First day of First responder training: CPR, CPR... and more CPR

Hey everyone!

Today was my second birthday in a row in Israel (19 years)!  That went fast.  But I wasn't able to celebrate it like I did last year on birthright, but thats ok.

I left my Aunt Naomi and Uncle Irving's house in Modi'in this morning at 7:30 am to take a super taxi to jerusalem.  A super taxi is a super cheap taxi that drives around until it has 8 people in it and then drives to Jerusalem.  It's not that bad considering that the taxis was a mercedez.  I guess everything is better in Israel. 

When they said that the First Responder training course was intense, they were right.  It's exhausting.

I arrived at the Bet Yehuda guest house in the hills of Jerusalem and it is awesome, but I sat around waiting with a couple of other volunteers from 8am until 10am for when other people started to arrive.  Everyone who is volunteering, and at the moment training to be a first responder with me, is just amazing because we are all giving up our time (and summers) to volunteer with Israel's ambulance dept.  It takes a certain type of person to do that, and have found a lot of great people so far. 

The day started with an orientation of Magen David Adom, and how awesome it is, and how great it is that we are here.  Then we were split off into 4 different groups to go into 4 different classrooms with 4 different instructors.  Each instructor is a "medic" with MDA and has been training future volunteers from 2 years to 20 years.  My group instructor has worked with MDA for around 15 years and has been teaching this 10-day course for around 10 years.  He's really funny, and gloats about his ADHD a lot for some reason, but is very good at teaching and extremely specific with house he teaches us about CPR.  Even though I already know CPR (thanks SUA) it was a nice refresher and using several of the words in Hebrew (like dofek is pulse etc.)

After the CPR course, I was CPR'ed out.

We were in the class from around 12:00pm till around 6pm, then dinner, then a talk from the main supervisor and creator of the Magen David Adom Volunteer abroad program.  It was very interesting, and reminded us why we are here: to give back to Israel, and have an awesome experience.

Now we are just hanging out and relaxing on the padio. Maybe play some late-night Jew ball (basketball) and probably pass out on the course BUT it'll be fun.


Can't wait for the next 9 days.