Figure 1. Baby iguana in my front yard in Cali

I am finally in Cali and so excited to be in this tropical weather surrounded by my family and familiar spaces. I arrived last Sunday almost at midnight. Monday was a holiday in Colombia, so I had time to rest, relax and take some pictures of the front yard of my house, were I saw a baby iguana, before starting my working week.

In the previous weeks we have been running operation activities, taking decisions with regards to the English program that will be taught, having multiple meeting with the different involved parties. For instance, meetings with the language institute, the different team members of the project.

We closed the registration period last May 31. The registration lasted two weeks. To our surprise, we received 428 registrations. We did not expect so many interested students; I guess the dissemination efforts in the field were a success. We also encountered some challenges with misinformation in our dissemination activities. For the context of the reader, in one of the teacher group chats where the sign-up form was shared, a teacher mentioned that the summer school was exclusively for students from a school: the one we partnered with. This information arrived at one of our partner NGOs, and the head of it wrote me to ask if it was true. I clarified to her that the program is open to all students in Cali, without regard to the school they attend. This was surprising, I guess a good surprise, as people who were eager to prioritize students at their schools were not what we were expecting.

Subsequently, this week, we are ready to launch the calls and invite students to our assessment. However, we had to delay this activity. This week, the teachers from all the public schools across Colombia entered strikes as a bill to change the education regulation is currently being discussed in Colombian Congress. Regarding this bill, articles with the ones the teachers do not agree with were included after political negotiations across Congress. To push changes in the bill, teachers ceased classes on June 12. This affects our project operations as if the public school we will use to implement the English assessment is closed, we cannot use it. As a plan B, and If the teacher strikes continue, we will launch the assessment in a private school nearby, with whom we partnered and where the classes were going to be given initially. Personally, as a student of Public Policy with experience in social project implementation and policy, overall it is interesting to observe how our project adapts to the political economy and politics of my own country. These are challenges when pursuing policy, as we discussed at some point during my first year as a policy student, and now being able to experience them live is a unique opportunity.

Finally, in my second blog post, I mentioned that I offered a non-paid internship position as a project manager to Harris School students at The University of Chicago to work along with me and the team in Cali during the execution of the summer project. Multiple students expressed their interest. This week, we welcome a new member to our project, Ximena Valenzuela. She is a Peruvian lawyer with more than ten years of experience, a first-year master’s in public policy student at the University of Chicago, and a Pearson Institute Fellow. The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts examines societies and people fractured by conflict. Ximena will be interning this summer with us thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Pearson Institute. She will be working hybrid and traveling to Cali for a couple of weeks during the upcoming month. To date, we are seven people working to deliver this project to the best of our capacities.

Stayed tuned for in-field activities development.