December 16, 2009 came all too fast. Today the members of Cast B 2009 arrived at our last facility, listened to our last morning meeting, ate our last Swedish sandwiches, and endured many more “lasts” that will stick with us forever.

December 16, 2009 was our last full day together as Cast B 2009.

When we started this adventure 6 months ago, we never imagined how fast this adventure would go.

We started off our day at a student nation house in Uppsala. After an hour-long morning meeting full of laughs and tears, we had a meeting with Eva, a representative from Vattanfall who is also an Up With People alumnus and organized this entire tour. She shared with us her initial plans to bring Up With People to Europe to help commemorate Vattanfall’s centennial celebration.

We were happy to hear that we far exceed her expectations!

Then we had a cast meeting with our amazing cast manager, Jen Moody. Our respect, love, admiration and appreciation for this amazing woman grew minute by minute. We were so blessed to have shared this journey with her.

We then traveled back through time as members of our cast set up country stations full of memories of our tour. We remembered our month of staging and our first experiences as a cast. We laughed at the empty rolls of toilet paper scattered on tables as we walked passed the México station. And we sang the Happy Birthday song to ourselves in Swedish, German, Danish, Polish, and Finnish as we walked through the Europe station. Each station was complete with pictures representing that time period. Many tears were shed and smiles shared.

We came together as a group with unlit candles and stood in a circle. One by one, we lit the candle of someone in that group who had inspired us. It was hard to choose just one person as we all have been an inspiration to one another.

Then it was time to get ready for our banquet! In colors of red, black and white, we sat and shared in more pictures and memories. We cried as we watched photos sent from loved ones back home. We ate a wonderful dinner and didn’t have to wait 30 minutes for seconds (thus was the norm for an Up With People meal)! And we danced the night away and snapped picture after picture.

When it was time to leave, everyone seemed to move slower than usual. We weren’t tired by any means. We knew that once we left with that host family, drove away in that taxi, or got on that bus, our Up With People adventure would come to an end.

Our cast connected in such a special way. Never before has a cast experienced what we experienced. We performed 47 shows in 6 months. We traveled to 7 different countries. We successfully completed a corporate tour.  Because of that connection, we know that our adventure is not over. We will all continue to live an Up With People life. We will continue to give and share with others in our community. We will continue to inspire and bring hope around the world. And we will always sing our song wherever we go.

We had a moment just a moment. That will last beyond a dream, beyond a life time. We are the lucky ones. Some people never get to do all we got to do. Now and forever.

Below are some memories from our banquet. Enjoy!

“When our cast manager, Jen Moody, read her letter from home.” – Deng Tiancheng, China

“Just us.” – Drew Thompson, USA

“Seeing messages from our families!” – Timothy Lewis, USA

“When they announced it was our last song and everyone freaked out because we all knew the time we had left was pretty much over.  Not my favorite at all but it gave me a feeling unlike any feeling I’ve ever had before. I’ll never forget it. Thank you Cast B for giving me that feeling.” – Kyle Stugelmayer, USA

“The “Letter to Home” put everything I am feeling into words and inspired me to remember that this has been an experience for my parents and family too.” -Aubrey Finkelstein, USA

“Dancing together for the last time…” – Lima Guggiari, Switzerland

“For me it was seeing the slideshow of pictures from home. It reminded me of the first green room we had in Denver when our parents sent pictures to tell us “Good Luck” for the first show….what a great way to end the semester, with picturse from home saying they are ready to welcome us with open arms…” – Annie Matthews, USA

“Almost lighting my graduation certificate on fire.” – Emilie Gladback, USA

“How everyone’s napkins kept lighting on fire and people rushed to put them out!” – Caitlin Stroup, USA

“Going back in time and seeing how much we did… there is so much to be proud of!” – Willemijn Van Eldik, The Netherlands

“Realizing just how darn much I’ll miss everyone… that proves how incredible this semester has been, and how much you all mean to me.” – Tinna Boman, Sweden

“The moment our last song ended and we did everything we could to not let go.”  - Sarah Yakich, USA

As a part of every internship throughout the semester, you are asked to finish off your six week experience with a project. The projects have varied from a song and dance to leading a workshop. The project is totally up to the intern and what they have learned from the internship, which is the ultimate reason for the project. Because every intern is at a different level in the given field, the projects have varied. As the current dance intern, previous dance intern projects stood out most in my mind. Once I was announced as a the final dance intern in Kolding, Denmark, the project ideas began to flow. In the end, the production intern, Lynsie Haley (USA), and I decided to team up and create a “love medley”.

