Bigfork teen has seen the world

By ALEX STRICKLAND / Bigfork Eagle

What is there to do once you've traveled the world, met people from communities as varied as Mexico City and tiny hill villages in remote Thailand and performed song and dance in front of thousands?

Nineteen-year-old Bigfork resident Jenna Taylor is planning to head to college.

Taylor has spent the last six months traveling with the organization "Up With People," a motivational group that travels to different communities around the globe doing community service work and performing a musical show.

Taylor found out about the organization from classmates at Flathead High School, where she graduated in 2007, but was already headed down a more traditional path.

"I was ready to head off to college," she said.

Already accepted to a school, Taylor said something just didn't feel right and decided to take a step back and enjoy a "gap year."

Before she could take off with Up With People, though, Taylor had to raise money for the program, $11,800.

Not wanting a run-of-the-mill way to raise money, Taylor decided to take a very entrepreneurial approach and offer "investors" the opportunity to buy "stock" in her.

Investors were given an outline of the commodity and the past performance, which included being the FHS valedictorian, and an outline of the returns — knowing they helped in community service and leadership training, and admission to a concert to be held on August 9 at Crossroads Church.

That concert will feature Taylor singing selections from the Up With People show she performed as well as a slideshow and talk about her time abroad.

When the program kicked off in January, Taylor spent a month in Denver, meeting the 100 or so people she would be traveling with for the next six months and learning the content of the show.

From there it was off to Mexico and then back to the U.S. for a tour through Texas and the Midwest. Traveling mostly by bus, Taylor said she had the opportunity to meet not only people from around her own country, but revel in showing off her home nation to other members of the cast.

"For most of them it was their first time in the U.S.," Taylor said of the cast that included members from 26 countries. "I was with a couple of people for their first time in a Wal-Mart. The Swedes would go on and on about the cereal aisles."

From her home turf, Taylor and the cast left for Thailand, where she was given the opportunity to spend a week with a remote hill tribe that spoke no English and enjoyed few outside visitors.

Taylor taught English at the local school for the week and helped work in the fields. After work, she got to eat with the family, where she indulged in what she said was her most interesting meal — boiled chicken blood.

And after a week of living in a bamboo hut it was back to work with the cast, where the "high-energy" show was put on in a Thai town out of the mountains.

"Our traditional grandma (from the village) came," Taylor said. "We were so surprised."

After she returned to Bigfork in June, Taylor said she found returning to normal life fairly easy, except for the confusion over what to do with all her newly acquired spare time, even with working multiple jobs and preparing for school at Hope College in Michigan in a few weeks.

Taylor's concert is free and open to the public and will take place at 7 p.m. on Saturday, August 9 at Crossroads Christian Fellowship on Highway 35 in Bigfork.