merkytea08’s blog

Man!! Where do I start......so much happened in California, I guess I'll give you the play-by-play starting from Monday through Thursday, but before we began, let me say through this reading you'll find I was wrong a lot:

Monday:

Monday is the day we left to California. We had two flights to take. One from Albuquerque to Salt Lake City then Salt Lake City to Burbank, California to Bob Hope Airport. When we landed, our supervisor Mr. Francis, was kinda lost. I guess lost is such a harsh word for a man so we'll just say he took the scenic route. We saw a whole lot of California before we finally found the Hilton where we were staying. We couldn't check in at first because our rooms weren't ready so we went to a place called City Walk at Universal Studios. It was awesome! It was so big and there were stores everywhere. We were looking for a place to eat when we found this really cool Italian restaurant. We went in and had the coolest waitress you will ever meet. Her name was Rachael. She was as awesome as the food was. She even gave us free ice cream. After we were done, we checked in to our rooms, but we only got to rest for a while before we had to head down to UCLA for our college tour. Now I bet your thinking the tour was with a tour guide like most tours are.........NO!! Our tour was more like this: Mr. Francis: " Find Ackerman Hall." Girls: "OK." Easier said than done. Everyone wanted to find where the hall was all by themselves so there were a lot of directions being shouted out at one time. In the end we ended up asking construction workers where the building was. Not a very good start, but it was a start. Now I thought our tour guide was at Ackerman Hall. Unfortunately, I was wrong again. Instead of meeting a tour guide, we sat down in the grass and Francis gave us a pep talk about college and knowing how to find where places are Freshman year. We should have seen this coming......we had a scavenger hunt to do. We had to find information about certain things such as: Info about the "Arts", housing, Native American Studies, tutoring, student government and all of our majors which is Pre-Med, Business and Hotel Management, Animal Science and Biology. Did I mention the campus was huge and we had about 30 mins to an hour to do this? Also we had no idea where to go. We couldn't even find one little hall......this seemed like a job for Utley's Angels!!! HAHA Sorry I felt a superhero moment. Anyways....the hunt was on!! We starters with student government. It didn't seem that hard considering Ackerman Hall was where the student government El Presidante was. The only problem was we didn't know what floor it was on. We went to the student help office and they told us. Now we figure we could get this done faster if we split up so we did. The teams were Chris and Geanna, Steph and Fish. Steph and I went to look for Native American studies while Chris and Geanna looked for student government. Boy did we have an adventure. Everything we wanted to find was practically on the other side of campus!! So we had to hurry and get there before time ran out. What was so weird and cool at the same time was we were looking so hard for everything and rushing trying to find everything in time, everything we were looking for, we found by accident! It was also funny that every person we asked for information from tried to get us to sign up for there groups. Long story short....we didn't make it back in time. Unlike America's Next Top Model, we weren't disqualified from the challenge. Instead we were asked about the experience and how it was. After our talk we went back to the hotel to have a talk with a guy named Mike Brown. Mike Brown is the cool guy who was taking us down to South Central. At first, I thought we'd have to take bullet proof vest with us,  but after talking to him, he assured us we wouldn't be in danger. It was so cool to talk to Mike Brown. He had such a weird perspective of how Natives act on the reservation. I'm glad we talked to him and kinda set the record straight with him so in case anyone asks him about Natives he can tell them and so on and so forth. Then......yes that's right Monday still isn't over.... we went back to the City Walk to go get some eats. We ate at a place called Cumancho's. It was a Mexican restaurant. Oh my goodness!!!! Their burritos are amazing!! We even had a little show.There were these drummers playing music. After dinner, we went back to our room to go swim. Swimming was fun. I hadn't swam for the longest time. It was cold, but t was worth it! Then it was time to go back up to the room. We showered and went to bed. Finally Monday is over.

OK had to take a little break. Man Monday was long wasn't it?

