Momentous Moments in Monterrey, Mexico!!

Hello all!

First week in Mexico! Woo hoo! So many things have happened in this past week that, unfortunately, this will be another long post, so bear with me as I guide across the winding landscape that is my memory of this past week.

We left Brenham, Texas bright and early Monday morning – 7:30 a.m. The drive itself to the border was about five hours, but we needed to allow for our border crossing time (which we didn’t know how long that was going to take), and then also the couple hour drive from the border to Monterrey. The drive to the border was uneventful, as always. We arrived in the border town Laredo (I believe) and unloaded ourselves from the bus. Our plan was to walk across the border and get onto another bus, but we were prepared for an entire cast search. Thankfully, however, the entire cast (all 100+ of us) made through customs and such in about two hours – not bad! After that, we loaded up onto our new buses, made a pit stop to load another truck with our excess luggage (since these new buses had half the cargo space as our American buses), and then we were on our way to Monterrey. When we hopped onto the other side of the border, I could immediately feel the difference between the two countries – just that feeling you get from your surroundings. It wasn’t an eerie feeling or anything, just a feeling of foreignness. Once we got onto the road to Monterrey, I took advantage of our comfortable seats and fell asleep for a while. When I woke up about an hour later, I did a double-take when I looked out the window – we were surrounded by mountains! I knew that the Rocky Mountains extended all the way from Canada into Mexico, but I didn’t realize they extended eastward. But these mountains, too, seemed alien compared to the Rockies in Colorado. These mountains had a beginning and an end, as opposed to the ever-stretching Rockies. I later learned that “Monterrey” means “king of mountain”, and for good reason. Even though it was dark, I could see that the city was surrounded by gorgeous, towering mountains. Beautiful. It took us about a half hour to tour through the city and arrived at our allocation point, which was also the theatre we would be performing at. We stepped off to a large welcoming of people, ranging from alumni to volunteers to news crews, etc. It was crazy! We all went inside and grabbed our allocation sheets. After, we watched dancers perform traditional Mexican numbers, which was cool, and then we went to find our host families. Mine, sadly, did not show up, so I was re-allocated to another family, and became hosted with Brandon from Colorado, and Gift from Thailand. Both have been great to hang out with! I left with my host brother Julio and went back to their home to meet the rest of the family. Besides Julio’s parents, he also has a sister named Ale, short for Alejandra. Both are in the college here in Monterrey, and both speak English very well, which makes life a lot easier for me. Their parents speak a bit of English, but its still very broken and haphazard. Even though it’s a lot better than my Spanish, it’s still difficult to communicate, which is why it’s great to have Julio and Ale. We all went out to dinner at Sirloin Stockade, which I hadn’t eaten at in a long time. However, the name was the only thing I recognized because all the food inside was Mexican, save a few American dishes. This was fine by me because I got a chance to sample a bunch of different Mexican dishes, buffet-style. They were all pretty good, too. A bit spicy, but good. After dinner, we went back and went to bed.

Tuesday was our first full day in Monterrey, and it was also our first CI day there. I was allocated to the DIF community impact project along with five others. We rode in a van with a rep from DIF to the site on the other side of the city, about forty-five minutes away. After a few wrong turns and a stop to pick up supplies, we arrived and set out to clean up the area that had become overgrown with weeds, grass, and trash. The weeds and grass were so rooted into the ground that we had to use pick-axes to rake them out of the ground before using a hoe to finish the job, and then a rake to pile it all together. It was hard work, let me tell you. We also had to had to paint the buildings that had become overridden with graffiti, which ended up being the easy job, especially when the sun reached high in the sky. Some different reps from local media came to our site in the morning, too, and Paul did a T.V. interview completely in Spanish – it was pretty cool. We broke for lunch at about 1:30, and had a home-cooked, authentic Mexican meal – gorditas. Mmmm. After lunch, we went back to work on the different stuff to do, and then left for wrap-up at about 4 p.m.

