Up With People Blogger Debuts on Planet Gap Year

Wow! I can’t believe it’s been three weeks already. It seems like yesterday when I arrived a day late and was thrown into the crazy world of Up with People. Up With People is a performing and global leadership program.

We focus on community service and bringing the world together through our show. We have 95 students from 21 different countries all brought together to spread the word of peace and understanding. Our first week was spent getting to know each other and becoming accustomed to the intense life that is the “Up with People experience.” We have an amazing education team that planned some great sessions for us. I really enjoyed the presentation on Culture. Earlier in the week I had been questioning the actual culture of America, being that we are such a diverse country. I loved that the students from the U.S. were able to gather together and discuss what we thought our culture was. I think the idea of the importance of the individual is totally American. I feel that the work ethic and the desire to work to gain happiness is an American ideal. Also, I think that popular culture is something that America has shared with other cultures. You hear of other countries becoming "Americanized" but what does that really mean? For a country that some people seem to think has no culture, it’s sure a country that others seem to emulate. Those were the thoughts I had during our exercise.

Later in the week we had a session called “People’s Barcodes.” It was all about stereotypes. We walked around the room and wrote on each country's paper a stereotype we've heard of the country. We then split into our home countries and read the stereotypes. It was interesting to see what the other countries thought of the U.S... It was said many times that were regarded as an overweight country. That wasn't surprising. It was also said that the U.S. is ill educated. While I do think we have a good educational system, I would agree that we are ill educated as a country when it comes to the rest of the world. As Americans, we tend to have a very independent view. I think we tend to overlook things that are happening in other countries. Or at least I know I have. This experience, within the first few days, is already forcing me to open my eyes and realize that there is so much more in the world that I've overlooked. I hope that during these next six months I will be able to hear first hand from others what is happening in their countries and what needs to be done to improve it.

Besides the educational workshops, we’ve been focusing a lot on the show. We had performance modules, which were basically dance, singing, and speaking auditions. Based on those introductory modules, we were placed into specific workshops to work on dance lines, solos and speaking parts. I’m pretty excited because I’ve had the opportunity to sing a lot and that’s what I love to do. The staging is going well too. It’s always a challenge fitting 95 people onto a small stage and then dancing, but for some awesome reason it seems to be working. I don’t know if I’ll ever understand the physics of it.

We spent one day last week exploring the city of Denver. It was our Regional Learning Day. We were given a scavenger hunt list of things to find in Denver and then split into groups to tour the Capitol building and other various places around Denver. It was one of the best days so far. My group was awesome! I spent the day with some people I hadn’t talked with yet and some close friends. We took pictures all over the city while visiting the library, art museum, Coors Field and the 16th Street Mall. The best part was riding up and down the Mall trying to find a cow statue that was supposed to be there, only to find out that they’d been moved for cleaning before the Democratic National Convention. In the end, we just took a picture pretending to be cows.

I could go on and on about the wonderful things that I’ve experienced in just the first three weeks with Up with People Cast B 2008, but I feel like that could get too long. So I’ll end with talking about our Community Impact Day. We worked with the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, which is an organization formed to protect and improve a watershed southwest of Denver. We ended up driving for about an hour and a half to a piece of land that had been severely damaged by a wildfire known as the Hayman Fire. We were split into three groups and spent the day either planting trees, seeding and raking grass, or removing weeds. I was in the weed pulling group. I spent the entire afternoon pulling these noxious weeds that had taken over a large amount of the land and were killing the rest of the plant life. It wasn’t difficult work, but the weeds had a small amount of poison in them that gave the majority of our group a slight rash. It was unpleasant, but totally worth it when we saw what we’d accomplished. In the end, our cast had transformed over 5 acres of land destroyed by the wildfire. It’s amazing how fun it is to get dirty when you know you’re making a huge difference!

I can’t believe we only have one week until our first performance! Time really is flying by and I can’t wait to update again!