I will try to explain just a little bit of what I did during 1996 when I was traveling with Up With People. First of all in this page there's a brief and 'personal' explanation of what Up with People is all about.
is an international education program that was founded in California 1965. It's a non-profit and independent and has no political or religious affiliations. It has three major elements (among many others!): Community service, living in hostfamilies, and the show. The organisation has its headquarter in Denver/ Colorado. The purpose of UWP is to build understanding among nations and people in the world throughout these elements.If you want to know more about that go here!
Some examples of what we did as community service: Re-planted trees
along a river, visited elderly in a nursing home, builded and painted houses,
picked up garbage on a beach or went into schools and did culturpresentations
about our own countries to try to eliminate their stereotyopes that the
students have. One of other activities we did in the classrooms was called
"Take a stand" where we divided the classroom with a "line" and asked them
questions like :"-If you found a wallet with $ 400 in it, would you turn
it in to the police?" and then, without talking to their friends, decide
what side - Yes or No - they would choose.No one could stand in the
middle. With a ball thrown between the participants they could comment
their choices. If you didn't have the ball you had to remain silent. Other
questions were "would you marry someone from another culture?", "should
there be a death penalty?". Many difficult questions with no "right or
wrong" that gave everybody, including us from UWP, something to think
about.
I remember some of the moments better than others, like the one in
California when we entered a classroom that seemed to be more like a Zoo
than a classrooom, with students between 15 and 16 years old that somewhere
along the road had lost their faith in the grown up. From being really
wild to slowly but steady begin to (after we had done everything
from beg to threaten them to leave the classroom!) what we had to say,
they start to listen and think..... and bing! There's magic!! You could
almost touch the electricity that flows between the students. For the
first time in many years for a lot of the students, there is someone who
actually takes them seriously and honestly WANT's to listen to what they
have to say. I've sometimes heard that for some of the students it has
been the first time ever they have spoken in the classroom. Then you get
kind of... proud! I could say.
It has also been interesting to hear some of the discussions and look at
the facial expressions among the students when we did the wrap-up's
afterwards. Because very often some of them never thought they could have
such different opinions or maybe to hear that they HAVE the same opinion
without knowing that, even though they had spent three years together in
the same classroom.
Guestspeakers
We also had guestspeakers throughout the year. The first ones we had
when we did the "Staging and Orientation in Denver. One of the speakers
on the road was a young girl from Sacramento, CA who "broke up"
with here gang beacuse a rival gang had kept here family as a hostage for
a couple of hours. And since you NEVER leave your gang she and here family
had to move when they started to threaten to hurt or kill here! She had
seen people get executed and tortured by gang members but she had never been
forced to do anything like that since she was a girl...
She is still today threatened on the phone by her former gangmembers.
Two guys from Kelowna, BC Canada really took us "down to earth"
one day by telling their life stories.
One of them was Quniton who has lived with the disease HIV for 8 years
now. He is 25 years old and are working as a "Condom Cop" now to try to
spread information to as many as possible about this fatal disease!
The other guy was 7 yo Jared who is fighting the Hepatitis 'C', that is
destroying his liver. He and his mom told us a lot about this dieseas
(spelling?) and according to the doctors he only had about 6 months still
to live... (In Decmber last year we got a happy message that he might be
able to go through a liver transplantation. It wont save him eternaly but
it will sure make him live a lot longer!) The hardest thing with these
kind of "lessons" was when we have to start to do something completely
different, right after beeing deeply touched by people's life stories,
and then just take a deeeep breath and continue with other - what
you think then - less important things like rehearsal of the show...
Advance Work
In order to prepare a city to host about 120 students from 20
different countries, Up With People sends on before hand, out
so called "Advance Teams" and they do things like finding beds
for all of the students in different hostfamilies, find food -
both lunch and dinner - to the same amount of people for about
two to three days, promote the show in "ten thousand" different
ways, doing presentations in classrooms and to organisations, talk
with the media and keep up the good relations with the local sponsor/s.
That was what I and a girl (Tonya from Alaska that was hired by
UWP, did in Fort St. John
Something I really learned by doing all this stuff is that I'm able
to do SO many more things than I ever thought was possible!! If I
HAVE to do it I CAN do it! I gave a speach about UWP for five minutes,
for the first time in my life, in front of 40 men when they had their
lunch meeting with the Rotary club. Then you have to consider the fact
that the speach was in my second language... I've talked to about 300
persons in the phone trying to convince them to be a hostfamily again or
for the first time. Even though there were times you really wondered why
you on the earth ever had put your feet in UWP at all, you knew that the
group was coming to your town, no matter what! So with other words you
just had to "get up again" and fight against yourself and the problems
that occured.
Interview skills
In order to find new students for upcoming tours we interviewed people
interested in going with a new cast. Those interviews where usually held
after each and every show we performed. We were two students from the cast
that spoke to one applicant for about 30-45 min (approximately!.) Even
though we were short on time we had to be able to judge wether this person
was suitable for a cast or not. Sometimes it was really easy when both of
us students agreed upon a decision, and sometimes it was hard to let go of
a judgement you had made... We had a form with specific questions that
would help us to find out instanly if the person were interesting for UWP
so we could tell him or her to fill out "section II", were the interviewed
person had to answer yet another 4 general questions on here own.
As the year went by, you started to develop a greater sense of what kind
of person you were interviewing, so in the end of the year and for the
rest of my life, I would say, I had/have a lead over other people when I
have to "judge" people in a short matter of time. The interview were
usually made in English, but both in Germany and Japan the applicants
could interview in their own language. The skills you gain throughout
interviewing other people are, as an example, a gift close to intuition
when you rather fast can see if this person is honest or not. You learn to
find the things that you are good at, instead of trying to think of the
things you just CAN'T do... and so on! When talking to other people you
ask questions differently. Instead of "going around" and try to find out
what's wrong, you ask the "exact" questions immediately, and save a lot of
time
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