The third week of my trip in Colombia featured a ramping up of our project to include the future plans to organize our student volunteers. The week began with training on research and design thinking, and we also had to opportunity to search for collaborations with the university administration itself.

Thanks to a meeting with the dean of the business school at UPB, we were able to re-assess our project scope and direction to be oriented more towards our partner organization: El Derecho a No Obedecer. Creating the superstructure for student group organization in a university without any prior infrastructure for this purpose was revealed to be too daunting of a task for our group to overcome in the limited time we were in Colombia. Perhaps if the project schedule began prior to our arrival in Medellin, conversing with our organizations earlier in the summer and coming with an established direction/plan, we would be able to do this. Projects inevitably encounter roadblocks and prompt opportunities to rethink, and I was grateful for the resilience of my fellow teammates in rethinking the scope of our project. 

Beyond the administrative hurdles our project had to overcome, we also took the opportunity to visit the Memory House Museum in the city that featured exhibitions on the Colombian conflict. It was a sobering experience to see the first-hand accounts, photos, and recollections of decades of civil strife in the country, and it left me with a deeper understanding of the resilience of the city of Medellin and its inhabitants. 

My third week in Medellin challenged my preconceptions about our project and my personal perception of the Colombian civil conflict. It left me inspired to apply new directions and perspectives in the coming weeks.