Our project is a collection of songs that will take the audience through a typical love story. Every girl knows that when she finds that one special person, it almost seems too good to be true. Our love story starts in a similar fashion with a song from the movie, Ella Enchanted. “It’s Not Just Make Believe” talks about how our Love Girl cannot believe her new found love is real.

Next our Love Girl is ready to take her relationship to the next level and hear wedding bells in the future. The next song, “A Night to Remember” from High School Musical 3, the girls are getting dressed up to make sure that the leave lasting impressions on all the guys. On the other hand, the guys are hating every moment of putting on tuxedos.

Finally the night we have all been waiting for! The girls look pretty, the guys are styling, and our love girl is anticipating the BIG question. With the song “Serious” from Legally Blonde: The Musical, our Love Girl’s poor heart is ripped apart when her Love Guy decides to do the opposite of what she was hoping for: he breaks up with her instead of getting down on one knee.

Months after going home and having plenty of time to think about the past six months, our Love Guy realizes that he made the worst mistake of his life and now he needs to win back his one true love. He entrusts the famous boy band, N*Sync to help him express his feelings with the song, “I Want You Back”.

And you’ll never guess what happens next (or maybe you already have!). Our Love Guy, after begging and pleading, decides to pop the question. Our Love Girl’s emotions are running wild and the new couple decides to hold an Up With People. While “It’s Your Wedding Day” from the broadway play, The Wedding Singer, plays in the background, our new couple is presented to their family and friends.

The final song and curtain call is “I’ll Be There For You”, the theme song from the popular television show, Friends. This song reminds me of Cast B 2009 and all of the amazing memories we have shared over the last six months.

I have had so much fun working on this intern project and it would not have been possible without the help of many people. Our lighting intern, Aubrey (USA),  created a lighting concept for my project. Niels (The Netherlands), is the video intern and  helped Lynsie and I to make the songs flow together with clips of the medley cast practicing their acting skills. Michael (USA), the sound intern, uses his flawless mixing skills to make sure that the sound was perfect. Another huge thank you goes out to all of the cast members who graciously lent themselves to assist me with my project. And of course, I cannot forget to thank Paul (USA), Cast B 2009′s Dance Captain, for all of his support and guidance. Thanks everyone!

My project performs tomorrow and I know that it will be a huge success!

Remember reading about Cast B 2009′s legacy project? You can donate to the Red Rhino Orphanage by clicking the button below!

As Cast B 2009 approaches the end of our amazing journey –  instead of pumping the brakes on our contributions to the world – we are using the momentum from the semester to finish strong. It is a tradition in Up With People that each cast will rally behind a cause or organization and work to the best of our ability, utilizing all resources to lend a helping hand. As a cast, we have selected to support the Red Rhino Orphanage Project in Kenya. The mission of the Red Rhino Orphanage Project (RROP) is to house and educate some of the most desperate and unfortunate children in Kenya, enabling them to become contributing members of society and leaders of the next generation. We’ve sung so much about how important it is to appreciate the one to one connections and we are using that idea with the realization that it truly does take a whole village to raise a child to empower our host families, alumni and friends to contribute financially as well. Over the course of the past few months, we’ve visited many countries and somewhere in the bottom of many of the suitcases we travel with are left over Pesos, Dollars and Kronors.   We’re collecting donations in all currencies to create a “Block of Bills”.  A map was created that highlights our route around the world and using square blocks, each of which represents 20 bills, we are shading in the blocks depending on how many bills we get.  The goal is to fill as many blocks as we can.  Set numbers are useful in reaching a goal, true enough; however, we didn’t want to place any limitations on what we can achieve together.  Even though it is the end of the semester for us, we see many benefits in supporting an organization like RROP. For example, we are raising awareness about the living situation of some children in Kenya by promoting this cause.   What is more, we ourselves are being educated every step of the way.  Additionally, financial contributions help maintain the vitality of a program that is in it’s infancy, but is constantly gaining more and more momentum.  It is a way for us to search within ourselves and motivates us to appreciate what we have. We want to everything in our power to make the same opportunities available for someone else. In addition to financial contributions, we are also constructing a “chain of love”  Each time a donation is made, a message is written on a color-coded paper and added to a chain of inspiring messages. Finally, it broadens our reach to a place where an Up With People cast has not physically touched.   As a cast, we realize that seeds planted today make a huge difference in shaping the world in which we live. As a final push this week, we are making available a place to donate online and continuing to measure our progress.  For more information on the Red Rhino Orphanage Project, please visit www.rrop.org. You will also be able to help donate to this great cause! A Paypal link will be available soon!

