City Year Washington DC: A Year in the Life

The best part of BTA is the retreat, BTR (Basic Training Retreat). We all go away as a staff and corps to a camp, usually in Maryland, and fill our time with more intimate trainings for working with and getting to know our new teammates from different backgrounds. The first night during “Community Time”, one of the corps members started a dance party. This consisted of everybody sharing and swapping dance moves. There was no alcohol and all the lights were on, yet the room was full of people teaching and learning dance moves even though they still didn’t know each other well. The next night was the talent show or the “no-talent show” as we like to call it to convey the idea that it is more for fun and less about competitive talent. This year there was cello and piano playing, spoken word poetry, stand-up comedy, freestyle hip-hop, and DANCING!!! The last “performance” was a few of the girls who started the dancing the night before. They asked all those who participated the previous night to come up and dance to showoff what they learned. This led to pretty much the whole room just dancing. There was a “Soul Train” line with the staff and corps just having a ball. It got me excited for the year and serving with this group of young people. Partially because I just love dancing, but mainly because this and other times throughout training reveal that our corps this year is just full of people ready to jump-in headfirst and make the most out of every experience.