Up with People Cast B 2010 On Tour

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So, I had a bit of culture shock in when we arrived in our 2nd Mexican City. Cabo San Lucas.  I was with my first host family that didn’t speak a word of English and being that I don’t speak much Spanish, communication was difficult.  Also, there were quite a few people coming in and out of the house due to my host mom’s open door policy and I’m not really sure who actually lived in my home.  Haha.  It was kind of awkward, but a total learning and growth experience.  I’m learning how to communicate without words.  I took an hour to show my host mom a book about Nebraska and I also showed her some pictures of home and friends.  I wanted to feel as though she knew me a bit more.

Ok, so I had some difficulty earlier this week during our Regional Learning Day. We went to a poorer region of Los Cabos to visit the people who lived there and I was really uncomfortable with the whole endeavor. We showed up in two huge air-conditioned buses and started handing out candy to the kids and taking pictures with them.  Part of me felt like we were in Kindergarten going to the petting zoo and feeding the animals and taking pictures with them.  I tried to see it as a positive thing because the little kids were really enjoying themselves, but I had a woman come up to me and ask me why we were there and why her home was suddenly of interest to the tourists.  I just felt awful.  Then to end the day we took a boat ride and were given free drinks and dinner. I couldn’t help but feel guilty knowing that the people I’d just left probably wouldn’t eat tonight and here I was having a pina colada and eating sushi on a cruise ship.  It was definitely the most difficult day of the tour so far.  However, now that I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience I see how important it was for the cast to see that community.  Yes it was uncomfortable, but no one said Up with People was going to be easy.  I know that a portion of our profits went to help those people, but it was hard to be there and not do something right away. 

Let’s see, Cabo ended up being a very interesting city.  I was the City Runner in that city, (meaning I ran the morning and closing meetings) with Eriko from Japan.  However, the cast was split up between Cabo San Lucas and Cabo San Jose so the two of us were split up as well.

I was apart of two Community Impact days in Cabo. Both days were spent painting the baseball stadium for our concert with a group of youth from San Jose del Cabo.  We had a problem the first day with the paint being so late.  The second day we painted all day with little interaction with the youth because we were so behind from the day before, so that was a bit frustrating but it’s all part of the differences in culture and learning to be flexible.

The next city on our tour was Tepic, Mexico.  My roommate Fenna from Germany and I stayed the week with in a host family with Angela from the US and Neele from Germany. It was amazing!  They were a wonderful family with a beautiful home.  Fenna’s friends from Germany came to visit so we ended up with 6 of us staying there.  We did a really interesting Community Impact/Regional Learning activity at a Sea Turtle habitat.  We got to see the baby turtles while cleaning up the beach to allow the baby turtles to reach the sea more easily.  My friend Miguel and I adopted a baby turtle and named him Miguelynn.  I didn’t get to do a lot of Community Impact in Tepic because…I got chosen to go on Advance Work!  Advance Work is an internship that allows me to go ahead of the cast to help set up a city before the cast arrives.  I spent this week in training because I got sent to Sahuarita, Arizona to help the Field Managers prepare the city. The rest of Tepic was all kind of a blur because I was gone so much for training.  The concert was amazing! We finally got the encore we were hoping for.  On host family day my host family took us to some old ruins and unfortunately a ditch was not marked properly so of course I fell into it and landed on my camera. So my camera is very much broken.  But no worries, I bought a new one today so there will be no lack of pictures from my time on Advance Work.

Talk to you again from back in the U.S.A…

Cabo San Lucas…What comes to mind?…The sun, the sand, resorts as far as the eye can see, sitting by the pool, a pina colada maybe?  Well, your partially correct…While most of these are true, UWP Cast B certainly experienced Cabo in a much different way…

In coming to Los Cabos, the cast was given the chance to experience more than just the beautiful vacation community full of wealthy snowbirds that move south to spend their winters.  Part of the goal of our sponsor, the Los Cabos Children’s Foundation, was to educate the local Mexican community that lives and works here year-round about the services and support that the foundations partner agencies offer.  So we were taken by the director of Ligamac, which is an agency that helps children get school supplies and uniforms so they can attend school, to a very poor, newer community on the outskirts of Cabo San Jose.  In recent years, there has been a huge migration to Cabo because of the construction demand.  But families are moving here too quickly for the community infrastructure, so there isn’t enough housing or schools or sewers or roads to handle the influx.  As a result, there are squatter communities popping up in the desert outside of town, where homes are made of plywood and scrap metal, and in some cases are put up the dry riverbeds, where a strong storm can wash away an entire community overnight. 