I must first say that this is breaking one of the Man Laws but I’ll make an exception. Man Law overruled. Our travel day from Hamburg, Germany to Odense, Denmark was on of the greatest times on this tour. Us men traveled on a luxury bus (we sat at tables!). It was a five-hour bus ride of male bonding (in the company of a few ladies). We arrived in Odense, Denmark at 2:30 p.m. and our music coordinator, Laura Lynn, came on our bus and told us that we had to practice Winter Medley – a compilation of holiday songs for our show – for a guest speaker arriving soon in Odense.

Meanwhile, our sneaky girls were making their way into our allocation facility.

While we were practicing hard for our awesome performance, the ladies were loading our luggage into the facility. When we finally got off our bus and made our way into the facility, we were met by our screaming and cheering Cast B 2009 ladies. They were holding up their cameras like they were paparazzi. Huge smiles appeared on our faces.

The first thing that came to my mind was, “Laura Lynn has totally killing time!

Everyone took their assigned seats with guys in the front and girls in the back. We had no idea was going to happen next.

The ladies had come together and created MAD: Male Appreciation Day. In fact, the appreciation continued throughout Odense. They organized an appreciation show for us, showed us a video about why they loved their Cast B 2009 guys, and created the Windsor Awards. The Windsor Awards are  awards in the form of ties (hence the name “Windsor”) and are specifically catered to each guy in our cast.

I got the “Basically” Windsor Award. Apparently I use that word a lot. I’m trying to get better. Basically.

Then they put us on the spot and asked some of us any questions – and I mean any questions – that they had about what is really going on in our minds.

It was very informative!

As the ceremony drew to a close, the ladies stood up and sang their own rendition of “Up With People” entitled “Up With Boys”.

We responded by doing the Spartan war cry from the movie, 300, in appreciation for MAD.

It was a great MAD day!

While in Berlin, Germany Cast B had the awesome opportunity to participate in Regional Learning tours throughout the city. Berlin was by far the most historical city that Cast B has traveled to. We were all so happy to have some time to tour the city and see historical sites that many of us had only ever seen on TV.

We were broken up into groups and tour guides showed us important places in the city. We saw the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, and the hotel at which Michael Jackson held his baby, Blanket, out of the window! The tour was filled with all of us asking questions and taking tons of pictures.

Throughout the day I saw many things that were thought-provoking, yet two sites stand out much more than others. The first was a memorial for  all of the Europeans killed during the Holocaust. It was made up of cement blocks of various sizes lined up on a city block. The blocks are only about waist high at the beginning then grew to be higher than 7 feet and at the end faded all the way into the ground. The tour guide told us to walk through the memorial and we discussed our ideas of what the memorial represented at the end.  At the end of the memorial, our tour guide told us that the artist wanted to leave the idea behind the memorial up to interpretation of the viewer. Walking through the site was very moving for me. Although I was walking through with my entire tour group, I still felt like it was uniquely my individual experience. A calm feeling swept over me and all I could think about was the people that lived through the Holocaust and how they had to be as strong and tough as these blocks. I also thought about the people that did not survive the Holocaust. Their lives were like the trees that lined the street entering the memorial site. The trees faced the blocks as if they were walking in unison, living, moving trees…turning into stone at the beginning of the site then rising up being pushed forward through horrific events that are unimaginable…then the blocks slowly shrinking, smaller, and smaller, and even smaller until the blocks were simply squares inside of the sidewalk. Even though the blocks became smaller, they never disappear completely. To me this symbolized how the Holocaust is a permanent fixture in the world’s history. This tragedy can not be covered up or erased. We can not forget. We can only learn from it.

