MIRIAM BENHAMU

My name is Miriam Or Benhamu Lopez Bleda. I come from Spain and I am 25 years young. 

I was born in Madrid but I lived most of my life in Barcelona with my parents, my three sisters and our dog ​​Buddy (you can think of us as the traditional Sephardic Jewish family)

I grew up in Rubi, a working-class neighborhood in the outskirts of Barcelona.

 

When I hit the age of 19 and was fresh out of High School I decided to make Aliya and make Israel my new home. It was on August 14th of 2014 when I landed at the Ben Gurion airport and made my way to the “meonot” of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I would spend the next year as part of the Mechina program in the Rotghberg International School.

 

Fast forward one year: I am living in Herzliya, opening a letter from the “tzav rishon” and starting the process to enter the army. I finally joined in December 2015 and served for two years in the Education unit. Our job was to prepare and train Israeli youth for the military service, working with children from all over the country with all kinds of social and economic backgrounds. Learning about Israel’s diverse society made me fall in love even more with the country and was what made me decide once again that this is the place where I’m living my adult life. 

After spending a few years in Herzliya and working in the hospitality and leisure world, I moved to Tel Aviv. I joined El-Al in January 2019 as a flight attendant: a fun experience of discovery that was cut short because of Covid-19. In October I started to study Psychology in the Open University, but quickly realized that I wasn’t listening to my heart and wasn’t following my dreams and goals. It was the eye opener that I needed in order to decide to pursue a dream that had been in the back of my head for a long time.