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A blink of life through UWP

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My name is Sophia Mares, I am currently travelling with Up With People

Up with People is a non profit organization, we are a 100 young adults from nineteen different countries and we travel the world together for six months, sharing hope to every community that we visit through community service and a show that we perform everywhere we visit.

When I was nine years old my mom took me for the first time to an Up with People show.
While the show was going on I was sitting in the theater and I felt something that most people tend to lose over time: hope. On account of that, I decided that I needed to travel the world with them and share with others the vision and hope that I felt at that moment. 

In my surroundings, I could see every day a world full of violence and a lack of universal values. Even more importantly, what I saw in the world was a lack of what I felt when I saw Up with People, hope. When I told my friends for the first time that I wanted to go to Up with People, everyone thought it was a good idea but told me that getting the amount of money that they were asking for was a silly idea. "Look around you, look at the place we are living in. You are not getting 17,000 dollars here,where you get paid a minimum wage of four dollars per day,¨ someone said to me. My answer was, ¨Look around you and after a few years look again because I'm sure that I will get the money. Just because you said I couldn't.¨ It was from then on that I decided that money was not going to be an obstacle for me.

I have always believed that if you fight for something no matter what, you will get it - especially if you believe in where you want to go and where are you coming from. 

Travelling around the world was not just going to be something that would make me understand the way that others live and think, but something that would give me the opportunity to show the people who told me I couldn't that ¨I did.¨ I knew all of that, but how was I going to get the money? I started to think
about different ideas until I decided to pick one that represented the essence of why I wanted to go around the world in first place.
I created a project called A Blink of Life. My project consists of showing through my blog what it really means to be mexican around the world, and to understand the stereotypes that other countries have from mine.

I have been part of the program for two months and I can tell that travelling with Up with People is a life changeging experience, I would like to share my culture to more people and change the stereotypes that people have in mind about my country.

Organizer

Sophia Mares de Juan
Organizer
Bonita, CA

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