Tuesday:

Tuesday morning we woke up and took a shower before heading down on the elevator. Francis told us we wouldn't be heading to South Central until about 11:30 a.m. so we decided to have a good breakfast. We all sat down and decided to have the buffet. The waiter told us what was in the buffet before he let us at it. What the waiter told us seemed so magical. There were pancakes, bagels, ham, bacon, sausage etc. Well guess what? The waiter lied! I got up there and this is what I saw: little 2 inch pancakes, greasy as heck bacon, no bagels, bright yellow eggs, yogurt ( I hate yogurt) and oatmeal which by the way looked grayer than usual. Basically the only thing I ate was the fruit. The fruit was the bomb!!! For real. So I paid about $20 big ones for fruit! After our ridiculously so not worth it breakfast, we went to South Central. It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Yeah, it was dirty and yeah, there were homeless people, but it wasn't as bad as the media makes it. We went into an unmarked building. There weren't any gangstas inside nor were there people waiting to jump us. Instead there was a room of people just chillin and a couple of teens our age just looking for advice. We sat down and talked to the woman who ran the program called FREE LA. It's a youth justice coalition for teens who don't dropped out of high school. Many students had interesting stories, but one that stood out to me most was a story one of the male students told. He was sitting on the stairs waiting for the subway when two cops came up to him. They were going to give him a ticket for blocking the stairway. This kid is as big as my pinkey, there's no way he could have been blocking the stairway. Before they gave him a ticket, they asked where he lived. When he told them, they suspected he was in one of the gangs around his neighborhood so they placed him under a gang file. That is so messed up!!! What made me laugh was that he was like, "They put me in a gang file, but I don't even know what gang I'm in!" After our talk with FREE LA, we went back to our hotel to chill for a while before we headed down to.......THE BEACH!!! The Beach was so pretty!! Or at least the water was. The beach itself was pretty dirty, but it was pretty dirt. What made it even more amazing was we were there when the sun was setting so it was really romantic if you had a date or someone. Not as romantic when your there with three other girls screaming, "Hurry up! Get in the water!" J/K I love my friends! After we got out of the water and made fun of Chris for having pee-pee pants, we had a walk on the pier then ate some of the best burgers I've ever had on a pier. They were delicious! After our long day, we headed back to the hotel, took our nightly showers and went to bed.

Wednesday:

Wednesday had to be the best day of the four days we were in California. Why? On Wednesday we went to DISNEYLAND!! It was time to find the little kid inside and set them free. Before we went to the actual park, we had a tour of where all the magic is put together. We had a tour of the department where they take care of all the costumes and the technology for all there events. After, we went to watch an Aladdin play and we had VIP seats. The guy who played Aladdin and Jasmine sounded exactly like them. A girl played Carpet. Carpet is a flying carpet, but because humans can't fly, the actor was just jumping and rolling around. Aladdin's partner in crime Abu wasn't there, but Iago was there and he was a puppet being controlled by an actor playing his voice. Jafar was there too even more evil than in the movie. It was so cool and the person who plays The Genie in Aladdin was so funny! He made jokes about current events which made the play even more hilarious! The effects were fantastic! They had all these backdrops that light up, they had the cave that Aladdin goes in to get the lamp, they even had an elephant for Aladdin to ride in on as Prince Ali. It wasn't real or anything. It was made out of this really nice, soft gray material that made it look real. I think the best effect I saw was the flying carpet. It was held up by these wires from the ceiling. Aladdin and Jasmine flew around the theater on it. After the play we had a backstage tour of the stage where Aladdin was put on. We saw all the trap doors and the backdrops from the play. We even got to see the elephant. The only thing we didn't get to see were the actors. It would have been nice to meet the Genie and get some autographs, but we had to be on our way. The next thing we did was head back to the beginning of our tour to get our tickets so we could enter the Disneyland/California Adventure park. The park was so amazing. I've been to Disneyland before, but I was really small back then so I didn't remember much. To see the park again was awesome. There were so many rides and so many pictures to be taken. The first thing we did when we got into the park was eat. We were starving!! We went to a cafe and had hot dogs. In the cafe playing musical chairs was Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and The Madhatter. They were funny, especially when The Madhatter kept taking away chairs and putting them back. After we ate we rode a few rides in Tomorrowland. We saw a 3-D movie called Honey I Shrunk The Audience and rode a virtual ride called Star Tours. Man that ride gave me a serious headache, but it was fun. When we got off the ride, we saw the end of a parade. We headed into Frontierland where my friends rode a roller coaster. I'm not really a roller coaster fan so I went to Fantasyland. We rode a few more rides before it started to get really late. We were supposed to see a fireworks show, but I guess there was high winds so they postponed them for a while so we went to go ride the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. It was cool for a little water ride. After the ride we had VIP seats for this amazing show called the Fantasmic. It was so sweet!!! There was dancing and sweet effects. The best effect was when there was fire on the water. After the Fantasmic, we rode one more ride. It was the longest line I've ever seen for a ride. The ride was the new Indiana Jones ride. Nobody in our group had rode this ride before so I was getting worried because I thought it was a roller coaster. Oh My Goodness!! You had to go all the way down into this tunnel to get to the ride. I was so tired. At this point, I was starting to think that the walk to get to the ride was the ride. When we finally got there, I have to admit, the wait was worth it!! It was so fun!! We rode in this car and it just jerked you everywhere!!! There were boobie traps and everything. It was so worth the wait! We were so tired, we just went straight to the car, but not before we had to climb 5 flights of stairs to get to the car. The escalator was broken. I don't remember the ride home. I just remember climbing into bed and going to sleep. I was so tired, but man did I have the time of my life!!!