An interesting tidbit that the tour guide explained to us is that within 24 hours of the memorial being built, a graffiti swastika was painted on a block. After this a company that built gas chambers for concentration camps during World War II donated a chemical coating that would make the memorial graffiti proof. Now even if graffiti is painted on the blocks, a person can simply wipe it off.

The second part of the tour was visiting the Berlin Wall. Our tour guide was very passionate about Berlin’s history and he gave us a lot of information about East and West Berlin and the Death Zone that was between it. It was amazing to be standing and touching something so historical; a wall that was literally built overnight to separate a group of people who were previously neighbors.

It has been about 2 weeks since I completed my public relations internship in Kolding, Denmark, allowing me time to reflect on my experience. Also known as advance team work, this internship is open to anyone in our cast and allows that cast member to learn what it takes to prepare a city for Up With People’s arrival. Though I had to be away from my cast for about 2 weeks, I gained a lot of marketing knowledge that will help me in the future.

With every UWP tour, the PR staff members travel ahead of the cast to prepare upcoming cities. This advance team does everything; from finding host families and locations for meetings, to setting up the show facility and organizing community service activities. The opportunity to work with the advance team jumped out at me. Advance work is an amazing way to get involved with all aspects of UWP including admissions, education, the show, and is a great way to connect with the local community.

While the cast was touring both Poland and Germany, myself and Wei (China), the other selected intern, journeyed to beautiful Kolding, Denmark to meet with the advance team to prepare the city. Compared to every other city in our European tour, Kolding was going to be very different.

We have been partnering with Vattenfall, the leading energy company in Scandinavia. 2009 marks their 100^th year of existence and we have been helping them celebrate their centennial events. However, our week in Kolding was to be the first and only week of our European tour without any Vattanfall events. This created a unique opportunity for the advance team and me to incorporate more cast-involved activities.

I have nothing but great things to say about Kolding, Denmark. First, Wei and I had a great staff member to work with: Cheryssa Jensen (USA). Next comes our sponsors and host family for the week, UWP alumni Brad and Lene. They provided an unlimited amount of support to Cheryssa, Wei and I. Thank you Cheryssa, Brad and Lene for helping to make my advance work experience a memorable one!

What does a typical day hold for an advance team member? First, no day is typical. Every day holds something new. Our primary goal is to find host families for the cast. Many e-mails were sent to and contacts made with local clubs and organizations introducing the greatopportunity to host one of our 80 students from 22 different countries. My family hosted UWP students in the past and it is such a great chance to pass on one’s own culture and traditions to young adults from across the world.

Our favorite part of every day was meet with the people of Kolding who were able to help us accomplish our goals. Within the first days of our arrival, we were in newspapers and on local television stations. How many people can say they’ve been on television in Denmark?

To me, the best part of being on an advance team is the additional time spent in the city. I loved taking Hayden, my host dog, for walks during the week. I also went swimming in Denmark! My host family was amazing. Brad was a huge Iowa Hawkeyes fan as well as a fan of college football in general. I felt right at home watching football with him. I also ate a typical Danish Christmas dinner complete with raw salmon and pickled herring with curry sauce.

I thought I was having a good time until the cast arrived. It was so great to see them again! Our week in Kolding was almost entirely devoted toward bonding as a cast. We participated in some great community service activities and had fun during Home Team Olympics. Home teams are small groups of cast members and 1-2 staff members. They are meant to be a mini-support team within the cast. Home Team Olympics are a series of fun games between the groups. We enjoyed a day where we watched movies and snacked on junk food

What a great week! Being part of an advance team was a great experience and I feel so fortunate to have worked with a great team!

Hej Hej from Varberg, Sweden! “Hej” (pronounced like “hay”) means hello in Swedish! We are back in Sweden and we couldn’t be more excited about it! We have returned to the land of red cottages, the cheese slicer, and of course, fika!

