Well i am now three days from heading off to South Africa. (Lord willing if this hurricane doesn’t destroy the whole eastern seaboard) and have been back in the States going on three weeks now. It doesn’t seem that long though, mostly because for the middle week I was in Tennessee for my cousins wedding, so I haven’t actually been in one place for more than four days yet. The transition back to life in the States is always difficult after traveling abroad and i still feel like i haven’t had time to completely acclimate to life in the States (Reverse culture shock has always been worse than culture shock for me). Since being home many people have asked about the organization i worked with so i wanted to share this video which breaks what they do down a little bit more…..
I was extremely lucky and blessed to meet so many people this summer. Its weird to think that the decision to go to Mexico was more of an afterthought. I simply wanted to make the best use of my time before leaving for South Africa. I could either spend the rest of the summer working at a coffee shop and hanging out in Boston or see what this experience had to offer me. I am so thankful that i chose to go for many reasons. First, the people i met were amazing and i now can’t imagine if i had never met them. I had so many conversations with so many people on so many topics and learned so much and at the same time can say that I formed real lasting friendships with a number of the people i met. Secondly, so many doors were opened through this experience that just gave me more options for my future whether that might be returning to Mexico, connecting with other Servant Partners sites, going back to school,… who knows? Lastly, I learned so many things about myself and God that i don’t think i could have learned in the same ways if I had stayed in Boston.
On the other hand, this experience did make me appreciate some things about the United States, especially its diversity. In Mexico, even in the middle of the city, the people were…well…Mexican. I am in no way knocking the Mexican people, they are a wonderful and beautiful people but i found myself missing being able to walk down the street and seeing people of different races and backgrounds. While this diversity here does cause its share of problems it also provides a richness that is missing in some of the more homogeneous places in the world.
I miss Mexico but am now excited for my next adventure in South Africa. It will be different but i am confident it will be good and I will continue to try to keep you updated while i am there. While there I will be working with the Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF), the largest microfinance institution in South Africa, on their operations side learning how to operate a microfinance bank. I will be starting in Tzaneen, Limpopo in the northeast corner for a bit of training before going to the Eastern Cape (southeast corner, the other intern is currently in East London so im thinking i might be there as well) and possibly traveling around to some of their other offices as well. SEF started in Limpopo but is now expanding across South Africa and I will be helping to ensure that their operations remain standard in the expansion areas during my time there.
I will leave you with this last cultural gem of some of the super sweet dance moves of the InterVarsity students in Mexico City…
It has been 9 days since my last post. Since then i have left my friends in Chimalhucán and traveled back to the States. My last few days in Mexico were packed with once in a lifetime experiences and my travels back were safe and smooth. The reverse culture shock that always follows an experience like this has set in but is for some reason lessened because i know I am traveling to South Africa in less than 20 days. Since returning home my time has been spent trying to rest and pull together everything that is necessary to apply for my South African visa (the application is finally in the mail). I will try to update you about what has unfolded the past nine days and let you know a bit about what is on the horizon.
It is hard to believe that it had been more than a week since Emprende ended (and it is slightly strange to be writing about it from my couch back in Boston so far removed). Last Tuesday the teams had to have all of their sales completed, their business plans typed up, and had to present about their business to the three judges and a larger than expected audience. We ended up moving the location of our last meeting (a decision made the day of) from out normal location in the offices on the ground floor of our apartment to the large office space in the community center to accommodate all the guests. The participants ended up presenting in front of more than 30 people including the judges, most of the employees of TUI, a team from Servant Partners who was there for the week, as well as a number of the families of the participants and other community members. I had not expected this much hype and to be honest I had a strange mixture of excitement, exhaustion, and nervousness going into the event. I was worried that the teams had not had sufficient time to prepare for the presentations (we had spent the entire day meeting with the teams finalizing their business plans and sales numbers and hadn’t been able to do a practice presentation as we had planned). I was proud of all the participants. 10 students started the program and 10 students finished the program and every student, with few exceptions, was at every meeting and on time, which i am told is a miracle within itself. All together the teams brought in nearly 5000 pesos in revenue through their businesses, enough to cover many of the costs of the program. It was cool to be part of the development of a project that has the potential to be financially self- sustainable in the near future. The participants were able to keep the profits they made beyond a certain goal (which i honestly thought was not going to be achievable) and two team took home profit. In addition the winning team and the best salesperson received a monetary prize. Here is a video shot during the announcement of the winners….
The best part of the program, and the real prize, is that the program is going to continue as a real business run by some of the students of Emprende who will be chosen based on an application process and their performance in Emprende. These students will be hired by TUI and paid on a commission based system to continue with business development projects with the oversight of TUI.
