I am doing my Leadership-in-Action project in Mexico City (CDMX) with the local NGO make_sense. Make_sense is an organization that coordinates volunteers for specific social-impact projects throughout the city and state of Mexico, and my project is to assist one of their partner orgs, Genera Territorios, with building financial education and resource budgeting materials for rural women's cooperatives in Amatlán and Ecatzingo. We've been tasked with building an open-ended, culturally sensitive methodology that helps women build financial awareness without devaluing or circumscribing their existing non-financial skills and social capital networks, like traditional patriarchal financial education often does. Hopefully, we will be able to build a system that can track both financial and non-financial resources and assist rural communities in building confidence in their ability to save. So far, we have a prototype using short, culturally appropriate animated videos to present the material in an accessible way, which I suggested we combine with a WhatsApp community to facilitate peer-led discussion. Our lack of understanding of the specific financial challenges in these communities is the main barrier at this time, and hopefully offering an open-ended, collaborative platform will allow communities to personalize it to a greater degree. I'm cautiously optimistic.
I have struggled a bit more with the logistics of the living transition. Triver Coliving, where we will be staying for the six-week duration of the project, is very nice and my three roommates (Yotam from Leeds, Spencer from Cornell, and Arthur from EPFL) are lovely people. The rest of the Laidlaw Scholars are also amazing people and I've been fascinated to learn about everything from feminist urban planning to the Fourier transform through my discussions with them. Food has been quite difficult though. This isn't anything unusual for me: I have an autoimmune condition called EoE that takes gluten and most soy and dairy off the table, and because of my neurodivergence I often struggle to make my body swallow when I'm eating new or unfamiliar food. After an inauspicious start the first night, when a delivery driver turned off his tracker and absconded with my gluten free pasta, I spent the first few days tracking down a grocery store with the food I needed and navigating restaurants with limited options. I now have stocked the pantries and refrigerator with a week's worth of food, and even found a few local foods I can eat. There's this soup with pork and alkali-treated corn kernels that's pretty edible, and I even managed to drink mango juice that I was offered! I could not be more relieved.
The language barrier is less of an issue than I expected. Even though I've only been studying Spanish for a few months, I've been able to communicate fairly competently about commerce with monolingual Spanish speakers, and even to have an in-depth discussion about Mayan mythology with a stranger mostly in Spanish. My vocabulary is growing a lot and I am no longer worried that I could fail to perform necessary emergency communication.
In terms of Changemaker Values, I would say Brave has been key this week because of the challenge of navigating eating. I am experiencing a strong tension between Ambitious and Fast with regard to the pacing of the content building for Genera Territorios, but I am hopeful that the WhatsApp solution will enable us to combine the best of both.
Best,
Peter Tarson