It begins!

UYO-Jerusalem starts tonight!!! With 21 fully registered students, and 2 who will be giving in their form or money sometime today! Woo hoo!

(I'd thought that the capacity for a UYO class was 22 people who had never taken it before and 2 who were reviewing, but it turns out that no, it's a simple upper limit of 24. Which means we STILL have room for one more. But I am soooo proud of myself for practically filling the class! I worked hard and it is bearing fruit!)

Thanks to everyone who recommended the Chandra restaurant in Mahane Yehudah. It was indeed delicious and a great shuk "experience."

The hardest thing for me right now is giving up control. I've worked so hard to arrange the logistics, and now -- at my own request -- other people are taking responsibility for making sure things go smoothly once the course begins. Having done so much work to make this happen, I want to be more free now to just watch and listen and enjoy experiencing everything unfold. I don't want to have to worry about who is setting up the snack table or whether every student got his/her name tag. Obviously I'll be on hand to answer questions, since there are things that at the moment only I know, such as where we stored the paper plates. However, I'm taking a huge step right now in handing over the reigns to others and trusting that the course will be FANTASTIC. It always is. I'm trying to remind myself that all the other UYO's I attended were amazing, with other people in charge. The people who are now in charge will make this one amazing too! But giving up control is really hard!

My main goal for myself over the next few days is to learn to do that. Because the whole point of this enterprise is to empower other people, and that can only happen if I trust them to do their jobs.

Wednesday night update: Wow!!! The course is going AMAZINGLY. What a fantastic group of students. The course assistants are soooo helpful. And the teachers. Wow. They are doing such a great job. I'm so pumped for tomorrow!