Staying dry and living in La Condesa
We landed in Mexico on Tuesday and both of us are SO excited to be here to start the first InVenture pilot in North America!! One of the best parts of this experience is that we get a chance to return to Mexico City - a city that we both fell in love with the last time that we were here in January 2009. Our first couple days have mostly involved settling in to our apartment and preparing an agenda for the next five weeks. We have also met with the microfinance institution (MFI) that we are working with, Ambito Productivo (APROS), yesterday. More info on APROS in a bit, but check out a pic of Sarina with the APROS team.
To start, our apartment is beautiful. We are living in an awesome and safe area of Mexico City, full of parks, restaurants, and greenery called La Condesa. We found our place through a site called LiveInCondesa.com, which features a collection of apartments housing students and professionals from around the world. Our roommates are from Germany, Spain, Ireland, Argentina, and Ohio. In fact in a huge coincidence, there are two other students from MIT who are living here as well! The community is great and there are even planned activities on the weekends organized by the apartment leaders.
In terms of logistics we bought ourselves a cell phone, joined the gym, discovered where the ATM machines are, brushed up on our spanish (which could still use some improvement), and made two trips to the grocery store. It is nice that everything is very accessible from our apartment and we are able to walk around the city easily. One thing we didn’t realize was that it is actually the rainy season here in Mexico. Combining that with Hurricane Alex, we have been caught in more than a few downpours already. Luckily we brought an umbrella!
And most importantly, yesterday’s meeting with APROS got our pilot off to a great start. We were first introduced to APROS during our last trip to Mexico City when we were doing field research on extensions to the traditional microfinance system. We have kept in touch with them during the past year and a half. When we decided to conduct this pilot in Mexico, we immediately knew we wanted to work with APROS. What really struck us about APROS is that they are some of the most genuine and dedicated people we have ever met. They really work hard to ensure that their clients are well served and as a result they build strong personal relationships with their clients - a quality that is very important for our pilot. One of the APROS employees, Carlos Delgado, has become a close friend of ours as well, and he is the one who we will be working with closely in establishing this pilot, along with Maria Teresa who is the CEO of APROS. We met them both yesterday at 11am in what ended up being a very productive and informative meeting. Both Carlos and Maria Teresa are extremely warm and welcoming. We are happy to be working with them and we were able to ask them many questions during our meeting. They were happy to answer and were clearly as excited to be working with Inventure as we are to be working with them!
So far, our trip to Mexico is off to a great start. We are both so happy to have the opportunity to travel here after receiving funding from the MIT Public Service Center. Can’t wait for next week when our work will really get under way. In the mean time we are hoping to enjoy the weekend with a possible trip to Cuernavaca and the finals of the world cup at the Zocalo! And hopefully stay dry as well… :)
-Manvi & Sarina
