Day 28 - The End of the Begining

Bags are left unattended on the parking lot, food is left unattended on the tables, friendships are suspended in time, unfinished, just started.

This morning, 9 am, still confused by the remains of a few hours of sleep, I see the first participant leave. Paola. The rush of bags, relatives, cars, friends, tears. And then it hits you in the face: the experience is over.

After five weeks of collaboration and the creation of a safe space, every single one of our 41 change makers will return to their respective reality. Will they resist the social pressure?  I ask myself the question as a facilitator explains how hard it will be to share their experience and the change they have been through.

This day feels surreal. We all now it has come to an end, it is in the air, but the same rituals take place. Struggle for waking up, rushed breakfast, struggle to gather the students together. I suspect they are trying to slow time down, trying to avoid the inevitable separation. Without each other’s physical support, determination will be challenged.

As we sit down in our last family session, our “Chilaquiles” seem to dread the reflection that is expected from the them. It will probably take them several weeks if not months to digest the amount of information that was given to them in these four weeks. Each of them was touched by something different and they will take this individual experience with them. Saul was inspired by his community service as much as Adriana found her direction during her Social Issue Activity.

An adequate reflexion of the courses content: a source of information and inspiration for further development. Thinking about the future, I can’t help but wonder how we will be able to reduce this experience to three weeks when they agreed they all would have needed more time. Time to prepare themselves for the transition, the resistance and the indifference.

Every issue seems so trivial in these last hours. Distance between facilitator-participant, authority, punctuality.

I remember the collage made by a group of my Visual Arts students: “It’s funny cause we’re all the same”. We are from the same generation, a youth full of hope and will to transform our realities, bring them just a bit closer to this vision we created. As we sit in the last plenary session, it seems to me that these 41 participants are one step ahead of us. As a facilitator, I chose to support Patricio Provencio’s initiative and contribute to it with my input. It is his vision we all worked towards and, with this vision in mind, we gave all we could. Thinking of the open day and the presentation of the social projects, I find myself confronted with the conclusion that for the time being I do not have the strength to initiate such a project in my own community. We all have a lot to learn form these 41 young adults who decided to act upon their society, despite of the fear. I know the memory of the nervous and excited faces will accompany me once I decide to engage on this same path.

Today is a sunny day. Sititng in a living room in Mexico City, I am ready to start the next part of my journey. Destination: Oaxaca, Chiapas. Ready to discover this country that 41 teenagers are so eager to change for the better. In this same morning sun, I know a majority of our participants are sitting in a classroom, reintegrating the immutable routine of schooldays. Hope that the changed they have gone through will be contagious. Hope that it will spread like a disease and become a pandemic. As the mother of a friend said on the way back to Mexico City, maybe only two of them will carry their project through, but for each awareness risen, our common vision is expanding. I have faith that none of the 41 participants will forget the lessons learnt during these four weeks and even when projects encounter too much resistance, I believe our lives have now taken a certain direction and no one could put us off this track.

I think time has now come to close this chapter. The task of writing the last blog entry was my burden. I could have used more time to draw reflections our of this condensed experience, but I realize that I would never get to the bottom of my emotions. I didn’t mention the tears, the cries, and embraces exchanged. I didn’t talk about the promises that were made. These emotions were theirs, ours and so should it remain.

A mountain of challenges is awaiting each and everyone of us, the road ahead will be filled with obstacles. Skepticism, conservatism, pessimism, close-mindedness, racism, discrimination. But we have faith, we do not stand alone.

Catherine Ador - Norway/ Switzerland (AC '09-'11)

Day 27 - Hope for the Future

Though tempered with the sadness, it’s a great joy to see this program achieve its conclusion. It’s been only a month, and a quick one at that, but I don’t think I overstate myself in saying this project has been an incredible sequence of events, and for me, personally, quite an emotional experience. Through this program, I’ve seen a lot of Mexico. I’ve witnessed this country’s horrifying diversity, extreme wealth, crushing poverty, radiant joy, desperation, and as I said in my first entry, these, this country’s many faces, compile the paradox that makes it so beautiful. As I also said in my first entry, this perfect paradox is brilliantly characterized by the complexity of the people, and as such the participants I’ve had the privilege to work with haven’t yet ceased to impress me, with their passion, young wisdom and hope. They’re very obviously teenagers, I should admit, and their natural spirit of rebellion can be at times tough to teach at, especially when it’s ten in the morning and the class is absolutely unresponsive because they didn’t sleep at all the night before. But I’ve seen in them such bold brave souls that I can’t help be let my teacher’s frustration resolve into admiration, particularly this week as they took the spirit of the course into their own hands with their work on their own social develop projects, the final step of Integrando a Mexico’s mission to allow the complex brilliance of this country to become its own savior.

