Beach Party

From Cape Cod we drove to Newburyport, MA our next city.  As an education intern, Dristy and I got to organize and lead a staff roundtable for two hours, where the cast was able to break up into small groups and get to know our staff on a more personal level.  This activity was our first major project as education interns, and Dristy and I had a great time working together to organize the activity.

This week, I got to room with Dave, our cast manager/director and we stayed with Abby and Betty Allsopp.  Abby traveled in Up With People in 2008 with Dave, so it was great to get to live with an alumni and hear all about her travels and experiences.  It was also great because Abby knew what little time we had to spend in Newburyport and she wanted to make sure we got the most out of our experience there.

Tuesday I had the opportunity to work on the most impacting Community Impact day that I have had yet.  I worked at a small church that has a preschool program.  Our job was to build a playground in the backyard of the church for the children.  The special part about the project was that the pastor wanted us to design the playground our own way so the children would always remember that Up With People built the playground.  We worked with the kindest people at the church and they were right along side us as we constructed a place for the children to play.  The pastor wanted the playground to be made from natural materials, so we used stones, logs, dirt, sand, and twigs.  In the four and a half hours we had to work, we dug a hole and built a sandbox, constructed a teepee, built a mud pit surrounded by a fence made of logs, painted dressers to hold art supplies, laid logs in the ground for children to jump across, and put mulch down over the entire area.

This Community Impact will always be a special memory for me because of how passionate our group was at building a space for children to play and also because of how grateful the members of the church were when we completed the playground.  They could not stop thanking us for our help and one woman started crying because she was so appreciative, which made our group start crying.  It is for days like this that I am so grateful to be a part of Up With People where we can make a difference in people's lives.

This week we had two performances-one on Wednesday and one on Thursday.  We performed in a middle school theater that was not air conditioned.  I tend to sweat when I stand outside in the snow without shoes, so performing in this auditorium was certainly an experience.  At one point of the show, about five songs in, as I was singing my heart out and jamming on stage, I moved back and looked down at the floor to find a small puddle of my sweat on the stage.  When I got off stage, I realized that the top half of my shirt was soaking wet.  We were all miserable because it was so hot, but that did not stop us from giving it our all for both performances.  It also gave us a better understanding of how hot it might get for us in Taiwan, The Philippines, and Mexico. 

Friday we spent the entire day together as a cast and we had a culture fair.  Each country has been working on a presentation for culture fair for six weeks and as an education intern, it was my job to help organize this culture fair which was for the North and South American countries.  Kelli, one of our education coordinators, and I were in charge of welcoming the cast to culture fair.  We decided to welcome everyone and get people excited by doing a few cheers and lifts.  We came up with three cheers that related to culture fair and added a few interesting twists.  We also dressed up as cheerleaders with sweatbands, cutoff shirts, and spandex shorts.  Kelli and I had a blast putting our welcome together and it got the entire cast laughing.

I was amazed at the amount of work that groups put in for their presentations.  The people who were not presenting were split up into groups and we rotated around visiting different tables and listening to the countries present about their culture.  I was very impressed with how well the culture fair went and how much fun everyone had.  We have another culture fair in two weeks for the Europeans and Asians and I am very much looking forward to seeing what the next group will do.  

Because of the holiday weekend, and our incredibly busy upcoming week, we had two host family days.  On Saturday Abby took me, Dave, and Kelli to the beach and we spent the afternoon soaking up the sun and enjoying a beautifully warm day.  After an afternoon of relaxing at the beach, Abby took me and Dave to some of her favorite bars on Hampton beach.  We had a fun evening of exploring the different bars and sitting down to talk to each other.

Saturday evening Abby took us to her favorite Sunday night activity, which was a reggae dance club on the deck of a huge beach bar.  Abby, Dave, some of Abby's friends, and I danced for hours to the reggae music.  It was like I was living the life of someone you see on the travel channel dancing at a beach party.  Once the reggae beach party ended, Abby took us to another dance club where we continued to dance the night away.  

It was so great to stay with Abby and Betty this week, as well as room with Dave.  A few years down the road, I would really like to be the cast manager so I greatly appreciated getting to see Dave's job from a different perspective.  One thing I truly admire about Abby is her genuine and caring nature that she has for others.  Wherever we went, Abby would see people she knew, but they were not always people her age.  Abby has friends her age all the way to her second cousin who is 86.  I have always loved meeting new people, but living with Abby this week really showed me how to look for the best in each person no matter their background or their age.  I was blessed this week to have such a wonderful host family that could inspire me to be a better person.