It feels impossible that three weeks have already gone by. This week, I gained a lot of energy back and was able to go into the office (yay!). Work-wise, the Las Sabinas team and I made a lot of progress: we finally started building our puppets! The prospect of building puppets was honestly really intimidating. Although I love crafting, I have never built a puppet before, so I'm definitely out of my element. And honestly, after working on them for the first time, I felt a little disheartened. I worked for two hours on my puppet and made very little progress (honestly, embarrassingly little; it was very sad). However, today, right after I finish this blog post, I'm going back into the office to work again. Despite my poor progress, my teammates made a lot, and because of that, today I can take time to ask for help, feedback, and advice. In addition to starting my puppet, we also had a meeting with local volunteers. For this project, Make_Sense assigned us volunteers to help support our project. Initially, the prospect of having volunteers was scary; I've never had to delegate work to others like that before. But after meeting with our two volunteers, I felt so good. They were extremely sweet and had amazing feedback for our games and puppets. One of our volunteers even brought us Mexican snacks to try, and it was so wholesome! In addition to working on my project, I also had the chance to leave Mexico City for the day and visit one of the other partner organizations, Hagamos Composta. The prospect of visiting a compost site wasn't the most exciting to me initially, but it was such an incredible experience (and I got to plant a tree at the end)! One of the things I appreciate most about this program is getting to engage with the work everyone else is doing and learning more about their projects.
Outside of my project, I have had a lot of time to explore the city. One of the biggest highlights of the week was visiting the National Museum of Anthropology, situated in the massive Chapultepec Park. I love museums. I love walking around museums, reading plaques, and getting to engage with history and art. Thus, I had a really amazing time at this museum. I had never been to a museum so large before, and I was there from 10 AM to 5 PM. There were exhibits about civilizations all across Mesoamerica, and it was just such an impressive collection of artifacts and history. Outside of my museum visit, I went to a few local markets, did a lot of walking, and hung out on the rooftop of my hostel with other people in my program. I wrote this at the beginning of my post, but it is so surreal that I'm almost halfway done with this experience. I feel so lucky to be here in Mexico City, and there's still so much to do and explore.
Anyways, that's all for this week. Until next week,
Mara