This week, we led the participants through the process of creating a project for social change, and the curriculum, quick but concise, proved quite effective. Participants were divided into groups and led through brainstorming sessions meant to draw out their interests and potential project ideas; they were then individually supported in the creation of a vision statement outlining their goal for the future of their community, a list of long term objectives, a list of short term actions leading up to each individual objective and a mission statement that suggests in a few words how these objectives’ respective actions leads toward the vision. Participants were also taught how to organize a team, fundraising techniques and other relevant management techniques like strategies for risk assessment and project sustainability. The week concluded this Saturday with an open day where participants were able to present to an audience of friends and family summaries of the workshops they’d participated in, and in conclusion, their project plans.

 As a conclusion to our project, I found the open day a truly satisfying success. The participants shared their nearly finalized project plans and most if not all were thoroughly impressive not only for their thoroughness but for their strength in passion and rigor. Some  participants intend to fight for solidarity and national identity with work in elementary and secondary schools, where workshops everything from anti-bullying to artistic expression are intended to act as tools for the development of self-awareness, individual identity, creativity and constructive interaction with the community. Others want to focus on marginalized communities, such as indigenous groups or immigrants, and will strive to spread their stories amidst the centralized Mexican community with the hopes of generating empathy and acceptance. Others intend attack social issues that augment such socio-cultural conflicts by focusing on a community in their home state and attacking issues like poverty and illiteracy directly.

I was particularly excited by two projects from the latter group planned by participants I had in both my poverty workshop and project development workshop were. One will begin with workshops teaching literacy skills to both build trust between community and project facilitators, and prepare their project participants for later workshops which will provide further academic support for the children of these families and resource management training for the adults. The other, more specifically, will attempt to act as an advocate for microfinance in its respective community, to bring both resources and a sense of empowerment to local famlilies living below the poverty line. The project hopes to raise awareness within the local banking community, perhaps even creating a link with the microfinance bank Fundación Realidad which in partnership with the international microfinance web acting through the website www.kiva.org, relays funds from donors around the world to communities like those in Guerrero, where with project will take place.  It will also attempt to culture skills necessary to apply these micro-loans for progress and sustainability, and possibly, as a final goal, encourage the sustainable living technique of the permaculture movement as such application.

Projects like these were particularly inspirational for me, as a facilitator, because in addition to watching these young people, in their projects, embrace, with such intention, real hope, I was also able to watch these individuals, as my students and friends, apply the ideas we’d discussed for the last four weeks, turning theory into reality. With the two mentioned projects, I watched participants take ideas from the consumerism awareness activities and discussions from workshop sessions on poverty in Mexico, and apply them to their strategies for change, planning to teach literacy as a strategy against Oscar Lewis’ ‘Culture of Poverty’ and the application of Muhammad Yunus’ microfinance (covered in the poverty workshop) and permaculture as a dual strategy to bring funds into a community made capable for change and simultaneously leading this community away from the culture of consumerism so often exhibited by the economic class they will hopefully enter. Seeing this as a facilitator was an incredible experience, as I can think to myself, somewhat egotistically, that I contributed to the formation of this powerful plan for action. But beyond this selfish satisfaction, these projects leave me in awe and admiration, for in addition to mastering the concepts covered in our workshops, these participants have plans to actually apply these ideas, something I, personally, can only hope to do in the future. These participants embody a spirit of both hope and action, which, as this project ends, gives me great hope for the work that is to come.

This, of course, is one of the most important parts of our project: success of Integrando a México will not, of course, be measured simply by the size of the dreams presented at our open day. Rather, the defining characteristic will be the number of projects that are actually attempted. Many projects seem much too good to be true, so it’s easy to be skeptical of some of the plans, with school starting this week and the all too discouraging resistance to change yet to be tested. But I choose to believe our participants will at least try.  As I’ve written for the past four weeks, I’ve met beautiful people in my time in Mexico, and if there’s one thing we’ve achieved in this small community of social entrepreneurs, it’s a sense of hope for their hope. As I’ve said before, these young people understand the painful paradox that is this country, they’ve experienced it first hand, and yet they’ve somehow maintained a belief in a better future matched with the willfulness to carry it through. With this as their grounding, I believe that they like our project’s leader Patricio Provencio, can match passion with reality and strive for real hope in their future.

With this as encouragement, I watched the first of the participants depart for home with a sense of satisfaction and pride. I don’t mean to take credit for the participants’ initiative, nor for their spirit, we had an incredible group, and much of our work merely helped them on their way. But to see them leave so hopeful and simply excited, I can’t help but think this project achieved at least the beginnings of its goals. We wanted to culture a mindset of openness, hope and readiness for action all necessary for a successful social entrepreneur, and these participants embody this mindset. Even if some of their projects fail, the raw energy that drives their present will for action doesn’t seem likely to die out, and until they finally realize the beginnings of the change they want to see, I have faith this energy will continue to motivate them. If this is true, we’ve achieved all we could have hoped for, and in this way, I think my fellow facilitators would agree, we have reason to feel content.