This week marked a shift in my LIA experience. With the anti-scam workshop completed, my work became increasingly centered on Justice Without Borders (JWB), particularly as we prepared for the first Healthcheck the following week. At the same time, my casework and research into the Hong Kong legal system gave me a deeper understanding of the structural challenges facing migrant domestic workers and the limits of what nonprofit organizations can address.

A major accomplishment this week was helping finalize the Healthcheck survey and preparing for its first co-creation session with migrant domestic workers. We narrowed down the proposed survey items and helped organize the logistics of the session, including developing specific facilitating questions, preparing translation materials for the primarily Indonesian participants, and reserving the necessary space. I appreciated that the process was designed to involve MDWs directly in shaping the survey rather than assuming that an outside organization could determine the most important questions on its own. The logistical work was less visible than delivering a workshop, but it made the community engagement possible.

My casework also became more substantive this week. I developed a full chronology for a case that was more than five years old but involved alleged worker abuses extending across more than 20 years. Working through such a long history was eye-opening. Organizing the case required me to distinguish between different events, documents, and stages of the dispute while understanding how they fit into a broader narrative. It also made the persistence of some of these problems much more concrete to me. What initially appeared to be an individual legal case reflected challenges that could persist for years.

Through discussions with supervisors and other interns, I began to understand more clearly the structural limitations of the Hong Kong labor system for MDWs. The legal aid work I was observing was often necessarily reactive: organizations could help workers respond to wrongful termination, abuse, wage disputes, or other violations after they occurred, but had much less ability to change the underlying conditions that made workers vulnerable in the first place. The combination of restrictive employment arrangements, limited pathways for social mobility, and workers' dependence on their employment relationships meant that even successful legal interventions could not necessarily address the larger socioeconomic constraints facing MDWs.

This realization also caused me to reconsider my own workshop. I still believe that the financial and fraud-prevention education we provided was valuable, particularly because MDWs can be especially vulnerable to financial exploitation. However, I became more conscious of the limits of such an intervention. Teaching someone how to recognize a scam can reduce one source of vulnerability, but it cannot fundamentally change the economic conditions that make financial security difficult to achieve. I found this tension important: meaningful work does not necessarily have to solve a structural problem to be worthwhile, but leadership requires being honest about what an intervention can and cannot accomplish.

The values most visible in my leadership this week were Curiosity, Humility, and Determination. Curiosity pushed me to understand the broader systems behind the individual cases I was seeing. Humility was important in recognizing that I could not approach these problems with simple solutions, particularly as someone relatively new to the Hong Kong legal and social context. Determination was evident in the detailed work required to prepare the Healthcheck and construct a chronology from decades of information.

The character dimensions most tested were humanity, integrity, humility, and justice. The case chronology especially required integrity and attention to detail because small errors or omissions could distort a client's story. Humanity and justice became more prominent as I considered the gap between what individual legal interventions could accomplish and the larger conditions facing the community. I had to resist turning frustration with those limitations into the assumption that the work itself was ineffective.

My leadership capacities this week were primarily process and people. Preparing the Healthcheck required careful coordination of logistics, materials, and facilitation, while the co-creation model required thinking about how to create an environment where participants could meaningfully contribute. I also felt stretched by working on problems where there was no obvious solution. Earlier in my LIA, leadership had often meant creating something and seeing it succeed. This week, it meant learning how to contribute meaningfully even when the larger problem was much bigger than the intervention.

My research into the Hong Kong legal system also continued alongside planning for the second Street Law workshop, which would introduce high school students to the law. Comparing the Hong Kong system with the U.S. legal system made me more aware of how strongly my own assumptions about courts, legal rights, and institutions are shaped by the system I am most familiar with. Rather than treating those differences as simply better or worse, I found myself asking how different institutional structures shape the kinds of legal education and advocacy that are possible.

My main behavioral adjustment going forward is to ask more explicitly about the intended scope and limitations of an intervention before evaluating its success. I want to continue developing humility and justice by distinguishing between what I can realistically contribute and what requires much broader institutional change. Next week, during the Healthcheck, I will focus on listening carefully to participants' priorities rather than entering the session with assumptions about what the survey should ultimately find.