At first, I was nervous when I arrived at the university because it was a big place. When I met the students I felt better because I was making more friends and they would help me with the project. With time I was feeling better doing the project because I was getting used to the people around me. I would always practice my lines when I was in the dorm. When we performed I was so excited about it. So, I really had a lot of fun performing with the UCSB students.
After doing this project, I will try to do other things like this and maybe I might want to do this as a career. When I first started, I felt uncomfortable writing so much about myself and I thought that no one cared. But as the project progressed, I felt that other people were practically the same as me. Moving out of my comfort zone and being the closer to all the other people helped me make my comfort zone bigger, which I’m sure helped me through the rest of the project and through tough obstacles in my life.
The experience in The Odyssey was great. It’s like we had an unbreakable bond with one another.
I would recommend The Odyssey Project to other campers because it was a fun experience that helped me mentally, emotionally and also helped me in my camp commitment.
The most significant experience I will take from this course and project is learning about the lives of each of the Los Prietos Boys. Learning about how they lived their lives and what they experienced at such a young age opened my eyes and put my life into perspective. Here we were, presented with young boys who are so talented, yet society looks down on them because of the wrong decisions they made in their life. I also felt that society looked down on some of them just because of the way they looked and, as a result, those boys internalized those people's views and acted according to society's expectations of them.
