Up with People in the San Diego Fox News!

Please click on the following headlines to view recent media stories on Up with People in Arizona and California. Thanks!

A message of peace, tolerance
‘Up with People’ returns to Corcoran after 25 years.

Up With People Is Coming To Corcoran, California

Up with People cast arrives in SV to perform

Inside Arizona Business interview with Tommy Spaulding and Bruce Erley
Business Spotlight: Up with People

Up with People returned to the city where it all started 40-years ago. A reunion August 9-11 brought to Tucson more than 1,000 current and former members of Up with People.

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.

One of the best components of Up With People is the community service we provide. It is so rewarding to see the impact that we can make. Yesterday’s CI in San Carlos and Globe was no different. The Cast was divided into half for the morning (excluding those staying behind for workshops) . Half went to San Carlos to work on the Apache Reservation doing Project Pride, and the other half stayed in Globe and worked with the Gila County Special Employment Services doing music and dance and an art project.

Those of us that went to San Carlos were part of what became known as Project Pride. It was essentially a beautification of the downtown business district. So we painted and weeded, and mowed and cleaned the whole area. It was such a transformation in the end. It looked 100% better! What was really cool is that the project is going to be a wonderful catalyst for many more such renovation projects to come. Then we had lunch and did a BTS (or mini show) at San Carlos High School. It was a little frustrating because the Native American culture is such that they don’t show a whole lot of enthusiasm. The cast did beautifully despite the lack of crowd support and I was proud to be in the audience (I am on advance team for this city so I was unable to participate). After the BTS we went to Globe City Park and held a Teen Event for the local youth. It was a chance for us to interact with the youth of Globe, and a chance for the cast to kind of relax a bit. We had food and live music and played some Frisbee.

The group that stayed in Globe worked with a group of disabled adults. They did some song and dance with them and then did a really neat art project. They traced the hands of the clients and their own and then the clients decorated them and signed them and then they interlocked the hands around an image of a globe. It was really neat. The clients (and the cast) loved it. Then they went and had lunch with the clients at a great Mexican Restaurant called Chalo’s. YUMM. After lunch some of them came and joined the BTS others went and painted an old historic steam engine. It looked great when they were done. Then after CI wrap up they too went to the park for the Teen Event. All in all it was a great day! I know for me it was super rewarding. Tomorrow we leave for Sierra Vista, where we will be until Monday.

Well, well…Our first week on the road has already come to an end. We arrived in Tucson last Monday night and were greeted by our host families as we pulled in. This week I stayed with good friends of my parents here in Tucson, the Worcesters. They are also UWP alumni from when my parents both traveled back in the 70’s. Tuesday we meet at Centennial Hall, the University of Arizona auditorium, where we started some training for our middle school community impact program “Stand for Peace.” In the afternoon, we had a guest speaker from the organization SACASA, the Southern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault. We discussed some issues regarding sexual assault and learned what the center does to assist victims and their families in the area. The rest of the afternoon was filled with dance and vocal workshops to prepare for our show.

Wednesday was a CI (community impact) day and I joined a group of 10 students at the AIDS foundation in Tucson. They are a large organization of around 50 employees who offer almost any service you can think of concerning AIDS. We worked on some projects for them filling condom packages with information that goes out primarily to gay bars and clubs in the Tucson area. It was interesting to learn that while most people believe that the number of HIV infected people is deceasing in the US, it is actually at a slight incline. When we returned for the clinic, “Cast C”, the other UWP cast on tour arrived from New Mexico and we did some stage set-up/workshops at Centennial Hall.

Thursday was the first time our cast used our “Stand for Peace” program, which we did at Desert Sky Middle School. The program involves putting 3 UWP students (each usually from a different country) in each class where we lead activities in teamwork, eliminating discrimination, bullying, teaching about different cultures, and many more. We work with the 6th to 8th graders in mostly hands on and discussion activities to teach them to respect others. Our cast then performed a 5 song set “mini show” in the afternoon for the entire school of 800 students in their gym. They had a great response to the show and loved our “stomp” dance that they could perform with us, as we were able to teach them in their classes earlier in the day.

Friday was the BIG DAY as we prepared all day in rehearsals for our show that night. For the first time we put both casts B and C together into one big cast for this performance. This week has been the same week in Tucson as the Up with People reunion, so we had 1200 alumni coming to the show, as well as another 1800 sold out for a total audience of 3000 people. Let me tell you that it was just a bit intimidating walking out onto a stage with that many eyes staring back at you. I spent some time doing cast movement, mic groups, and sang my solo “Ounce of Positive” as well as performed our final song, “We’ll be there.” The crowd was amazing and the show itself lasted about 2 ½ hours.

