From nothing to something: A story of salsa in Harbin

Sean Boyce teaches some footwork in class. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Most of the bars are in this area and so we didn't have to look too far to find one of the bigger bars. Box is one of the biggest in the area and so we approached the owner over a lovely pint in one of his bars about starting classes. Alan (the owner) gave us his blessing to use his bar on Friday and Sunday evenings for our salsa classes. Thus came the second big expansion. As soon as we started teaching at Box, the classes literally exploded. So many people were coming, we had to separate beginners and intermediates as we couldn't fit everyone into one room. So we used ACE for intermediates as there are less intermediate students and Box for the beginner's classes.

Now I cannot take credit and say this expansion was all because of me; it was a joint effort. But through this joint effort I can say a lot about team work, in particular multicultural teamwork. We had people translating our adverts into Russian, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, French and Mongolian. We also had Matt take over the actual running of the online operations.

We took many of the tutorial videos we'd made and posted them online to Youku so that even people who didn't attend the classes could see what we learned every week. Matt also runs the WeChat groups, which includes almost 300 members by this point, creates adverts and arranges class locations and times. He was a godsend to our classes and we probably wouldn't have made it without him.

To top off the year, we had our salsa Christmas party! This involved games, getting someone to dress up as Santa Claus and of course arranging everything. Again I have Matt to thank for a sterling effort in getting much of this organized while we ran about buying prizes, downloading as much music as we can (Cuban salsa music is hard to find in China) and getting ready for the party of the year!

The party of course was a fantastic night, with everyone dressing up for the occasion. It really was the culmination of a semester of hard work and effort from everyone involved, from students to teachers.

Our story does not finish there though. Why do we do this for free? Well, when it started developing, I quickly had the idea to turn it into a charity, the very same charity I used to work with back home, sals4water. Our charity won awards for being the most innovative student charity in Britain and we turned it into an international franchise with branches in Sweden, France, Scotland, the Czech Republic and Kuwait. It's time the charity branched out into Harbin and so next semester we plan on making the first international student run charity in Harbin (and possibly Heilongjiang).

For more information on salsa4water and the 4water charity go to: http://www.weare4water.org/salsa

So watch this space, as this to me seems to be the start of something beautiful, a way to give back something to Harbin and China, a way in which an international community of Chinese and foreigners alike can truly come together and speak one common language, the language of dance. This year in China has been amazing and it was all thanks to salsa.

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