Thursday:

Wednesday night we had decided to go to the beach in the morning because we were leaving California on Thursday. So we decided to get up early so we could go to the beach and get back to the hotel in enough time to take a shower. Bad Idea!!! We didn't get home from Disneyland until 1:30 Thursday morning. We got roughly about 4 hours of sleep because we got up at 5:00 a.m. Everyone was like, "I don't wanna go to the beach!" We were so tired, but we got up anyways because if we didn't go in the morning, we would go at like 10:00 a.m. and we wouldn't be able to shower so we would smell like the beach. We got to Santa Monica about 7:30. The beach was practically empty so the water was all ours. It was freezing!! We went in deeper to get used to the water right? The waves just kept getting bigger and with every wave that came in, a whole lotta seaweed came with it. It felt so gross. It felt like something was crawling on your leg. Everyone was getting creeped out so we decided to just sit down and let the water come to us. Wrong! The water looked nice and fresh when it was a wave, but when it got to the shore the water had so much dirt in it the when it hit you, you weren't refreshed, you were just dirty. It also swept you back if it was a big wave and rolled you in the dirt so you were even dirtier. We got used to the water eventually and went back out to face the waves and the seaweed. We got really far out and the waves weren't that big until all the waves got together to make one big one. We all got taken under. It was so funny. I guess after that one everyone got pretty tired of tasting salt water so we packed up and went to get breakfast. We ate at a place called Jinky's. We sat outside because we didn't want to stink up the restaurant. Once again...that wasn't a very good idea. The hostess sat us and took our drink order..........................that was it. No one came out to take our order. Waiters were just passing by us in the window just looking at us. It was about 20-25 min of waiting before Chris went in and asked if they could take our orders. When she came back she said, "They forgot to send someone out." I was so mad. When they finally took our orders and brought our food......it kinda wasn't work it and I was already full off of my lemonade and hot chocolate. By the way, the hot chocolate is spectacular. In case you haven't notice, I'm running out of words to explain how amazing something is. Anyways we ended up paying another $20 for a breakfast that wasn't worth it. We went back to the hotel to take showers, we packed and we headed on back the New Mexico.

All in All:

All in all, the trip was the bomb diggity!!!! I had so much fun and learned so much from this trip. It was a really good experience. I met a lot of neat and amazing people in South Central and Disneyland. I would so do this trip over again. every bit of it. Even being tired to my last ounce of breath. I would like to say thank you to Mr. Lee Francis though. I pretty sure all of us could not thank you enough for taking us to LA. Let me tell you about what this man did. He drove us everywhere we wanted to go and never complained. He also sacrificed his dignity, pride and reputation because he drove us everywhere in a mini van and it was lime green!!! Not to be dissing on the mini or anything. The mini is my homeboy. We didn't have to fill up that car once. It lasted on the tank we picked it up in. I know it doesn't seem like we went very far or anything, but if you count all the missed turns and mistakes, that's a lot of gas and the mini held up. Go MINI VANS!!!! So Thank You Mr. Francis for the long, exhausting, fun, exciting, awesome trip!!!!! OK so that's it. That's my trip folks. I'm done. Thanks for reading! Come back soon!

