Some (useless?) Stats (and the background story)

When I was in 11th grade, between my 16th and 17th birthdays, I was part of a Youth Delegation sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign affairs.

Israeli youth delegation

This was an all-expenses-paid 5 week overseas travel (during school year!), to some location in the Western world (we're talking about the early 1980s, so that bias is not a big surprise).

The 70-or-so delegation members were selected from all 11th and 12th graders across the state of Israel.

The selection process started with each school sending two candidates (theoretically, we were selected by having good grades, and good attitudes. Knowing myself, I'm not sure what was the criteria :-| But we'll leave speculation out of this).

Then, all candidates took an exam (mostly general knowledge about Israel, Judaism and the World, some current affairs).

Then, some of us were selected to take another exam, and finally - a face-to-face interview.

Then, some lucky 70-80 of us were selected for a 3-day seminar, after which we were coupled-up to girl-boy team, and assigned a destination - a location to where we will travel for 4 weeks or so, meet local youths, and make them see how "normal" we are, and hopefully make them take a leap-of-faith to realize how normal Israel is.

Why?

Well, as part of the above-mentioned seminar we learnt all kinds of trivia tidbits, and the first one was:

If measured by foreign news coverage, then Israel is the second largest country in the world!

We would travel to some city - my partner and I were sent to the Midwest of the US - basically bigger-and-smaller towns in the vicinity of Chicago, Illinois.

Some of us went to western Europe, and there was even a pair that traveled to Australia...

We'd be hosted by local Jewish families who'd take care of us and take us around, starting with picking us up at the local airport upon arrival, and dropping us off at the airport at the end of our stay.

Every morning we'd go to a local highschool, and during school-day we'd meet different classes for 6-7 hours in a row, tell them about ourselves and our lives in Israel, with a well-prepared lecture, peppered with anecdotes and trivia tidbits, and end with answering questions we didn't cover in our lecture.

Israeli youth delegation - session

In the second half of the day we'd meet with local jewry, and try to walk the fine line of increasing their zionism without hinting that they should be making Aliyah.

The other super-popular trivia tidbit (in addition to news coverage tidbit from above) which I can't seem to forget, was comparing the size of the state of Israel to the size of...

• The State of Texas - 24 times the state of Israel (actually, 695,662 km²)

• California - 15 times (423,970 km²)

• Lake Michigan - 1 time... (58,030 km²)

The funny thing is that as I was writing this post, I re-checked the numbers and they don't really add up, as the size of Israel (20,770 km²) actually fits 34 times into Texas, 21 times into California, and nearly 3 times into Lake Michigan.

But nobody called our bluff (and if they would, maybe they'd be even more impressed?).

And by far, THE most popular topics for questions were the 5 'D's - the American teenagers would ask us about:

• Drinking

• Draft

• Dating

• Driving

• Drugs

not necessarily in this order...

They were jealous about the effectively-non-existent Drinking restrictions (as of 1980s), were shocked about the compulsory army Draft, less impressed with our Dating or Driving (age 18 or 17.5 at the 1980s) stories and would really grill us about the Drugs (nothing interesting to hear from my partner and I - we were really boring in that aspect).