PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — This summer one County teen will leave on a jet plane en route for Australia to share her gift of singing.
Seventeen-year-old Abby Shaw of Presque Isle is part of a group of 150 selected from 18,000 who auditioned to sing at the Sydney Opera House with the WorldStrides 2017 Honors Choir.
“I’m very excited to go,” Shaw said. “It’s a long flight, 22 hours from Boston to Sydney.”
She will head down under on July 4, and she’s bringing her grandma with her to enjoy over a week of singing and sightseeing, all while staying at a five-star hotel.
“They’re taking us to the zoo, sightseeing around Sydney, so they have it all planned out,” she said.
This adventure began in her sophomore year when she sang at Carnegie Hall in New York as part of the 2015 WorldStrides Honors Choir. Ten thousand singers auditioned and only 500 were chosen to sing. This experience led to her nomination to audition for the trip to Sydney.
“At first when I got nominated I was thinking, ‘No way, I’m never going to have the money to do it,’ but I got talking with a couple people at my Bible camp and they’re all like ‘Yeah, go for it,’ and I was like ‘Yeah, sure,'” she said.
Shaw’s a senior at Presque Isle High School, which means she’ll have graduated just weeks before leaving for Sydney. After her week in Sydney, later this fall, she plans to go to college for theater with the possibility of a double major in music and music therapy.
“My aunt has always told me I’d be really good in occupational therapy,” she said. “I just love to help people.”
WorldStrides is an accredited travel organization that helps more than 270,000 students travel to destinations in 85 countries each year.
