Our facility for the week was Buena High School, the only high school in Sierra Vista and many kids here have a military family background. I think it is a gorgeous school, itlooks like a theme park as Hanna said, and there are many trophies by the Wall of Honor. I had some trouble finding the restrooms without my glasses, as all of them were numbered to a 4-digit code like a classroom!

We had a Community Impact Day in Sierra Vista! This is soooo exciting because I am going to a Juvenile Delinquency Center to interact with the teenagers there. Have long heard of JDC in the US, and I didn’t agree with Hector when he tried to explain to us that it is like a jail for young offenders. It is truly more like an education center than a detention center to me. These youth, aging between 8 to 17, are staying here from 2 weeks to some a year for burglaries, assaults, and other crimes. They have to stay in cells and there are 2 teachers here, teaching them a lot about citizenship and basics. We were there to give them a sense of peer fun and global citizenship awareness.

At the beginning everything was a little reserved, we talked a little about what is UWP and where we are from. I tried to break the ice and asked them where is China, a little Mexican boy shouted ‘the other side of the world!’ after a small silence. They asked Benjamine about the language in Belgium and asked Jörn about his Chinese T-shirt bought in Thailand. Glad to see the students started to laugh.

Then we introduced the stomp section in our show and brought them to the beats and finally to their feet. After half an hour we nearly completed the full first section of the show and I am so proud of the team!!!

Then we enjoyed the Cross the Line game, we talked about lying to a friend, marrying someone from another culture, HIV/AIDs, death penalty, freedom of speech, and they were all really interesting. I remember there was one like:

Would you kill a butterfly to win a one-week trip to Hawaii?

Would you kill a dog?

I knew about the pet culture in the states and I respect their connection with pet animals. So it was kind of a surprise how our opinions were diversified, regardless of our origins. Some people would choose to kill, just because a cat scratched him.
I switched when it turned into a cat because I really heard it’s not a pleasant and easy job to kill a cat, and I don’t want to go to Hawaii anyway. And it was really interesting to hear one of the youth mentioned we killed one of the 9 lives of a cat.

If you have the power to end world hunger by killing a random innocent person, would you do it?

It actually struck me that many of us chose not to. My answer was yes, since there are so many people dying for this great cause, with the greatest regret at their deaths that they are not able to put an end to it. It would be a great favor to these great fighters. And I am sure they would be willing to die for such a great cause, since many of us actually agreed we would be willing to sacrifice our own lives for it. On the other hand, there are thousands dying out of hunger each single day. If I could kill one person to save those millions, I simply kill less. It really is not smart nor benevolent to see millions die at the expense of your own cowardliness.

Then it started to get complicated into sort of a philosophy problem:

Would you kill 10, 50, 500, 5000, or 50000…?

I stood still at my yes side, but got a little frustrated at how the question was phrased. I believe there are thousands of people working at reducing world hunger, all good people, and they are DYING for it, without being able to put an end to it. So as long as it’s a measurable number this is a worthy thing to do, but there should not be a measure of how many people we are willing to sacrifice.

It was so interesting to discuss it with youths from a JDC, I was so glad to see that each one of them shared something with the whole group. And they were so respectful and insightful just as a normal group that I believe they will be great people once released. But of course there are times when they revealed some unusual thoughts, like one of them mentioned he would never marry because he has seen how wives treat their husbands, and another mentioned he would do whatever to go out of Arizona because he had stayed here for his whole life.

Then we had some more discussion on our home countries, I talked something about the Great Wall, and taught a greeting in Chinese. They are such wonderful group of people, and showed their passion for life, one of them also came to Matt for beat-box tricks. I had so much fun with them and got more hope that they can help make the world a better place.

Then in the afternoon I went to an elementary school to promote our show. They are such a talented and energetic group of kids, that they guessed I was from China at first sight, and one of them even named ‘ Sweet Chicken’ or something as a Chinese dish. I love this audience; they are all prospective UWP kids. Our promotion team was really smart to have this coloring contest in elementary schools, and the winners would get a free ticket as a prize.

At about 3 o’clock we went to The Mall at Sierra Vista, the only Mall in the city. We performed 2 mini shows and I stood at a table trying to sell our show tomorrow. We realized how important it is for the cast to promote the Up with People show.

I thought about going to Mexico on our free day, but host mom said our advance team actually told them not to take us across the border because some people may not be able to come back into the US because of their Visas.

Seems like border crossing is a big issue here. We talked about immigration, how the Apache tribe got angry and tried to drive whites out of the country. I had a debate with the host family since I see it the other way around. It was the white people who grew aggressive and ungrateful and even cruel at the beginning, while the Indians had a good reason to be unsatisfied. Then went to the borderless world and the Taiwan issue, and the Tian’an men incident at the transformation period. I gain insight every time talking with different people and truly developed my own understanding on it as well.

I hope tomorrow’s show will be another great success.