Today Shelsea (USA), one of our awesome education interns, led a great workshop on bucket lists. Do you have a bucket list? Do you know what a bucket list is?  A bucket list is a list of things that one wishes to accomplish in a lifetime. You may be familiar with this concept if you saw the movie The Bucket List (2008) with Jack Nicholas and Morgan Freeman. Shelsea asked Cast B 2009 to write down people and things that inspire us. I wrote that things like music, writing, miracles, and laughter inspire me. The people that inspire me include my family, my niece and nephew, and our Up With People cast manager, Jen Moody.

Shelsea explained how one determines his or her values. Questions such as “How do you spend your time?” and “What do you spend your money on?” can all be attributes as to what one’s values are. She then explained that there can be seven areas of life for which one can make a bucket list: spiritual, mental, physical, social, work/service, financial, and familial (family). We all took a few minutes to write down a few goals for each area.  Here are some things that Cast B 2009 put on their bucket list.

1. I want to be able to watch a sunset from a lighthouse. (Annie Matthews, USA)
2. I want to publish a book. (Megan Luebke, USA)
3. I want to have a job that I am passionate about, and to have a family. (Nolwen Parizot, France)
4. I want to visit people that I met through Up With People, meet their families, and experience their culture. (Andy, Mexico)
5. I want to visit every continent. (Phil Woods, USA)
6. I want to do volunteer work on every continent for at least one month. (Kyle Stugelmayer, USA)
7. I want to learn how to sail a ship. (Marek Hlavac, Czech Republic)
8. I want to be a successful businesswoman. (Daniela, Mexico)
9. I want to have a family. (Sarah Yakich, USA)
10. I want to visit every single pyramid in the world. (Anthony Anaya-Gorman, Navajo Nation)
11. I want to become the best teacher I can be and educate the leaders of tomorrow (Lynsie Haley, USA).
12. I want to be successful with a happy family. (Michael Worcestor, USA)
13. I want to visit the Seven Wonders of the World. (Kelsey Kiernan, USA)
14. I want to become a famous singer. (Lima Guigarri, Switzerland)
15. I want to be my own best friend. (Caroline Andersson, Sweden)
16. I want to be trilingual in English, Spanish and Mandarin. (Keira Holt, USA)
17. I want to own a dance school. (Jochien Vandenbussche, Belgium)
18. I want to be a wonderful mother. (Rachel Velasquez, USA)
19. I want to be a humanitarian. (Leslie Kleiman, USA)
20. I want to go on tour with my own band. (Tinna Boman, Sweden)
21. I want to learn a foreign language, and inspire youth in other countries. (Cecilia Butler, USA)
22. I want to travel to Slovenia. (Rachel Hansen, USA)
23. I want to swim with manatees. (Enrique Lara, Mexico)
24. I want travel and complete a humanitarian project. (Aude Goudereault, Canada)
25. I want to feel inspiration every day. (Yume Kuchiki, Japan)
26. I want to have my own bakery in Luxembourg. (Wei Jiang, China)
27. I want to design and build my green and energy-sustainable house. (Gifford Wilcox, USA).
28. I want to see my children grow up and be happy. (Therese Rydberg, Sweden)
29. I want to have an aquarium. (Alejandra Reyes, Mexico)
30. I want to open my own preschool. (Andrea Alabado, USA)
31. I want to be a senior graphic designer/entrepreneur. (Jason Bascome, Bermuda)
32. I want to find happiness in every moment of life. (Laura Lynn Horst, USA)
33. I want to bass jump in the Cape of the Swallows. (Dylan Folsom, USA)
34. I want to be the teacher that every child will remember. (Lindsey Blatchford, USA)
35. I want to always be reading a book. (Stephanie Wagle, USA)
36. I want to invest my time joyfully. (Jimena Orea, Mexico)
37. I want to lead a scuba-diving tour, swim with dolphins, go on an African safari, run a relay for AIDS awareness, and go skydiving. (Emilie Gladback, USA)
38. I want to build and design my own car. (Niels Knoester, The Netherlands)
39. I want to become fluent in Russian. (Caitlin Stroup, USA)
40. I want to be a foster mom for an adopted child. (LIzz Holtz, USA)
41. I want to be invited to speak at a women’s conference. (Anna Struss, USA)
42. I want to buy a Ferrari. (Jorge Cantellano, Mexico)
43. I want to see how many days I can go without spending money, and learn how to surf. (Michelle Wadleigh, USA)
44. I want to travel to Africa. (Raven Smith, Bermuda)
45. I want to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef. (Matthew Erley, USA)
46. I want to look back on my life when I am 80 years old and smile. (Ronja Wienewski, Germany)
47. I want to have a loving, happy and healthy family. (Melissa Lepp, Canada)
48. I want to have a family. (Bernward Reinecke, Germany)
49. I want to climb Mount Everest. (Brandon Serna, USA)
50. I want to record a hip-hop album. (Adrian Kummerow, USA)
51. I want to be a mom. (Jen Moody, USA)
52. I want to swim with the bio-illuminescent jellyfish in Southeast Asia at night. (Paul Conzemius, USA)
53. I want to complete an Ironman. (Timothy Lewis, USA)
54. I want to be confident in my own skin and love myself for who I am. (Jessica Johnson, USA)
55. I want to go to an airport and buy the first flight I see. (Kelsey Hudspeth, USA)
56. I want to go paragliding on Machu Pichu (Manuel Rivas, Mexico)
57. I want to go to the Galapagos Islands. (Deng Tiancheng, China)
58. I want to live for the world and not for myself. (Emil Wallnér, Sweden)
59. In 20 years I want to be a pilot, and a musician who can play anything. (Naquita Rae Rivas, USA)
60. To obtain a higher education degree within 5 years. (Nilofar Amiri, Sweden)