Whoo Hooo!!! In 3, count them, 3 days, we'll be in Los Angeles, California!!!!!! Our supervisor, Mr. Lee Francis, decide to take us to LA so we could learn about non-profit organizations and also work with people who are currently involved with gang prevention. It's going to be great! I can't wait to get there. We're going to learn a lot from this trip. I especially can't wait until we go down to South Central. South Central is where we'll be learning about the gang prevention. I can't wait because you always here about gangs and shootings. To see it first hand would really give me the feel of what people have to go through everyday. I hope I won't see any shootings though. Personally, I'm a little scared. Who knows what'll happen down there? No one really knows so I hope we're all safe when we go down there.

Now for the fun part. When we arrive in LA, we'll be taking a tour of the college UCLA. That should be fun. It'll be nice to get a sense of higher education and very nice to get connections with UCLA. After UCLA we'll be going to Disneyland for backstage tours, but it's not all fun and games. I hope to learn more about non-profit organizations and who better to teach me than the biggest giver himself....Mickey Mouse. We'll be at Disneyland from 10:00a.m. till 11p.m. We'll be having a fun filled day with Mickey and all his friends. Heck Yes!! Thank God for Walt Disney. During this time we will also be seeing a show. The show is Aladdin. Then we'll be going to see a fireworks display. Before we come back home, we'll be hitting up the beach working on our tans. Man, I can't wait for this trip to start and I won't want it to end. It's going to be great!

India Travelers:

I'm going to write a little update because I haven't written in a very long time. Ok, so some of the people in our group, Josh, Brandi, and Sam, went to India. I just read some of their blogs and India sounds very intense. I heard it smells horrible and there are a lot of beggar's in the street and it's not very clean. I also heard about they toilets. Apparently there isn't any toilet paper and you have to clean yourself off with water. After reading their experiences, I'm not as jealous anymore. I'm still jealous that they get to experience the culture though.

Our Progress:

Well that's them. Now for us. Well for a while now, we've been trying to do a little project on what's happening with Mt. Taylor. For those who don't know, Mt. Taylor is a mountain that is very sacred to Native Americans around the area. The problem is, there are people who want to mine in the area, but we have sacred places on the mountain that we don't want to be desecrated, so we fought the people who wanted to mine and we won a 1 year hold on the mining.

Happy People:

People were very happy because now the mountain is temporarily protected and there's more of a fighting chance, but for the 1 year, we have to show progress on the mountain. Basically we have to show why the mountain is important and why it should be saved. I hope the mountain stays preserved.

Angry people:

Boy, do I have a few words for these people. The people who protested against us had a few words of there own. Basically they think we want to mine the mountain for ourselves to earn money. They also think that we don't want anyone up there. Not true. We just want to preserve certain places sacred to us, but nobody wants to listen. People are just in for a fight. Another crazy theory is that we want to "build a casino up there." How crazy and stupid is that? But like I said, nobody wants to listen. You may change some minds, but there's always that set who think they're right. Right now I'm going on a quote that somebody stated: "If we can live in a world where there is a possibility of a woman president or an african american president, then we can solve this problem in a civilized manner."

So now were doing a video on Mt. Taylor. It should be fun. I love debating. It's always so exciting to see the outcome. I'll have more updates later.

P.S We= TCP (Traditional Cultural Property), Sierra Club, 5 tribes (Laguna, Acoma, Navajo, Hopi, Navajo, Zuni)

Yesterday we had a presentation about non-profit organizations from a great guy named Eduardo Martinez. He told us about the organizations and how they work. He told us how many non-profit organizations there are and taught us about the social sector. There are 27 non-profit organizations. A non-profit organization is:

• A corporation
• A non-governmental organization
• A community-based organization
• A service provider
• An educational entity
• An intermediary

I learned that the 5.0.1.c.3 is the most common used in a non-profit organization. I also learned the structure of a non-profit organization. The non-profit world is amazing. It's all about people working hard and helping people out. It's about doing jobs because it feels good to know that someone will be better of tomorrow when your done. Our guest speaker was very informative and he made the presentation fun. Thank you Eduardo. I love the non-profit world and you should get to know more about it. Check out this website and find any non-profit organization. http://www.guidestar.org/using/nonprofits.jsp?source=hpnpo

Ok......last week we had Thursday and Friday off because.......well I don't really know why let's just say the world was being nice those days lol. Anyways because the world was nice to us, we decided to be nice to the world and go pick up some trash around our communitys.(Real reason: Our supervisor, Mr. "Lee-unit" Francis wanted us to be productive with our days off.) Because 4 of us are from Laguna and 1 is from Acoma, we decided to do both.

