June 10th 2018

My last day in Mexico has come and I can truly say that this experience changed my life. Before leaving America, I was dragged by my routine, always extremely stressed, and many times worrying about things that do not really matter. Somehow the semester ended and I was in a plane to Puerto Vallarta, on my way to live, work, and travel with people I did not know. At that time I was just taking a leap of faith, but right now I am aware that this was the best decision I could have taken.

These weeks with Human Connections and Entreamigos proved me that in order to lead an organization to attain success it is crucial to work in a personal basis with your team to take the best out of everybody and make the functioning of the organization easier. In other words, I learned that if you get to know people, their dreams, what they are driven by, and also their strengths, as a leader you link these aspects to their daily work and positive results will come. However, this experience also showed me that to connect with people I had to connect with myself first. I got to learn about myself not only in a working environment but as a human being in my day to day life and in relation to others. I understood how past experiences have shaped who I am and had also determined my career interests.

Specifically about Human Connections, just by working with them for a month I learned so much about the structure of non-profits, the importance of having a good relationship with the community, how to take a huge industry, in this case tourism, and make it something beneficial for the locals, the value of having a diverse team to get things done, as well as, how to break differences and instead use them for the best outcome.

Furthermore, I learned profoundly about the community and the Mexican culture in general. The community we lived in is very small, since Bucerias is not a big town, but the whole environment makes you feel at home. The day before we had to leave Mexico, I realized that we already knew all the streets, how to find things, we knew many of the locals and we did not wanted to leave. Contrary to America, people there are more talkative and will always say hi to you even if you do not know them; in addition, they show more their emotions. Because of this, values such as family, honor, pride, happiness and self realization are very strong in these communities which made me gain an enormous sense of appreciation that I was losing over the years. Every single person we met, especially Human Connection partners, local entrepreneurs and the staff itself, were proud of their job and moved to share it with us.

Most of them mentioned that changing the international perspective about Mexico is one of their main goals with their businesses, since most of the foreigners would decribe the country with a lot of negativity. In this way, I believe that our project with HC built a space were visitors can see the truth about Mexican culture and realize the beauty of the communities and that they are more positive things to say about the nation rather than negative. In order words, in my opinion our work will challenge stereotypes.

Leaving Bucerias was hard, I left people that I got really closed with, a unique job and an incredible community that I have never seen before. However, even if this departure was full of sadness, it was also filled amazing feelings that create a huge desire of helping others and gratefulness for how my life is. By taking that plane back to Chicago I left a month that changed the way I see myself, others and the world itself, and gave me so much more than I expected. It gave me new skills to be a better leader, knowledge about how the real world works, a clear passion for social entrepreneurship, confidence with who I am, ten friends that I am going to see around campus and feel happy, and most importantly, tranquility and peace.