Week #31 - Billings, Montana

          This week has been pretty fabulous overall. We traveled a short distance from Bozeman to Billings Montana, both cities are college towns so similar in a sense, but the geography around the cities was very different. Bozeman is surrounded by mountains and Billings is in the plains part of Montana.

Travel day was a lot of fun because when we arrived in Billings we were at the zoo and we ended up having a fun little gathering with our host families.  The gathering included volleyball, graffiti painting, a BBQ dinner, bounce houses and much more. My new roommate for the week was Fien from the Netherlands and we have been waiting for awhile to be roommates so we knew right away it would be a great week. Meeting our host family made that even clearer. Right off the bat they were super outgoing and we were laughing within the first couple of minutes of knowing each other. My host parent’s names were George and Regina and we had three host sisters Hannah, Morgan and Grace (17, 12 and 10 years old). I felt so at home the entire week, which counteracted the fact that I was not feeling 100% health wise. I ended up staying home sick one day to just stop my sore throat and lack of sleep from becoming something much worse. Throughout the week we had nights full of laughter and tears (when watching a sad movie haha), delicious dinners and lots of girl talk. Poor George was over loaded with estrogen this week, but he handled it well. They loved the show and we talked about it for hours afterward. Last but not least, host family day was just perfect. We got to sleep in, have a delicious breakfast and then a well-needed girls day. Our little host sisters did our hair and painted all 20 of our nails (toes and hands). Then we went shopping before having a yummy final dinner, movie and scrapbooking evening of goodbyes. It will no doubt be challenging to say our final goodbye in the morning as we head off to our last stop in Montana.

            In UWP this week we had 3 shows so we were very busy. We also set a new record for the most interviews in one week for UWP (last set in Quebec Canada at 112). The admissions crew interviewed 122 people, which is almost a full UWP cast on its own! Yay Billings haha J Friday was a big day for me because I completed one of my goals for the semester, which was to sing the acapella song in the show “Let the Music Play”. We also had the backstage begin to flood during our show on Saturday because Billings was having record rains and the building was leaking. Complete craziness, but we pushed through and it was a great show despite the chaos behind the scenes. On Tuesday I facilitated an anti-bullying class and it was super powerful to see the young middle school really understand the message we were trying to spread. This week was just the beginning of the anti-bullying workshops that we will be doing in schools and I look forward to the rest of the impact that we make in the coming weeks.

            Next week we head to Lame Deer (the Native American reservation of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe) and it is going to be quite the week. I get the amazing opportunity of staying in a prayer lodge where we will be living along side the women in the lodge and learning about their ways and culture so I am super excited for that. I will do my best to share that experience with you next week, but it will most likely be hard to put into words. So here we go – to a life changing experience. I have no idea what to expect so I am just keeping my mind and heart open as I head into the coming week.