Acoma:

First we hit up Acoma. Let me just say for the record....Acoma is, seriously no lie, the cleanest place I have ever seen. This has to be the first time I've ever been disappointed to see no trash on the ground whatsoever. I guess before we had gotten there, some do-gooders had decided to do a little community service of there own. So we were kinda just standing there wondering what to do. Well we went around anyway and we found little "pity" pieces of trash. Then all of a sudden, we hit the jackpot. We went to the edge of the rock. (Oh yeah, the part of Acoma we went to was on a rock. No, not like a pebble or something.) Anyways, at the edge of the rock, we found trash. We also found an amazing view. It was so pretty, but we couldn't enjoy it. We had trash to pick up. Well we finished picking up trash and decided to go to Laguna, but first, we had to drop of Geanna. I guess she had to go wait for her brothers at home so we dropped her off. After we dropped her off, we went to have the greatest lunch we've ever had!!! HA! Just kidding! I say that because Geanna kept saying she was hungry.

Laguna:

Ok, now Laguna is a different story. I'm not gonna say it's like mondo dirty, but it could use some cleaning up. So that's what we did. We went around the plaza and around some houses and by the church. I think we did a good job. I was so tired, but it felt good to clean up the communities. I wish we could've done more, but we had to leave. We took the trash to the dump and went home. It felt really nice to know we had done a good deed that day. I went to bed happy. Hopefully we can do more community work like that.

PSA:

Well here's what we've been doing so far. We've been making PSA's (Public Service Announcements) about Tobacco. Everyone (Chris, Josh, Steph, Geanna, and I) had to make a tobacco PSA. I did a PSA on tobacco facts. I think it came out really good. A PSA is supposed to be a minute long. I went over the limit with a record time (not really). I have a 3 1/2 minute PSA WHOO HOO!!! It took a lot of work to make and it had a lot of editing. A lot. Actually there were times when it was so frustrating, I just wanted to delete everything and go home. It was frustrating because Steph's parts wouldn't load. The computer would only load the outtakes of her and not the serious part and even when we would re-do her part, it would still only get half her part. She had to go do some religious doings and I needed for her to say just 2 words...."You decide." Well I recorded her and she left. She wasn't going to come back the next day and I was just about to finish my video. Guess what happened? Yes, that's right. It didn't get her part. I had to wait 4 days(it was a Wensday and she wasn't going to come Thursday and we were off on Friday and because of the weekend) to get her part! I had to wait 4 days for two little words. And even when she came back and we re-recorded, it took us three tries to download her part!! See what I mean by frustrating. We had to re-film her like 20 different times.......well not actually 20 but pretty darn close. Anyways in the end it came out good and I was so happy to be done with it.

The "Crew":

I had the best crew in the world helping me. Because my PSA was about facts, I had a lot of information and I needed people to read the lines and do different things. My crew, which consist of Steph, Josh, Chris, and Geanna, was up for the challenge. I'm pretty sure they thought it would be easy. You know, read a few lines and we're done. WRONGO!!! It was so hard. I was using the visual instead of the voice recording, so they had to memorize there lines and keep a straight face while looking at the camera. If you know my friends like I do, then you'll know that keeping a straight face is impossible to do. Even just saying short lines like, "One in Five deaths occur in smokers" or something to that effect was hard to do. We had a million takes, but they pulled it off. Let me tell you about everyones parts because everyone had a problem or two:

Steph: Steph couldn't stop laughing in front of the camera and her parts wouldn't come up on the computer.

Josh: Josh had a very short notice and had to memorize his lines fast because he came in late. Also he had one of the longest facts to say, so it was hard to memorize.