Wednesday started off well -- we have a cast appreciation book that gets passed around between people of the cast, someone bequething it to someone else they appreciate, continuing around the cast. Wednesday morning, durning our opening meeting, it was passed onto me. I took a picture of what it said so that you may all read its virbous flattery. Needless to say, it was nice to receive it. Wednesday was also our second day CI of the week, and I went back to the same DIF site with about four other cast members. We had the same driver to the site, a DIF rep named Oscar who knew only a few words in English. We had, just like the day before, a castmember with us who could speak Spanish, but it was fun to talk with Oscar and work on our Spanish while he worked on our English. When we arrived at DIF, we continued cleaning up the surrounding area of garbage and weeds. After lunch of some delicious gorditas and tuna macaroni salad, we worked on a mural to represent our work together. It turned out pretty nice – we had our Viva la Gente/Up with People star with the DIF logo, trimmed with the nations flags who worked on the project, Mexico’s in the center. It was pretty cool, especially in the hot afternoon sun, which avoided by being inside. After we said goodbye to all the children and volunteers at DIF, we went back to our wrap-up location. We did a small discussion of our CI stuff, but then moved into a discussion of high-performance teams. This discussion was facilitated through an activity that I and a few others participated in while the rest of the cast observed. Basically, the activity put us in a time crunch situation that requires efficiency and teamwork. We all learned the value of trusting the people in your team, putting the pride of your team ahead of your own, communicating efficiently and honestly, and willingness to try new ideas/think outside the box. It was a great experience to be a part of, one that I don’t really want to spoil by walking through what exactly happened. Suffice it to say, I learn a lot by participating. After this activity, we met up with our host families and went home for the day.

Thursday brought our last CI day of the week, but I was signed out of CI to do a BTS mini show on the college campus we had been working at. The twenty of us that were signed out for the mini show had rehearsal in the morning, and then made our way to a courtyard to block the show on our stage, which was a bunch of risers set up on the grass in front of the courtyard. We blocked the show and then changed into our costumes, which we were all sad to do since it was about 95 degrees outside with absolutely no shade. It is hot normally while doing a mini show, but this was just crazy. We started our BTS off just like normal with “Keep the Beat,” but three-quarters through the song the riser I was on dropped about three inches down, tilting all weird and wobbling. I, of course, moseyed my way off the riser and advised people around me to do the same, all while trying to keep my stage face and get someone from the staff to come fix it before it collapsed and some got hurt. Yeah. Fun :) After the second song in the BTS, someone had fixed the stage, but sweat had made its way into my eye, and I couldn’t really wipe it out. More fun :) But we made it through the mini show, and people really seemed to enjoy it, which was reassuring. Afterwards, our admissions team took a bunch of applications, did some interviews, etc. while I was able to relax a bit in the shade and be on call in case they needed help with interviews. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon. After we finished all that stuff, we all came back to our wrap-up location, discussed our three days of CI, and did a general wrap-up of the day. After that, we had a half hour break for a bite to eat and to relax a bit before a panel came to talk to us at 6:30. When they arrived, they all talked about the different things they did after Up with People, and how they applied what they learned in the program to their lives after. It was really cool to listen to, and the time seemed to go by fast.

