High School Musical

One of the unexpected high points of FBT was when a high school invited us to participate in their school dance. We were surprised to find that it was almost exactly like a high school dance, with lights and a nice sound system. The music ranged from popular Latino music (hip hop, reggaeton) to American 80s to Evlis.

Almost immediately I was asked to dance by a skinny boy half my height and a third my weight who nonetheless could move his hips better than I could (we were told ahead of time that the kids would be appropriate and that it was fine to dance with them). Pretty soon all of us trainees were on the dance floor getting our groove on like it was serious, occassionally dancing with the kids but mostly as a group. It was ridiculous to see what happens when you get a bunch of alchohol deprived, sexually repressed twenty-somethings on a high school dance floor after a month of evening spent at home with the host families. But in an awesome way.

Another night, we were invited to the high school´s talent show, where we got to see a range of singing modern love songs, traditional folk dances, and a dance/lip syncing to a Spanish-Cyndi-Lauper type song with a whole fake band. The volunteer in the village had begged us to put together something to showcase American culture, so we sang "Yellow Submarine", did the electric slide, and put on the sort of skit you see in summer camps where two people are the heads and bodies of the characters while hidden people made their arms and legs... and they acted out a typical American day. So we may have been short on the actual talent, but at least we had fun making a spectacle of ourselves, and they loved it.