bus to AD Gordon elementary school on the border of Bat Yam and Yafo. I went to three English classes, and on a good day, would take out a group of kids in each one to help them move forward in their workbook or study for a test.

I wasn't there to change the world or even turn the kids into fluent English speakers without thick Russian accents, but it was nice that there was a college-bound American they could turn to whenever they had even the smallest question in their homework. They were such good kids, and in a time when knowing fluent English would be the ticket out of Bat Yam, they weren't given a fair shot. Their teachers were new Russian immigrants and barely knew the language themselves, not to mention the fact that they taught in the farthest-from-American accent possible.

At the school, there was this one student, Daniella, who I will not forget, and it's a shame she'll never in her life come across this website or this article. Daniella is a tiny little Russian fourth-grader who lives with her (supposedly) negligent dad somewhere in Bat Yam.

The first day I worked with Daniella, we started reading sentences in her workbook, and it didn't take me long to understand that she couldn't read, let alone remember which letter made which sound. Her most obvious problem was deciphering between 'b' and 'd', so I wrote in big letters on the front of her book 'DANIELLA' so she could practice writing her name in English and always remember that the first sound in her name matched up with the letter 'd'.

Then, in the front cover of the book, we made a big chart of the alphabet, and went through letter by letter, thinking together of which English word she not only knew of with each letter, but could see everyday outside of school, either on a sign, a store's name, the Internet, or on TV, so that she could start associating the sound with an actual shape.

It took us a good three days to finish the list, but she came up with some really good ones. It was a few weeks later that Daniella came up to me at school and told me that the list was really helping her, and thanked me for coming all the way from America so that we could think of those words together. I just had to hug the kid, it was one of those moments.

This is the type of thing that was so great about living and volunteering in Bat Yam. I could do a little bit of good work at one school, someone else would do good at another, and these little pockets of good would just take place all over the city. Even though as individuals we only saw one school and met only some kids, in the bigger picture, we as a group were bringing a lot of care and love into Bat Yam.

But as the year moves on, so do we, and now there is a new group of Year Coursers continuing the work we ourselves were only continuing in Bat Yam. And I have moved on to the Sde Boker field school, where I am living a very different life in a very different Israel. This Israel is dominated by mountains and riverbeds in every direction to the horizon, and the work that needs to be done is far from English tutoring.

We have marked and picked up trash along hiking trails.   We have also worked with the rangers at a goat farm, and even a snake center. But the drastic differences in our new lives at Sde Boker stretch far beyond the volunteer work to the Israelis themselves who live here. Even though it's just less than three hours away, these people will probably never step foot in Bat Yam, and vice versa.

I've lived three different lives this year, experiencing three completely different extremes of Israel.