Friday was our regional learning day in Monterrey, and we had a tight schedule that took us around to different parts of the city. I started off in the Macroplaza, which is either the largest or near the largest in the world. Really cool to see! I definitely took a lot of pictures :) After that, my group took a boat ride down a canal, which took us through a bunch of cool different things in Monterrey. After this, went to an old ironworks factory that had been recently converted into a science museum. It has a lift that takes you all the way to the top where you get a great panoramic view of the city. Unfortunately it was a bit cloudy, so we couldn’t get a very good view of the mountains surrounding Monterrey, but it still was really cool to look at the entire city from that point. After this, we grabbed a quick lunch as we walked over to a local attraction, roughly translated “Dialogue in the Darkness.” Basically, it was a blind experience. We were taken through this activity in groups of about 8 people or so, one of which who could speak Spanish since our guides could only speak Spanish. It took about an hour. It is called a “Dialogue in the Darkness” because you are walking through many different rooms that are in complete darkness. Absolutely no light. We had a walking stick to use to guide ourselves, and of course our guide, but that was it. All we had besides that were our other four senses. We went through a nature room, a grocery store room, a dockside room, a street room, and finally a coffee shop room where we could actually buy things to drink from the worker. It was there we found out that our guide was actually blind, and so were all of the other people we met throughout the tour inside. When we paid for our drinks, they got us change without any help. They were completely self-sufficient inside. When we reached the end and stepped back into the light, we were finally able to visually meet our guide. She told us that she lost her vision about twenty years ago to glaucoma, but she only wishes she could have her sight back so that she could see her children and now her grandchildren. It was such an amazing experience, one that I wish we could have continued on beyond just an hour. It was doubly interesting because we have a blind girl in our cast – Jessica Rojas – and I think this experience really helped us to all “see” the world through her eyes. Definitely very cool. After the blind experience, we all went to another DIF center that works with displaced children. All of the children were ones taken from their homes because of the abusive situations they had all been in while legal action was pending. Some of the children themselves had not been abused (they were just in an abusive home), but others had been abused, both physically and sexually. Their ages ranged anywhere from newborns to eighteen year olds. Absolutely crushing to hear their stories. I found it interesting, however, to find that despite being in a different country there were the same sad things happening. The United States had its own major problem with domestic abuse, something I learned a bit about while working at the Woodbury County Court House. I found it interesting that while culturally the United States and Mexico are quite different, we are linked by this one tragic sadness – a common pain between us. No matter where you’re from, hurt people hurt people. Children who had no doubt grown up with abuse in their families are now passing the terrible legacy to their children. A vicious circle of pain. Our task in visiting this center was to hang out with the children there. All of the ones there were those who didn’t have relatives to visit over the holiday week (the week after Holy Week is also considered part of vacation for school and sometimes work). These were the children who normally have no stories to tell to the other children when they return from vacation. But this time they did have a story – they got to hang out with Viva la Gente! We played games, tossed a Frisbee around, and kicked a soccer ball back and forth. Our time together went by very fast, and before we knew it, we were saying goodbye and giving warm hugs. We returned to the university we’ve been operating out of all week, and dropped off some people who were to be picked up by their host families. The rest of us took a ride out to a host family’s weekend home for a party and barbeque. We hung out with host families and alumni and members of our cast all night long, enjoying great food and even better music. It was a great time, a good culmination of a great day!

Today was host family day here in Monterrey, which meant I was able to sleep in until about 10:30 – amazing! After that, and some breakfast, Brandon, Gift, and myself joined our host mom and went to a mall to do some shopping and looking around. After that, Brandon and I had to go to the theatre we’ll be performing at and help set up the stage. We’re doing it the day before the show because tomorrow we’re putting on two performances – one in the afternoon and one in the evening. This means that the morning will be spent rehearsing, which means that we had to have the stage ready first thing. No morning set up. So we set up the stage quickly and efficiently, and were able to leave at about six. After that, Brandon and I went back to our host family’s home and grilled out on the beautiful Saturday evening.

Tomorrow is show day, and as I mentioned earlier it is a double show day – as all show days will be in Mexico. I’ve been told that one show has pretty much sold out and the other one is nearly there as well. Needless to say, we’re all a bit nervous, but definitely excited, too. It is our first show in Mexico! And Viva la Gente is such a big deal to many people in Mexico. And, the next cast (B08) will be traveling through Mexico, too, so we’re setting the tone for their tour as well. If we do well, they will have a receptive tour. If we don’t, well… So. No pressure, right? It’s going to be a long day tomorrow. With rehearsal all morning long, leading into a show at 4 p.m., which will last until about 6:30; then we’ll eat quickly while doing interviews and admissions stuff for that show. After that we have another show at 8 p.m. which admissions, interviews, and strike to follow. Where the show doesn’t get done until about 10:30, we won’t get out until about 12:30, and then we still have to go home and pack so that we’re ready to be on the bus later that morning for our travel day to Mexico City. And the bus leaves at 6:30 a.m. Fun fun fun!!! Yes. A bit of sarcasm. I’m sure you heard it. But, it’s all pretty exciting, too.

Until my next post!

Dan