Chris: Chris kinda had a hard time memorizing lines too. Most of her mistakes were my fault too because she would say her lines perfect, but I would make her say them over because I forgot to zoom in with the camera.

Geanna: Geanna had a hard time saying her lines. For example, the line was, "Smoking can slow your blood flow" she said, " Smoking can slow your bud flow." She also had to slide down a slide and deliver her lines wqhen she stopped........except we were at a Elementary and the slide was small so she slid down extremely slow.

In the end, my crew did an awesome job. They pulled through for me and didn't let me down. We had mistakes, but we got through the, Thanks Guys.

The Experience:

The experience was fun. I'm no stranger to making a movie because I've done it before, but I've never done anything as informative as this. I learned a lot about tobacco and how horrible it is. It can take over your whole life. Before we made our movies, we saw other PSA's on Youtube. I've seen what tobacco does to a person and how tobacco has ruined millions of lives. I've also seen how many lives have been taking by tobacco. I also learned about teamwork and leadership. LEADERSHIP: I had to come up with the PSA, direct it and edit it. TEAMWORK: My friends helped me and we didn't argue once. All of our ideas came together as one. I loved this experience!

I believe woman are very underappreciated because society sees men as the strong, protecting, providing type. They see men as the ones who have to do everything while the woman stay home and cook. Why are woman so forgotten? Why do people think woman have to be protected and taken care of? Don't people know this is the 21st century? Woman are just as strong as men and can do just as much as they can. I don't blame all of society though. i must admit, it's somewhat our fault too. We can't just expect people to believe we are strong. We have to show them woman can do anything men can. If we want to prove ourselves then we have to stand up and be strong. Others have done it, why not us? We believe we are strong. Let's show society how much we can achieve and show them we are as strong as men.

The Nobel Peace Prize is given to people who do the greatest things in a human society and to know that woman were able to accept this honor, I think, is a great accomplishment. It's an accomplishment because not many woman have been known to do great thing's. If you ask anybody about a great woman hero, many would probably only be able to come up with Rosa Parks or Mother Teresa. Honestly, that's all i can come up with, but reading this piece on Heroines of Peace made my knowledge of woman "do-gooders" expand. It's also nice to hear that all these woman are no one race. They all have different backgrounds and come from different parts of the world. For example:

Baroness Bertha von Suttner was born in Austria and she helped form a Venetian peace group, initiated the Austrian Peace Society of which she was for a long time the president, attended her first international peace congress, and started the fund needed to establish the Bern Peace Bureau.

Mother Teresa was born into Roman Catholic Albanian family living in Skopje, capital of the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia. She worked in the Calcutta slums. There she started a new order, the Missionaries of Charity, committed to serve the poorest of the poor, which soon spread to many other countries.

Aung San Suu Kyi was born in Rangoon, Myanmar. She campaigned against dictatorship in a non-violent way. In the good fight for peace and reconciliation, we are dependent on people who set examples, people who can symbolize what we are seeking and mobilize the best in us. Aung San Suu Kyi is just such a person.

These woman all had different customs and beliefs, but one common goal: To change the world we live in today. These woman are perfect examples of how woman can change the world if we set our minds to it. If you believe, you can achieve. I know I only mentioned some of the great heroines, but if you want to know more, check out this website. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/heroines/index.html 

Top Five Characteristics:

1) Able to speak well

2) Dedicated

3) Passionate

4) Extroverted

5) Strong Willed

1) I believe the ability to speak well is a characteristic any leader has to have. If you can't communicate with your team or with anybody else, then there's no connection there. You need to be able to relate to thet people you leading or there would be no trust. 

2) Every leader has to be dedicated to their missiuon. If there's no dedication, then everything falls apart especiallly if the leader doesn't care about the mission.

3) A leader has to be passionate about what they are doing. Nobody wants a leader who doesn't care about what they do. A leader has to have the passion to change the world.

4) A leader definetly has to be extrovertd. Extroverted means very friendly and a great people person. A leader has to be ab le to relate to everyone there helping and leading.

5) Last, but not least, a leader has to be strong willed. They have to have the will to continue the job no matter happens. They have to stay strong and have extreme confindence in themselves and the people they lead.