I thought that after Emprende was over i would get a chance to rest, relax and enjoy my last days in Mexico. While they were enjoyable they were not exactly restful. That Wednesday we ended up attending two lunches and then cooking for 20 people. First we had TUI’s end of the summer celebration lunch where we reflected on all we had done that summer. Albert, Dave, and I then went to one of our friend’s houses for another lunch. It was great to be able to get to know him better, meet his family and get one last home cooked Mexican meal. We then made out way to the market to buy our ingredients for the meal we were planning for that night. We wanted to thank all the people who had cooked for us the whole summer by cooking for them and also invited some other people we wanted to thank; it ended up being about 20 people. We decided to do something a little different and serve them Asian food. We made bulgogi , chicken broccoli stir-fry, fried rice, white rice, and chocolate chip cookies. It was quite the production trying to cook all that in a small kitchen. Here is a little video of what the process looked like and a picture of them hopefully enjoying their food…..
On Thursday we slept in a bit and then traveled into the city for the last time. There we started in Mercado, the largest market i have ever been in, to find some knock-off soccer jerseys, walked to the Zócalo then walked down the Paseo de la Reforma, the nicest part of Mexico City all the way to Chapultepec where the zoo and a nice park is. We then walked a little further to make it easier to catch the metro. All told we walked about 8.5 miles and didn’t get back home till about 10:30pm. It was great to be able to see soo much of the city in one day….although my legs were a bit sore the next few days.
On Friday we then woke up at 6:30 to start our trek to see some Aztec pyramids in Teotihucan. While we were obviously tired, it was definitely worth the trip. We had to wake up so early because we were meeting the team that was out at the retreat center from Servant Partners and had to navigate our way there on three buses by ourselves, a trip neither of us had ever made.We made it there safe and on time and it was cool to be able to hang out with the servant partners team for the day and hear their stories from all over the world. I also learned that Servant Partners has a site in South Africa so i hope to be able to hook up with them during my time there.
The rest of the day was spent finalizing some Emprende stuff then meeting with the director and the judges about the next steps for Emprende. After that meeting we then headed to one of our student’s house for our goodbye dinner as we were leaving the next morning. Actually, the whole organization was leaving the next day for a conference in California which is why our celebration lunch was on Wednesday. It was difficult to say goodbye to these friends i have made. I did not expect to make such good friends in only 5 weeks and with such a language barrier but I did and I will never forget the impact they had on my life and all they taught me. Hopefully one day i can return (and i can speak more Spanish) but right now I am ready for what comes next in South Africa.
I can’t believe i am now in my final week in Mexico. On one hand, the time has gone by so quickly that it doesn’t feel like I’ve already been here for more than four weeks. On the other, as i reflect on all that I’ve experienced and the relationships I’ve built, it seems like I’ve been here for months not weeks.
This past week marked the end of the summer courses that TUI runs (except Emprende, my entrepreneurial class, which will end this Tuesday). The past few weeks have been incredibly busy for TUI with so many programs taking place including Emprende, a sports clinic for teens (where i have been coaching soccer), a number of youth camps in different neighborhoods run by three different 1 week short term volunteer teams, graffiti courses, Albert’s dance class, English classes, and art classes in addition to TUI’s normal program load. For another good update of the past few weeks you can visit Albert’s blog here. Coming into this experience I did not anticipate this much going on and thought the majority of my time would be working with Emprende but it was a pleasent surprise to be able to coach soccer in the mornings as well as help out with the other sports including taekwondo, basketball, and fronton (a popular game here that resembles handball). The last week of taekwondo the kids actually starting sparring and the last day Albert and I didn’t want to miss out on the action and decided to give it a try…..
The second video isn’t in slow motion we are just extremely tired….the altitude effects you more than you would think….and we both almost passed out after this…..
Albert may have gotten the best of me in the fight but he got a pretty nasty looking bruise on his left elbow from blocking my kicks. Although, I did have a slight limp for the next day or two from the bruise his elbow left on the top of my foot.
