Lenore Sobota
The Pantagraph
Friends Forever participants at a Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church service in Bloomington.
Seeing the transformations of students involved in the Friends Forever program is one of the rewarding aspects of Megan Gonsalves' job.
She is the site manager spending two weeks in Bloomington-Normal with a group of 10 teens from Israel — five Jews, five Arabs — in a program designed to improve understanding between the groups.
The visit is part of a year-long program that also involves activities in Israel involving the Jewish students from Ma'ale Shaharut Regional High School in the far south of Israel and Arab students from Rama Technical High School, about six hours north.
This is the fourth year Friends Forever has come to Bloomington-Normal, sponsored by Rotary Clubs in the Twin Cities and others.
Friends Forever was formed more than 30 years, starting with youths from Northern Ireland, later expanding to Israel and, now, Uganda.
“It's not a challenge that's about politics and Israel,” Gonsalves said. “It's connecting person to person.”
Mikhail Barkan, a student from Ma'ale Shaharut, has lived in Israel less than a year. He emigrated from Russia, attending a boarding school on a kibbutz. He saw Friends Forever as “an opportunity to see who the Arab people really are.”
In Russia, he only knew what he read in the media, he told a group of about 20 people at a public meeting last week at Illinois State University's Bowling and Billiards Center.
Barkan was expecting all the boys to be terrorists with knives and all the girls to be wearing hijabs.
“When I came to Israel, then I saw they are all different and most of them want peace,” Barkan said. “I saw these nice boys who look just like me.”
He and Ali Abed of Rama have become close friends.
“He is my friend, my brother, my teacher in the last eight days,” Abed said of Barkan. Abed said he has helped Barkan with his Hebrew and Barkan has taught him some Russian.
Alon Herlinger, a teacher at Ma'ale Shaharut and a paramedic, is one of two teachers accompanying the group.
He decided to become a teacher after a trip to a World War II concentration camp in Poland with his son and his son's class.
“I don't want this to happen again,” Herlinger said. “I want to teach kids about tolerance and that all human life is precious.”
The students, who are in their second week in the Twin Cities, are required to leave their cellphones at home when they come to the United States. While here, they have no access to technology or mass media.
Gonsalves said, “The amazing thing to see is they stop looking to home for support and they start looking to each other.”
The students first met in Israel in what is called the group building phase of the program. The U.S. phase focuses on skill building — communications, empathy, resilience, impact and perspective. The final phase, when they return to Israel, is community building.
While in the Twin Cities, they have been involved in several activities together.
The students, ages 15 and 16, many of whom have never left their country or been away from their families before, face challenges. Gonsalves said being challenged is “the place where growth is possible.”
When one student was reluctant to participate in the high ropes course at Timber Pointe Outdoor Center at Lake Bloomington, the group reminded her “we make an agreement to always enter the growth zone.”
They persuaded her to put on the harness and helmet and walk to the edge, setting her own personal goal beyond her comfort zone, and she wound up doing the whole route, Gonsalves said.
Michael Gizzi, an associate professor at ISU involved in the Friends Forever program locally, said of the students, “They're going to be ambassadors for peace.”