It’s been about 3 weeks since my last post. A lot has happened since then. We have already finished our project and I’m back to Singapore.
Work was intense. We spent the 2nd and 3rd week of April interviewing more clients - the kids, a New Zealand pioneer youth social entrepreneur, Paula Sorsona, a board member of Puerta 18, Laura Benbenaste, the founder of Puerta 18 as well as doing team discussion and research.
· In our discussion and brainstorming sessions, we came up with the Kid’s Wheel – where the kids are the center of Puerta 18 where they have unique identity from which they can utilize to grow and expand from.
· We also started a a WIKI page for Puerta 18, which they can refer to for the internal information like: visions, missions, operation guidelines and work strategies.
· The SAP team analyzed Puerta 18‘s current offerings and created a menu of ‘‘sponsorable units“ (size of funding required, frequency of sponsorship and staff requirement ) – and from this, created a process to evaluate potential sponsors and map them to sponsorable units.
· Created standard monthly report templates which Puerta 18 can use to conduct their monthly meetings, this would build their business management skills.
All of these were presented to them on our last day of the project work as well as in a manual guidebook, which they can refer to in future.
With the final 2 days left, we presented our scope of work to Puerta 18 and a closing ceremony at SAP Argentina office.
My Thoughts :
This has been much of a learning experience for me and I felt lost at times and not aligned with the team on their thinking. The more I felt I need to contribute, the more stressful I became. However, this came to another light when unexpectedly, I experienced “breakthrough” in the work. As you know from previously post, mate drinking is a art and culture of Argentina. I learnt to make mate and was the mate master (serving the mate to the team) for a couple of times. At first, I was lost and made a bit of mess at the Puerta 18 pantry. Some of the youths taught me the finer skills of mate making and I chatted with some of them who could speak English and just on the last weekday, Sophia, a youth from Puerta 18, gave me a box of mate from her home country, Paraguay! Somehow my anxietiesfor the last 2 weeks all dropped. After all, Social Sabbatical is not only about work, it is about connection with the locals, the clients and touching them.
I learnt to categorize and dissect information collected and to expand on the ideas and to think strategically and structurally, which I seldom do in the office. I also did a lot of work on Power Point, Google drive, Excel and Word and most of all, movies making, which is new to me. I can now show my videos and pictures of the past 4 weeks in my newly acquired skills on imovies – links below:
Of course, all work without fun makes a bored Janice. For the weekends, some of us went to Iguazu Waterfalls. Another weekend was spent exploring around the town where Tina (another member of the Los Buenos team) and I checked out the biggest mall, to the best hotel in town and of course, visited the cartoon icon, Malfada statue. It was a relaxing, fun and I clocked many steps ! Last Sunday at Argentina was spent at Carolina’ (Pyxera ‘s coordinator) house having a nice bbq Argentina style or asado lunch !
I want to thank Rob and Kathrin (my Puerta 18 teammates) for their patience and guidance. I also want to thank Tina for all the support she has given me in the past few weeks here in Argentina. I was sometimes very anxious and she listens and gave me good advice. It is good to find a friend in another part of country!
