Dear all,

This week has been one of the most exhausting of my lifetime. On Wednesday, we met with Gineth from Genera Territorios and found out that essentially the entire curriculum of our chatbot, Izcalli, needed to be scrapped. 

I agree with a lot of the feedback--answers were overly verbose and the structure failed to fully accommodate self-pacing. However, none of us were enthused at the turnaround time of 5 days for a complete recoding of the app and hefty edits to our other deliverables. 

We had a good cry. We took a walk to the fountain by the Alvaro Obregon metro and let out all of the emotions--the frustration, the anxiety, the overwhelm. For me, the shame. Then we got to work. After some disagreement between Gineth and her translator, Krista, on how important the adaptations were, we met with Kení and Aide to decide what percentage of the changes we could realistically implement. We ended up doing all of it.

Liam and I re-coded the VoiceFlow, in what proved to be a grueling eight hours of work for each of us. I built Mermaid files for easier inspection of the flowchart's underlying logic. Annie and Eve edited everything else--the transfer guide, the user manual, and every other tiny annoying deliverable on our list. I truly cannot overstate what troopers my teammates have been. Thank you so much for doing your parts exceptionally and being so supportive, so I could focus on the amorphous, ever changing technological demands of building the chatbot. Slowly but surely, we chipped away.

The night before our presentation (Tuesday morning), I began the process of downloading the chatbot into WhatsApp. I believed, given what I'd heard about the software, that this was a 15 minute installation. It turned out that this process required not one, not two, but three different applications with their own API keys and accounts, requiring a careful synchronization of steps and settings to connect. After spending three hours attempting to run the installation using different accounts and combinations of dozens of settings, I ran out of tokens and hit a wall. I paid them and tried again, to no avail. Every suggested path I used returned different error messages or just froze. I was terrified. Kení warned us that important stakeholders from other NGOs were attending and it might not be worth their time unless I could display it in WhatsApp.

I was ready to burst. I'd already let out some nautical language when I got the nineteenth Webhook URL token verification error. All of this work for nothing? Just to fail because of a bug in a software that I should have anticipated? Because I'm never fast enough. I am never hard enough, but always too hard. Because I always take up too much space. People protect me. I suffocate them. I'm a man. I will never be fully engaged in anything, and no one will admit it because my very hormones and mannerisms manipulate them. My neurodivergence was accommodated because I am a man. I am sheltered because I am a man. I will never be held to the standards of others, which means I live up to no standard at all.

Growth. I'm here to grow. I plunged hours and dollars into the transatlantic journey to Oxford to grow. I made friends in vulnerable places before I had the requisite social skills to manage complex high-control dynamics I found myself in so that we could grow. I begged to learn Latin and algebra as an 8 year old before I could tie my shoes or handle unfamiliar music, to grow. My parents gently exposed me to new sensations and challenges, rather than conditioning me into submission by force-feeding me liver powder, so I could "grow." Growth. A thousand silences, borne mostly by women, ten thousand smiling patiences of the infinite so the finite can define their puny artificial walls against the outside world a little more comfortably. Growth at the cost of normality. Just to fall short in the same way halfway across the world? Because there was never anything real that I was contributing underneath. 

And then it was silent again. I took a deep breath as my heart settled precariously into place. We set up the slideshow. We began.

~~~

Our audience could not have been happier, including the highest official in Oxfam in Mexico and a powerful public-sector bureaucrat, asking when they could use Izcalli in their own work. The voiceflow was no issue at all. Gineth was delighted and proud.

I've agreed to stick around as a volunteer for the next few months virtually while they roll this out, to address any technological continuity issues (and, obviously, solve the WhatsApp problem). One of the attendees will be speaking at the International Development Society back in Oxford this fall. On a lark, I reached out to an academic I greatly admire in linguistics whom I will be helping with a literature review he's doing on Uto-Aztecan. I had a fascinating conversation with Evie about the proper place of gender in politics. I managed to eat an entirely unfamiliar cuisine. All is well.

In terms of virtues this week, absolutely it was Drive, but I also felt Integrity and Collaboration came in clutch, especially as I navigated disagreements with my teammates and advisors while preserving our unity and commitment to one another's wellbeing. In terms of Changemaker Values, I think it has to be Determined. Whatever the flaws in the approach, my team pursued our goals without hesitation and built a truly usable deliverable as a result. I couldn't be prouder.

Best,

Peter