Week 2 of my Leadership in Action experience in Colombia offered me a great insight into my abilities and preferences in positions of responsibility and leadership. It definitely helped that the week in itself was curated towards this sort of self-exploration, but nonetheless I am very glad I was able to take advantage of that fact. For one, our weekend trip to Guatapé – a countryside pueblo near Medellín known for its extravagant lake views and its massive inselberg eloquently named "la piedra (the rock)" – brought a lot of further self-awareness into my leadership abilities, notably through leading a successful military kayaking campaign on the lake against my fellow scholars alongside Vinay – oh! and the actual leadership activities that Daniela and Evelyn carefully put together for us, those were very insightful too. On the topic of these leadership activities, I particularly appreciated how they focused on helping us understand which aspects of our lives held the most importance for us, how those developed into our own individual understanding of what it means to lead, what results good leadership should bring, and what that looks like in the first place. I can definitely say I learnt more about myself and what type of a leader I would ideally want to become.

In addition to all of the self-growth leadership aspects of this second week, I am very happy we were able to continue exploring Medellín and, as I have now mentioned, Antioquia at large. Not only does that feed into my desire to discover more about Colombia as a country and the world, but it also allowed me to further understand the situation in the region, which is inevitably one of the main objectives of this trip. In fact, our visit to the Picacho con Futuro organisation and the opportunity to interact with the children they host was particularly fruitful for me. I appreciated the opportunity of being thrown into the local livelihood and interacting with not only the kids, but the people our age that came in to have a dance lesson with us (which, unlike many people that know me would believe, I really enjoyed). I also particularly enjoyed being able to peek out the window on numerous occasions to watch a pick up football game just next door, not necessarily an insightful or special experience on the day but I just love watching football. Regardless, I found this week to be particularly insightful and fruitful in terms of my personal development.