First-year student
Jordanna Mallach came to Union via Israel and Guatemala
Every so often last year, Vice President of Admissions Dan Lundquist received a postcard from Israel or Guatemala-all sent by Jordanna Mallach '00.
Mallach, of Maplewood, N.J., was taking a year off after high school, deferring her admission to Union. During that time, she had some remarkable experiences-from living in Israel at the time of Prime Minister Rabin's assassination to helping educate poor Guatemalan children.
Mallach began in Israel, living in a small neighborhood for a few months to immerse herself in Israeli culture. “What overwhelmed me was the generosity,” Mallach says. Alone in a small apartment, she was inundated with invitations of hospitality, she says.
As a volunteer at a community center, she taught English to children and helped lead the Teenager Adventurers Group, teaching Israeli teens how to rock-climb.
When Rabin was assassinated, Mallach began to reexamine her own Jewish identity.
“I always knew about Israeli politics,” she says, “but when the guys I was going to the movies with were waking up the next morning, putting on their uniforms, taking out their
machine guns, and heading up to patrol the border, it really had a big impact on me.
“The whole experience was unbelievable,” she continues. “They had no more life experience than I did, yet what they were dealing with and what they were facing was something far beyond what I could comprehend.”
During the night of Rabin's funeral, Mallach and some friends went to the assassination site, where she was overcome by the number of candles and memorials from all nations. “That had a great impact on me-just the fact that there is such great support of Israel and the Jews at large,” she says.
Her destination for the next five months was Guatemala. Her plan was to attend a language school and do a little traveling, but that changed when she met the students helped by El Proyecto (the project), a small
not-for-profit group associated with her language school.
“I absolutely fell in love with the children in this organization,” she says. After she was offered a job working for the group (for food and shelter), she changed her plans.
When Mallach arrived, El Proyecto was a new organization sponsoring eight children so that they could attend they public school. By the time
Mallach left, the group was sponsoring sixty children.
In Guatemala, many families cannot afford to equip their children with the necessary supplies and uniforms to attend school, and many children work to support the family. El Proyecto sponsored children by providing for their supplies and also giving the family the money (for food and medicine) that the child might have earned instead of going to school.
The staff of El Proyecto – Mallach and one other woman – also provided tutorials, adult education classes, group games for children too young for schooling, and classes on
women's issues.
“It was long hours and really hard work but I loved waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night feeling that I had contributed to the lives of these people,” Mallach says.
By the time she left, she was proud of her ability to carry on her head the amount of water
that a six-year-old girl could normally carry. And she was touched by the spirit she found. When a little boy at a pizza party sponsored by El Proyecto offered her some of his pizza, she was overwhelmed by his generosity. “This boy probably gets to eat pizza twice a year, yet he was offering me a bite with this huge grin on his face,” she says.
Mallach says that returning to America and beginning college was difficult. “When I came back from Guatemala I went to the supermarket, stood in front of the shampoo isle, and almost cried,” she says. “I wish everyone could leave the environment in which they feel safe and secure to spend some time in a place where people don't have enough to eat and don't take anything for granted because they don't have anything.”
And after Union? “If I get a degree and go to work in diplomacy, then I can go down there and help change the educational policies of Guatemala,” she says. Instead of helping sixty children, perhaps she can help all the four million children of Guatemala.