My first week in Hong Kong was primarily about understanding the community I would be working with and beginning to translate that understanding into the foundation for my anti-scam and fraud prevention workshop for migrant domestic workers. Before arriving, I completed a research worksheet from my supervisor at Street Law Hong Kong on the legal and financial circumstances of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Hong Kong. This gave me an initial understanding of issues such as their two-year employment contracts, the 14-day period they have to find new employment after termination, restrictions on where they can live and the type of work they can perform, and the financial burdens created by recruitment agencies. However, much of this first week challenged me to move beyond understanding these issues academically and see how they shape people's everyday lives.

One of the most valuable experiences came on my first full day in Hong Kong, when my supervisor and I attended an EmpowerU session. EmpowerU is an HKU-based nonprofit that provides semester-long programming for MDWs on topics including financial literacy and self-advocacy. The session I observed was led by a Goldman Sachs manager on personal finance. I was struck by how engaged the participants were. They asked frequent questions and expressed a strong desire to become more financially independent. At the same time, my conversation with my supervisor afterward made me think more critically about what "financial independence" actually means in this context. Workers face significant structural constraints on the ways they can earn, live, and change employment, and some arrive in Hong Kong already carrying substantial debt from recruitment agencies. Their desire for greater financial independence therefore exists within a system that makes achieving it particularly difficult.

Seeing this context firsthand was especially important because later that day, we visited Central, where large numbers of MDWs gather on their weekly day off. Seeing people transform public spaces into places to socialize, eat, listen to music, play games, and spend time with friends gave me a very different perspective than reading statistics or legal provisions about migrant workers. It reminded me that the people participating in our workshop are not simply a population defined by a set of legal or financial vulnerabilities. They are a community with their own social networks, interests, routines, and priorities. That realization will influence how I approach the workshop. Rather than designing something that simply tells participants what they should know, I want to create something that respects their existing knowledge and gives them practical tools they can use in situations they may actually encounter.

The rest of the week focused on developing the curriculum with this goal in mind. My priority was to make the workshop interactive rather than lecture-based, particularly through simulations that would allow participants to practice identifying scams and deciding how to respond. I also met the other interns, including another Laidlaw Scholar at HKU, which gave me an opportunity to learn how someone else was approaching an independently designed project within the same broader organization.

Another major learning experience came from attending the Chicago Booth NGO Leadership Conference at the University of Chicago's Hong Kong campus. With more than 100 nonprofit leaders and board members attending, the conference exposed me to organizations and leaders whose experiences were very different from my own. Sessions on nonprofit business models, management, AI integration, and sustainable funding made me think about my project beyond the immediate workshop. Even a well-designed educational intervention depends on the organizational structures and relationships that allow it to reach people consistently. Hearing other leaders discuss how they built and sustained their organizations expanded my understanding of what nonprofit leadership can look like.

There were also several things that did not go smoothly. My transition to Hong Kong was more difficult than I anticipated. This was my first time traveling and living abroad completely on my own, and I underestimated how disorienting the first few days would feel. Language was one of the clearest challenges. Although I speak Mandarin, Cantonese is the dominant language in Hong Kong, and choosing whether to begin a conversation in English or Mandarin was sometimes surprisingly complicated. Younger people were often more responsive to English, while some older people spoke Mandarin, but I could not always know which approach would be most appropriate. These experiences made me much more conscious of the relationship between language, identity, and place. I also realized that having some linguistic ability is not the same as being able to navigate a new linguistic environment confidently.

The values most visible in my leadership this week were Curiosity, Humility, and Determination. Curiosity was particularly important because I needed to resist assuming that my pre-arrival research gave me a complete understanding of MDWs' experiences. Humility was closely connected to this: I was entering a community and context that I did not fully understand, and my role was initially much more about listening and learning than leading. At the same time, Determination was necessary as I adjusted to living independently in an unfamiliar environment while continuing to move the project forward.

There was also some tension between being fast and being curious. I arrived wanting to make immediate progress on the workshop, but the more I learned during the first few days, the more I recognized that moving too quickly could lead me to design a workshop around assumptions rather than the actual needs of participants. In this context, slowing down was not a lack of progress. It was part of doing the work responsibly.

The character dimensions that were most tested were humility, courage, and humanity. Humility meant recognizing what I did not know. Courage appeared in smaller, everyday moments: navigating an unfamiliar city alone, communicating across a language barrier, and putting myself in situations where I did not feel fully comfortable. Humanity was especially important in thinking about participants as individuals rather than as a target population for an intervention. I needed to understand their circumstances without reducing their experiences to the problems our workshop was designed to address.

I relied most heavily on the people and process leadership capacities this week. Because the workshop depends on collaboration with EmpowerU and my supervisor, building relationships and understanding expectations were essential. At the same time, I began turning a broad goal of "fraud prevention" into a concrete curriculum with specific activities and simulations. I felt most stretched by having to do both at once: learn a new environment and organization while simultaneously taking ownership over a project that I had initiated myself.

My role shifted throughout the week. Initially, I was primarily a learner, listening to participants and nonprofit leaders. As the week progressed, I became more of a facilitator and project designer as I began shaping the workshop curriculum. I think that progression was appropriate. One of my biggest takeaways is that leadership does not necessarily mean entering a new environment with immediate answers. Sometimes it means creating enough space to understand the context before deciding what action is actually useful.

One behavioral adjustment I will make next week is to build more deliberate opportunities for feedback into the curriculum development process rather than waiting until the workshop is finished to test whether it works. Specifically, I will seek input from my supervisor and the EmpowerU team on whether our scenarios are realistic and culturally appropriate before finalizing them. My goal is to workshop curiosity and humility by treating feedback not as a final evaluation of my work, but as part of the design process itself.