Do you have a bucket list? If not, we encourage you to grab a pen and some paper and start writing away! It’s great to let your mind wander and write every goal that you have for yourself. And you can accomplish those goals too!  Just set your mind to it and you’ll achieve more than you ever thought possible!

The Hunger and Poverty banquet is an event that has been held around the world for many years to promote awareness about world poverty and hunger. Oxfam, a nonprofit organization whose main purpose is to end poverty and injustice around the world, has been sponsoring events like these that usually take place in homes, churches, and educational settings. The motivation behind the banquet is to divide participants into the three main socio-economic classes: the rich, the middle, and the poor. They are then given the typical meals of those groups in society. For example, those in the rich group are given three course meals and those in the poor group must share one pot of soup. This is meant to cause discussion amongst the groups about their feelings and thoughts on world hunger.

In Up With People we dealt with this topic just a little differently, as we always tend to do. Our evening started out with a wonderful presentation by a few members in our cast who are passionate about educating others about world poverty and hunger. Facts and figures flashed through a PowerPoint presentation, and we were taken aback as a group by a documentary based on the poor of the Philippines. I started to feel my heart shift a little as I thought about the time that I had spent remote villages and big city slums in India. My mind took me back to the day I spent in a slum house built on a trash heap. The house was smaller than my kitchen table at home and it drew in some uncomfortable conclusions about my own view of life. “How could the place where I eat food – the table which has never been empty and from which I have never left hungry – be bigger than this house in which lives six people? My mind slid back into my skull, as I was once again present.

Cast B was then led into a different building into which we walked in silence, viewing pictures from all over the world plastered to the otherwise barren walls. The blank space of the walls was synonymous with the idea. I watched the darkness of emotions flood the room lingering like a low-lying mist. Each step I took toward the next explicit image seemed heavier and heavier. The music in the background was drowned out by my constant inner monologue that was pressing further and further in my heart. My eyes glanced up from the floor and fell upon an image of a young girl so near the brink of starvation that her skin looked like a tanned piece of leather stretched over a drum. Each bone in her body was more visible and more real than anything I have ever seen. She was a corpse who had given up on life itself. At the time at which this photo was taken, hunger, and not life itself, was her only motivation. She was crawling toward a United Nations food bank located a kilometer away. She was being watched with a luring eye, as a vulture was crouched in the background, waiting for her to give up on life so it could feed. How can anyone survive in this war-torn Somalia hell? The caption of this picture described what happened after the picture had been taken. The photographer claims that he chased the vulture away, and that the girl continued on her trek and made it to her destination. However the photographer himself committed suicide three months later, due to depression brought on by this experience.