Through these programs I was able to meet many of the teens in the neighborhood (about 30 participated in the sports camp plus other youth who were just around) by hanging out on the sports field for 3-4 hrs every morning. Now as I walk down the street I am usually bound to run into one of these youth and be greeted by the handshake of choice in this area which makes me feel like a little less of an outsider. The other amazing part of the last couple weeks has been the lunch times. One of the families in the neighborhood provided a home-cooked lunch for the short-term teams that were here and Albert and I were invited to join them. I think half of the reason they invited us so adamantly was because they didn’t trust us to feed ourselves well enough after getting food poisoning my first weekend here. Although it was clearly food poisoning, we still get jokingly lectured for eating too many tacos and that being the reason we got sick. Some of my best memories of the trip have happened during those lunch times and i am extremely thankful for that family. Every day they prepared an appetizer, an always delicious authentic Mexican main course, and even made special drinks for 20-30 people sitting at three long tables in their dining room overflowing into their living room, and always offered seconds, thirds, and fourths. Looking back, the other cool aspect of these meals was how i gradually became more accepted as part of this community. Mostly because of language, the American short term team usually sat on one end while the Mexicans sat on the other. During the first week I spent most of the meal times with the short term team getting to know them. However, as the weeks went on I found myself sitting at the other end of the table with my Mexican friends. This not only helped me with my Spanish but really made me feel like i was part of the community here and allowed me to get to know the family better. They always tried to include me in the conversation as much as possible and were very patient as i tried to communicate. The kids in the family even took the time to teach me some of the most important phrases to get along here including “Qué me ves” or “why are you looking at me” in a what’s your problem type of tone, to which the appropriate response is “Lo feo que te ves” loosely translated to ” you look ugly.”
Meal Time
All of this culminated in a big celebration or clausura put on by the church to celebrate and give thanks this past Saturday. Here is a video that Albert made for the opening of the clausura highlighting these different programs….
I didn’t realize how big of an event the clausura was because there had been little preparation done for it before the day of (I think mostly because there simply wasn’t enough time to plan with so much going on). All we were told was to meet at 10am Saturday morning and we knew that the event was supposed to start at 4pm. At that meeting i started to realize how big the vision was for the event was and I thought there would be no way we could pull it off. The event was to be a large open air event to take place at the end of the main road in our community where there was a dead end used by the buses to end their route. In four short hours Albert had the task of making 2-3 videos for the event and prepare for his dance routine while the rest of the team had various tasks to accomplish which included collecting chairs, tables, and tents from sites all over Chimalhucán, oversee the people we hired put up a large tent about 30 yards by 50 yards, construct a stage ourselves using only small crate boxes and a few disintegrating 2×4’s, figure out how to hang a screen for the projector from the tent and make it visible, collect and set up food for about 200+ people, construct a baptismal pool for the three people who were getting baptized, figure out a power source and set up the audio visual equipment, all while TUI’s van had broken down so we had to use an old rental manual pick-up truck which i had the excitingly terrifying privilege of driving a few times (thanks Dad for teaching me to drive a standard or else we would have been stuck!). And of course with any event like this nothing ever goes perfectly smoothly. While we had received permission from the bus operators to use the space we had never gotten permission from the municipality. So about an hour into constructing the tent and the stage the police showed up, but we were able to plead with them and argued that we were a community organization doing this for the community and they decided to let it go. Another obstacle to overcome was to get a water truck to come and fill up the baptismal pool which finally showed up right before the baptisms were supposed to take place. For a while we joked that we would have to do the baptism in the canal which was located there. If you recall, i have mentioned these canals before and they consist of a brown slowly flowing bubbling sludge from the sewage they contain. While the event did get started a bit late (which is normal around here) we did accomplish all of these tasks which I thought was not going to happen.
The event itself was amazing and I was so fortunate to be a part of it. The only hiccup was that it down poured for about half an hour in the middle of it, but that is why we had the tents, and while it was a bit distracting it was not a game ender. One highlight was Albert’s dance performance that everybody loved and even started chanting “Otra Vez” after the first go through so they did it for a second time. See it for yourself here (along with the stage we constructed)….
The other highlight was the baptisms. There is something powerful to being baptized out in public where everybody walking by could see. As the rain had stopped shortly prior, there was a rainbow resting on the mountains in the distance which provided the perfect backdrop to the baptismal pool (which was really just a small backyard swimming pool for kids made of tubing and a tarp with dolphins on it). The simplicity of it was powerful and it was clear from their testimonies that God was present there as the crown gathered around the pool and each one was dunked and brought back to life. The other cool thing was that the three people getting baptized were all students in my Emprende course which gave me a special connection to the event. All i can say is that the whole event was beautiful and i still can’t believe that we pulled it off.
So now i have 5ish more days here which will include the conclusion and announcement of the winners of Emprende as well as more exploring of the area now that we have some free time. I will try to update you with how this final week unfolds when i can. Until then enjoy another one of my favorite songs from my time here with an amazing video to match…
My name is Kevin Ryan and I graduated this past spring from Northeastern University in Boston and studied Social Entrepreneurship and Human Services. This summer I will be in Mexico City working with a community development NGO and then will be moving to South Africa in September from anywhere from 6mo-2yrs to work with the largest microfinance institution in South Africa. This is a glimpse into my mind on these travels.
Life's A Trip 