the past few weeks

HI to all,

Life has continued to move forward and the past few weeks in the army have had their ups and downs. In the army we have moved from basic training to hebrew course and we are now learning hebrew for anywhere from 6-8 hours a day. Since my hebrew is not that great I have a private tutor and learn one on one with the tutor while the rest of my group is in the class. My hebrew has greatly improved and I am starting to understand and speak more than i did when i first started the army. This past week has been really busy at the base. We have had some very important people come to the base so there have been many ceremonies for that. We have a women from the knesset (israeli government) come to the base to visit with soldiers from other countries so we had a big ceremony for that. We also had the head commander of the education unit come and take a tour of the base. we also had a ceremony because today is Tubeshvat. so we had a flag raising with all of the groups from the base and the commander of the base gave us a speech. so this week has been full of important events and that has been a good break from just sitting in the classroom all day.
Many people have asked how i have been feeling lately. I am still struggling with the migraines and the effects from them. I have been having a hard time dealing with the pain and that has been really frustrating when you can't take the time you need to feel better and take care of yourself. I continue to push on though and not let the pain hold me back. Being in the army you can't just give up and i don't want to just give in to the pain, so i just put on a smile and move on.
I have been slowly making friends, but that has also been hard. in my group i am the only one that speaks english, the rest of the group speaks russian, so i am an outsider in my group. But there are other girls in other groups that speak english and i have been making friends with a lot of the other english speaking girls. I have gotten to know some of them pretty well and we hang out whenever we can during our breaks.
Overall the army has been good. yes you do not have your own time or your own space, but the you get used to the structure of the army and it has now become a part of my life. There have been many challenges, but slowly I am rising up to these challenges and overcoming them. I never fully understood how hard life really can be until now. and because of this i am learning more about myself and it has been amazing to see.
I hope that everyone is doing well! please keep in touch. It makes my day to read all of you e-mails and notes and it really means a lot to me!
Love,
Roxanne