That image was enough for me, gripping onto my heart and not letting go. It held on with the tightness of an emotional rigor mortis. I had to sit down. My thoughts went wild and raced in no particular order:

All those people, all that hunger, all that pain, dying, disease, famine, my friends, my stomach, my dinner table, my mothers pot roast, my fathers grilled steaks, my comfortable bed, arid desert, the rocky mountains, my Indian family, the girl who did my laundry, the family that slept in the street, that woman whom I had seen lying in the gutter while dogs urinated on her.

And then silence.

Then Cast B partook in the actual activity of splitting into the three socio-economic groups and sitting down to eat. My mind had gone completely blank. A wash of white enveloped me and I felt like I had just gone through an emotional reboot. Everything started to slowly come back in focus, my vision returned and I slowly started to make sense of the low-lying background noise as the people who represented the rich started to eat and make conversation. I found the hand of someone stroking my back and I felt tears that had subconsciously arisen slide down my cheeks and into my beard. I was angry. My body pulsed with hate: hate of ignorance, hate of greed, hate of wealth, and hate of the life that I had lived without blinking. I hated the activity and kept repeating to myself, “It isn’t a game. This is real life.”  I stayed silent for the rest of the evening pushing myself to give just a little bit of input as we debriefed about the activity, but the only thing that produced from my mouth was incoherent and inexplainable thought. The activity had done its purpose, and the image of that girl will live in my mind and haunt my heart. It is that image that will be ever-present in my mind while I strive toward placing a little piece of good somewhere in this world.

Next time you visit Hamburg, Germany (or when you visit it for the first time), how will you most likely visit it? Will you arrive and decide to explore the city on your own? Will you use Google or a travel web site to determine the best sights to see? Will you call up friends, perhaps UWP alumni, to determine where you should go?

Or will you ask a homeless person to take you around the city?

On Sunday, November 22, a group of Up With People students visited Hinz Kunz, an organization that publishes a newspaper sold by homeless people in order to generate some sort of income. The requirements to sell the newspaper are: one must be without a home or children, be at least 18 years of age, speak German, and be willing to stay in the city (being Hamburg) for about one year. Hinz Kunz receives no outside support and those that help to run the organization do so as volunteer work. The main motivation behind Hinz Kunz is to build bridges of communication between the different socio-economic classes. Hinz Kunz allows the people that sell the newspaper to gain independence and a feeling of self-worth.

We also learned about Hamburg Tafel, a local food bank in the city. Hamburg Tafel takes donations from local grocery stores and bakeries, and gives that food to people in need of it. The main that must be asked when receiving the food is “Would you eat this food?” Most times, the answer is “yes” but there is a defect on the packaging or an overproduction of the food. Hamburg Tafel distributes over 4.5 tons of food per day. Imagine how many lives that organization is affecting!

After learning about Hinz Kunz and Hamburg Tafel, we had the invaluable experience of touring Hamburg with a worker at Hinz Kunz who has lived on the streets for the past 16 years of his life. His name was Fred and he gives more than 150 tours every year to people around the world. Fred earns nothing financially by giving these tours. Yet he gains the satisfaction of showing others a different part of life that is troubling, uncomfortable, and real. Homelessness is something affects most cities in the world but is a topic that many choose to avoid. Fred’s tours showed us the result of a community striving to turn around conditions of homelessness by taking efforts to work with those living on the streets.

We went by a building where the homeless can store whatever belongings they have during the day in order to be more active and earn a living. We visited a building where showers and basic hygienic materials are available. Finally, we stopped at a place where the homeless can meet their drug addictions in a safe way in order to prevent transmittable diseases, and hopefully turn those addictions into nothing. The places that we visited on Sunday are places that aren’t included on the normal Hamburg, Germany tour but are an essential part of the city.

After one learning experience comes another and 13 Up With People students learned just many people a subway elevator can hold. They were stuck in an elevator for 30 minutes and the 2 people that spoke fluent German were among them. It was quite a laugh for those that chose not to take the same elevator, and another event to add to the Up With People memory book.

Sunday was also our Friends and Family show in Hamburg and we had a great support from alumni from all over the world. Thank you to those that came! It was great to meet you!

Time is moving by faster than expected and we leave for Odense, Denmark on Wednesday morning. See you there!