Hotlanta

Monday we drove from Statesboro into the big city of Atlanta.  This week was an exciting week because I had the opportunity to live with a cast mate that I traveled with last semester and also had five roommates that traveled last semester as well.  It was going to be an exciting week together.

Tuesday was spent preparing for the anti-bullying workshops for the following day.  Up with People has been working on a curriculum for the anti-bullying workshops since last semester.  The curriculum has been updated since the first time I facilitated the workshops in Hamilton, MA.  The feedback received after this semester will help determine the final curriculum for the UWP anti-bullying workshops.  Because we were piloting these workshops, it was important that we were prepared and organized.

After preparing for two weeks, it was finally our time to facilitate the anti-bullying workshops.  We worked at Sequoia Middle School, which had a very diverse student population.  Many of the students come from low-income families and do not often have a strong support system at home.  Most of the students and their families have lived much of their lives in other parts of the world before coming to Atlanta.  The students knew we would be coming because we had been working closely with an UWP alumna who is an English teacher at Sequoia Middle School.  She was so excited for UWP to be coming to work with her students and she had spent months helping her students raise money so 125 students could come see our show.  We were all very excited to get into the classrooms and meet the students.

It was a very successful day working with the students in the classrooms.  Each group facilitated 2-two hour workshops to the eighth graders in the school.  I was amazed at how engaged the students were and the level of respect that was shown to us as facilitators.  We were all pleased with the workshops and felt like we were able to give some good feedback to finalize the curriculum.  We were also really looking forward to having the students learn more about what we do at our show.

Thursday was a regional learning day where we had the chance to spend the morning at the State Capitol building.  We had the morning to explore the capitol and sit in on the meetings going on as well as read about the history of Georgia and the city of Atlanta.

After lunch we headed to Roswell, which is a suburb of Atlanta and the city in which we are performing.  We went to the Roswell City Hall and had a meet and greet with the mayor.  We got to give a little presentation about who we are as UWP and then the mayor got to ask us some questions about our experiences.

Friday and Saturday were our show days.  Saturday was a double show day.  We had great audiences that were really enthusiastic about our show.  Friday morning, the first round interns had to announce the new interns for the second round.  We decided to make the announcement Harry Potter themed, so we all dressed up as students from Hogwarts and ride in on boomsticks.  To announce the new interns we sat on a stool and had the sorting hat call out the new intern.

The Saturday matinee was the show where the Sequoia Middle School students came.  During our final song, Voices, I was standing in the front wearing an international costume.  Towards the end of the song, I noticed the students in the front holding up letters.  When I realized what the letters spelled, I began crying, along with several other cast members on stage.  They had spelled out "Thank You" for all of us to see.  Seeing the sign made me cry because I felt like I should have thanked the students for making my experience at their school so memorable, yet there they were thanking us for their experience.  That moment on stage and seeing those students will always be one of my most cherished memories from the semester.  It was a great way to end our final shows in the US.

Our host family took all of us to the world's largest aquarium and the Coke Museum on Sunday.  Aquariums are one of my favorite places to go, so I was thrilled to be going to the worlds largest.  I could barely contain my excitement from the minute we walked through the doors.  I could not believe the magnitude of this aquarium and all they had in it.  The first tank that blew me away was the massive tank of Beluga whales.  I could have stayed and watched them play for hours.  If I did not think that tank was big enough, we went next to the most majestic tank I had ever seen.  I felt like I was in the ocean as I stepped in front of the glass with three Whale-sharks and two Eagle Rays swimming passed me.  It was unbelievable watching these creatures swim around in the tank.  It made me feel as if I had entered their world rather than seeing them from behind glass.

After the aquarium, we headed across the street to the Coke Museum.  We watched movies and read all about the history of Coke and the secret recipe.  When we got to the end, we were able to try different Coke products from every continent around the world.  It was awesome to experience the taste of Coke from some of the remote parts of the world.

I had such a wonderful week with the Hamadi family during my time in Atlanta.  It was so great to spend the week with my former cast mate and my roommates from last semester.