Saturday we spent most the day at the La Paloma resort where the Up with People reunion was going on…we had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with the founder of UWP, Blanton Belk, and his close friend Raj Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. They shared some incredible stories with our cast and their amazing visions for the future. Raj Gandhi spoke to us of, in his view, the most important issue of the next 20 years…reaching and breaking the barriers between our generation and that of the young Muslim generation. We also heard from Carolyn Lee, an Up with People legend, who told us, among many things to “keep your eye on the ball”. Overall, what an amazing first week on the road! We leave tomorrow for Globe, AZ for 3 days, and then Sierra Vista, AZ for 4 days…then onto San Diego. I’ll keep the blog updated towards the end of that week. If you made it through this all…Congratulations. Thanks for taking the time and please make comments if you wish…

Aug 6th, 2007

As we wake up at 6:45 in the morning on Sunday, we put our clothes on and check around the room for anything we might leave behind. We check our watches and wonder if our friends will be there to see us of. the tension and excitement of the morning is building in us as we are about to make our first travel day to Gallup, New Mexico.

We wrote quick notes to our host families in hopes that it could by some small chance pay them back for our 4 weeks. We put our 44 lb luggage in the trunks and drive away from our first host home. some look back, others look ahead. as we sit in the silence or talk in the last moments, we realize that this is the end of the beginning. The start of UWP is about to truly begin.

We climb out of the care with little drops on our faces, upset to leave behind our temporary moms and dads and brothers and sisters, but excited to experience the road ahead. We tumble our luggage into the compartments and give a last hug, maybe kiss goodbye. Some friends from cast C show up to wish us farewell until we meet again. We clamber onto the bus awaiting our voyage onto what would later seem like an eternity before we are reunited with our sister cast that we love so dearly.

Excitement builds as we roll off. I take the mic, “good morning cast B, next stop, New Mexico”. the last words of my first beginning.

Josh, USA

Finally! Cast Member Profile is now READY!! Have a look and get to know a little more about us =)

August 3rd, 2007

OK!!!! so tonight was cast b first show as most of yall know! tonight was the single most amazing and emotional night of my entire life. Before the show, our staff got us pumped full of energy and made us let out the emotions that were building inside of us for the past 4 weeks.

Everything seemed to explode on stage with every clap and shout and stomp. i was there on stage with my entire family doing what 4 weeks ago we all thought to be impossible. i was sweating and crying with some of the most important people in my life. I don’t cry much at all, but tonight was the time to let my feelings free as if i had caged them long enough. the joy of tonight and the sweat we had all poured into this night came rushing out of me onto my already sweat soaked face. I love every single one of my cast mates, they are my brothers and sisters.

We have conquered diversity, we have overcome inabilities, we have settled disputes, and we have learned that through each other we have strength, we have understanding, and we have love. I learned more about myself tonight then i ever have. i can dance, i can sing, i can feel, I can cry, I can love, I can grow close to 60 people that i never knew 4 weeks ago, and now that all of this has happened to us, we can now call ourselves UPPIES!

I love you all, tonight was the best night of my life!

Josh, USA

Our first Regional Learning Day was in Boulder, a city located north of Denver, a great town, with clean streets and beautiful buildings.

We did a scavenger hunt in Denver, and the clues lead us to nice places such as the University of Colorado, the famous band shell, and the public library. We made a stop on the creek to freshen up, which was a little different for me, because in Brazil we can’t go in rivers inside cities. They are usually polluted, but this one was very clean. From almost every place in Boulder you can see the mountains!


We didn’t have regional learning in Denver, where Up with People headquarters is located, because we all did our “Personals Regional Learning” in Denver Downtown already. So UWP staff decided to take us to Boulder, for a new experience. Thanks for the thought! We had an amazing day at Boulder!

Rafael, Brazil

CI – For all of you who have little impression about Up with People, CI is the acronym for Community Impact. Community Impact is the day where we do volunteer work at different places where help is needed. One day is a very shot amount of time, and sometimes the help we give isn’t as big as we want, but for sure we all changed ourselves every time we do CI!
During our CI Day in Denver, one of the CI facility was Inner City Health Center, a Clinic determined to provide health services for whom can’t afford a health insurance.

They are doing a great job, the place is very clean, organized and the employees seem to be happy to work there. We saw some children playing around before being attended, they were a little afraid of us, because there were so many of us there!

Our job was to make two new gardens and paint some rooms; therefore we split in 3 groups, one for front garden, one for painting and the other for back garden.

This kind of clinic is not very common in Brazil, because we have a huge amount of people who don’t have health insurance. Usually in Brazil, this kind of clinic is related with church or some big company that have a lot of employees living near the clinic.
A big thank you for the Inner City Health Center for having us, and to Newborn Hope who organized the CI for us.

Rafael, Brazil