The following entry is by Larissa Ushizima, one of the students participating in the Colombia IFP this summer.
Before heading to La Merced, Pácora and Supía, the towns where each group is conducting fieldwork in Colombia, students of The New School and the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales (UAM) participated in a series of workshops and meetings during their first week in the country.
The workshops mainly focused on team building and contributed to strengthening the relationship between team members (especially among The New School and UAM students, who only met that same week). My team, for example, led a group facilitation exercise using a methodology called “tree problem.” The exercise aimed at assessing both problems and opportunities of communicating in a multicultural environment, considering that team members have different language skills in both English and Spanish. This type of workshop helped us not only to “rehearse” how to use different methodologies, but was also an opportunity to discuss ways of cooperating and guaranteeing an effective communication during the fieldwork.
Our agenda in Manizales also included meetings with the Secretary of Agriculture of the state of Caldas, the Regional Director of the Department of Social Prosperity (DPS), which is the federal entity that oversees social programs in Colombia, two Directors of the National Center for Coffee Research (Cenicafé) and a journalist of La Patria, the main newspaper in the state of Caldas. These meetings were an excellent opportunity to learn about federal and state-level programs, especially how they have been implemented in our three towns, as well as to gradually connect multiple pieces of the complex political, economic and social puzzle of rural Colombia.
You can stay up to date on all the exciting projects the students are working on by visiting the Colombia IFP Blog.
