Spelling, Wine and a Rabbi

Today brought more spelling and more Hebrew.  I worked with S3 (third year of secondary school, or high school) on spelling, in preparation for the inter-year spelling bee tomorrow.  I have no idea if this will actually resemble anything like an American spelling bee, but the teacher I work with really wants to have a "competition" for spelling, and has heard of the film Akeelah and the Bee, so I'm assuming it will be something of the sort.

As for Hebrew at Hadassah, I worked with the oldest and youngest Hebrew-learning groups today, and had my first big culture shock with the oldest group.  Continuing our focus on the meaning of prayer and ritual actions, we learned the meanings of some brachot (blessings), including boreh pri hagafen, which is the blessing said on wine, because it is blessing "the creator of the fruit of the vine."  Trying to explain the connection between the bracha and the action to the students, I asked "What is wine made from?" 

The unanimous answer: "Mangoes."  

Upon prodding, I also got apples, but never got a mention of grapes--which it turns out, most of them have never heard of, because they aren't grown here.  In retrospect I should have realized that or at least considered it, and it was certainly an unexpected challenge to have to explain a blessing in terms of a commodity they had never encountered, though the rabbi does have some kosher wine that he uses for the communal kiddush on Friday nights (which I'm guessing they had no idea comes from grapes).

On the interview side, I had my first extended chat with the rabbi, and it gave me some interesting insight into his life, personality and his motivations for serving his community and his country.  He told me how he came to study at the the (Conservative) American Jewish University for rabbinical school (after a stint  at the (Reform) Hebrew Union College and a possibility of study at (modern Orthodox) Chovevei Torah) and how he thinks he found a happy medium in the Conservative movement.  He described the unique challenges that his community faced in following certain halachot, such as simply not being able to obtain all of the arba minim (four types of plants used on the holiday of Sukkot) because they weren't available in Uganda, and how the mikvah (ritual bath) set up by the community has fallen into use by locals as a well. He also told me about the efforts he's made to improve his community and his country, both by serving as a spiritual leader and communal leader (thus his heated run for Parliament).  Perhaps most interesting was the revelation that he had not only embraced relatively progressive ideals of Conservative Judaism in relation to egalitarianism in Jewish practice, but that he did seem to see importance in extending that egalitarianism to non-religious life as well.  This helped address one of the questions I have been pondering for a few days now--the question of how much the Judaism here is a transplanted American breed that has a lot of foreign elements perhaps unfriendly to Ugandan soil.  While I'm not completely convinced yet that this is not the case, it was good to have confirmation that the Rabbi recognizes these challenges and is really interested in tackling them.