Good Days

Thursdays are always awesome. Why? Because there are PEOPLE in the office! Thursday is the day of meetings and I love sharing our ideas and leading the meetings and making so much progress. Plus Thursday is the day of my two favourite teams!

In the morning decided to stop by the bank to get some extra cash for Curitiba tomorrow. So I got off the bus one stop early and headed over there. On the way back I had to pass the little café, so I decided to stop and have some tea. They didn’t have any of my usual apple cinnamon (I order it as “cha maça por favor” [apple tea please]), but I had a very nice mint tea. I was also a little hungry, so I ordered a bread thing with three cheeses inside. It was really good. Then I made my way to the office. I turned on the computer, updated my blog and answered some emails, and by then a good part of the morning was gone and people were starting to arrive.

I have attended the last two education meetings, and I think I’m hooked. There are only 5 of us, but everyone is so passionate and dedicated to this project. I love it!!!! I had a chat with Diogo about it on the weekend so I went into this meeting with a strong agenda and a lot of ideas. We had a really good talk about what exactly the project will be, what the goals are, why companies and schools should be interested in this project, and what are we going to do to make it happen. This group is still an “Interest Group” and not a full project yet, but honestly they are doing much better than the two “projects”. We are now ready to begin developing a proposal. Man, I have never been so excited to write a proposal in my life! I really hope this project can be successful. It has a lot of potential, but one main challenge that may hold us back. Can you guess? Language.

I guess I could explain a little about how these projects work for the non-AIESECers reading this. A PBoX is a Project Based on Exchange. It involves partnerships with companies and organizations to facilitate a large number of exchanges which are centred around a specific issue. Our issue is education here in Sao Paulo, which I have learned so much about these last few weeks. Our other issues are environmental sustainability in conjunction with corporate responsibility and entrepreneurship. The education project aims to directly impact the disparity between public and private schools here in São Paulo. The idea is that we bring students from both public and private schools together as a team to work on a project. What that project is could vary, depending on the interests of the team members. The Project Manager of this team will be a trainee from another country. They would work directly with the kids and give them the skills and training they need to create, develop and execute a project. The kids would get to work with an international, so there would be cultural sharing as well. The kids would develop essential skills that their schools might not be offering them. Plus they would be developing networks and a better understanding of the situation and students from the different types of schools. Ideally, social discrimination would decrease amongst the participants. There are still some details to be worked out, but I really want this to happen. It would be such an amazing experience for those kids. The other projects have objectives based around their specific issue, but all PboXes aim to impact a social or economic issue. In Canada, PBoXes have always failed. I don’t think many Canadian companies are prepared to support this kind of a program. Here in Brazil it is very different. The need is great, and so the companies are willing to sponsor programs on a larger scale.

Back to the day! After that meeting, which I left feeling very inspired, I had my infrastructure meeting. We are starting to produce results and my team is really great. I made some plans to help them with their tasks and we decided to try to have everything done within two weeks. I’m really excited to see the end results. The taskforce isn’t a major project, but it’s fun and I think the members are learning and enjoying it. My infrastructure meeting was a riot today, we ended up spending half the meeting laughing.

By then we were all starving, so a bunch of us went for lunch. The Bandejon was closed (another strike) so we went to a little buffet restaurant near the physics building. It was really good. And it was so nice to do something all together. I’d have to say my biggest complaint about Sao Paulo is that it’s so big it makes it really hard for people to get together. Even just going out for dinner together is a major thing because for some people it could take an hour or two to get there. So whenever we have a chance to hang out together it’s cool. It also doesn’t help that some people have classes in the morning, some in the afternoon, and some in the evening. So I might see quite a few people because I’m there all day, but they don’t see each other. Each period has its regulars. Maira and Iza and Koba and a few others are always there in the morning. In evenings are my evening hermits, the guys who come and hang out for hours but never seem to do any work :P Jorge, Fernando, Renato and Rubinho. The others are more sporadic. But getting everyone together in one place at one time is a big challenge. In Victoria we will just spontaneously say “lets all go for dinner!” Call a few people and 20 minutes later we are all there. I didn’t really appreciate that until now.

Once we got back to the office, I helped Renata to make sugar cube envelopes! It was a lot of fun, and we got into a discussion with Diogo about the best way to mass produce them. I also taught Maira how to do meeting output properly and talked to her about some other events we are working on organizing. Then I talked on MSN for a while with Igor and Rita, getting everything organized for tomorrow. I sent a few more emails and then finally decided to head home.

I wish all my days could be this good. Unfortunately they aren’t, but I have to work towards making my time alone in the office more productive. I always seem to get so much more done when I’m working with other people, so I love the days when we have lots of meetings and discussions. But working alone is something I will work on.

I’m really excited about going to Curitiba tomorrow. It should be awesome! Then next week is Rio and I might be going to visit another extension the week after that. I also received an email from the recycling people. I might not be able to go visit them for another two weeks, but hopefully we can figure something out. I really hope I can make it there to learn about their program.