Mexico Mission 2023

I worked for the Canadian federal government for 15 years, the last six of them at an executive level. One of the defining challenges of the work we did to advance Canadian interests was to always concern ourselves with how decisions and the processes to arrive at them might be interpreted by the general public - full transparency, akin to working in a glass house. Our work in the Church's humanitarian aid efforts here is very similar in this respect although still in its infancy, as we are helping to build and internalize accountability systems. Again, as one would expect, there are growing pains for all of us as we are creatures of habit and change can be very hard. The first couple of this year's projects have just started to roll out, quite a bit later than we had hoped. We had a meeting today to help identify potential areas of improvement. With six senior missionaries with a wealth of experience in the room. there was no shortage of suggestions and an understanding that a...

One of the graduation requirements required nationally by law for an undergraduate degree in Mexico is completing 480 hours of unpaid social service. I did mine in 1997-98 in the International Students Office at the Universidad de las Americas in San Andrés Cholula. One of my projects was to create brochures and other promotional products to help foreign students understand and successfully address and emerge from culture shock. We have been in Mexico for just over five months now and while we have lived here before, I think we are just emerging from culture shock, being able to successfully navigate through very different life/work problems with very different social tools or at least newly awakened social tools - the most valuable at the moment seems to be "hold still". About a month ago, Sister Schlachter and I were given an additional assignment in the Education Department to help organize a number of "education week" events in different places in Mexico. We rep...