Culture Shock in Cabo for Gap Year Volunteer

Submitted by LauraLynn on Tue, 09/16/2008 - 23:39

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…

Up with People seeks to train youth in global leadership and to spark them to action in meeting the needs of their communities, countries and the world.

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