It was hard for the cast to drive our air-conditioned shiny coach buses into this community, to get out for less than an hour, to walk around, talk with the families, to play with the kids, and to learn a little bit about these people and their situations.  To some it looked so bleak, yet there were small gardens, and homes that were well-cared for, and in the more established community, where most families have been there for a year or more, there are structures of cement with rebar sticking out the top as a sign of the 2^nd floor addition that they’re planning as more money comes in.  That’s what is incredible about the way this community is developing—its not that a big development company comes in and builds a complex, and then the families move into bright, finished suburbia.  It’s one family at a time, building their houses from scraps that the husband brings back from the fancy condo construction site he works on all day, if he’s lucky enough to have found work.  Every house has a water tank, and a truck drives through the community delivering water, house by house.  It isn’t potable, so another truck delivers drinking water.  Schools are overflowing and for many, the nearest one is over an hour’s walk away. 

But as we talked to the women and played with the children in this dry, dusty village, they expressed their appreciation for us coming, and being interested in learning about their situation.  So even though it feels horrible to get off the buses and take pictures—I heard comments about cast members not wanting to treat these people like we were at a zoo- but if we had ignored it altogether by not coming, and instead have only had the more touristy Cabo experience, we wouldn’t be doing the community justice either.  And in visiting the community with one of our beneficiary partners who works with these people every day, it was an honor for us to see what the money raised from our show will benefit.

The irony was that we started the day in this poor, depressed community, and then visited a lush mango farm in the rain where we hurriedly hiked to a waterfall and rode back to the buses in pickup trucks full of mangos, with fresh mango juice dribbling from our chins. We had to rush back to Cabo in order to make our sunset boat cruise out to the famous Cabo arch.  On the boat there was a band and an open bar, and we danced and ate sushi and saw sea lions, and had a wonderful, amazing time… all the while remembering the families we met this morning and how different our lives were from theirs.  It was a day of huge contrasts, and one that this cast will not soon forget.     

Cast B performed 2 back-to-back shows in San Jose Del Cabo, as well as Cabo San Lucas for a combined crowd of nearly 6000 people.  They were amazing!…full of energy, beutiful music, dance, and the very popular, Mexico Medley…An exciting line-up of popular mexican pop songs designed solely for Up with People’s Mexican tour.  Cast B leaves for the Mexico mainland and the city of Tepic…

Cast B has just wrapped up another incredible week on the Baja Peninsula of Mexico.  Tomorrow, the entire cast will board a ferry for the Mainland of Mexico and a city called Tepic.  UWP on Tour will have new posts from Cabo within the next day, so make sure to stay updated on Cast B!  Nos Vemos!

Volunteering in La Paz

Our beneficiary this week (who receives the proceeds from our show) is Mobilize Mankind.  Its an organization started by an American couple who have been living here for five years.  They bring used wheelchairs, that by law cannot be redistributed in the United States, down here to the Baja.  They find the families that need the chairs, and they give them away.  They fit the kids with chairs, and they do continual service, and trade them into new chairs as they grow or their needs change.  They also work with schools to make facilities handicapped accessible, and they have just laid the cornerstone on an amazing playground that is over 90% accessible to wheelchair bound children.  (Most playgrounds in the US are only required to be 10% accessible—you put up one ramp and a spinning wheel and you meet that minimum requirement…) their vision is for kids of all abilities to play together on creative, beautiful equipment that is fun for all.  There is a castle and a pirate ship, water fountains and sprinklers… the designs are incredible.  Our sponsor, the Los Cabos Children’s Foundation, that’s helping support Mobilize Mankind, is bringing us to La Paz to spread awareness of this project and to get the community excited about it.

The cast has also spent a lot of time on an anti-graffiti campaign in the city, painting the baseball stadium where we perform tomorrow, parks, and walls all over town. 

We also managed to squeeze in a little fun: on our first day all together here (Tuesday), we visited the anthropology museum to learn about the history of settlers on the Baja, the cathedral, and ended on the beach to play in the sun.  Coca-cola has been our beverage sponsor this week, and brings coolers of water, iced tea and powerade to our volunteer sites, along with a truck with huge speakers to blast party music while we work.  It feels like Spring Break meets Americorps! Its hilarious, and so much fun. 

La Lluvia

So it never rains in La Paz, except when there’s a hurricane.  When I asked the advance team, who’ve been living here for two months, if we needed a rainy day plan for any of our activities, they laughed… until tropical storm Julio started rolling in yesterday.  Our show was in a baseball stadium, and we built a stage basically on second base.  Because its 110 degrees here everyday, we were worried about our equipment being too hot to function properly.  That turned out to not be a problem at all, since it started to rain right when we started our afternoon rehearsal.  It sprinkled through most of the afternoon, and rained hard enough for us to stop and get offstage for a little while.  The tech team was busy all day… moving tents over speaker towers and wrapping lighting trusses in tarp.  There was a canopy onstage all afternoon over the band.  When the rain got heavy, all the microphones were covered with plastic bags, and the stage was full of gravelly mud from the baseball field.  Thankfully, by some miracle, it cleared up about two hours before our show and was dry through the evening.

Our biggest problem during the show was that the air was steamy and humid, and dancers kept losing their grip because they were so sweaty!

 Ellen Enebo, United States