The flight from Mexico City to Tuxtla Gutiérrez was the shortest of my life, but the vastness of the urban center was replaced with tiny streets and curbs up to my knee. San Cristóbal is somehow even more colorful than Mexico City and its endless vendors keep the streets alive at all hours. Our stops in random knick-knack and clothing stores have been way too tempting, but the cafes and restaurants are so plentiful I can’t wait to try something new every time I can.
Catedral de San Cristóbal de las Casas and square
We visited with Cantaro Azul and Isla Urbana, two NGOs focused on supplying clean and plentiful water respectively to the under-represented communities of Mexico who lack the access to life’s most necessary resource. Wherever you find water, you find life–especially in Dune by Frank Herbert which I have been reading in my spare time throughout our weeks here, a fitting story for our research. In hearing their genuinely courageous stories of building a non-profit from nothing in the name of helping others, I’ve realized that some engineering projects do not require massive amounts of accreditations, funding, and analyzation–that is not to say that most do and all should to ultimately reach the maximum amount of people–but they can start out of garages and be community-based. These projects started as a few people that finally decided to do something about a problem they knew all their lives.
Facing the Mountains
Cantaro Azul’s design process was especially intriguing because they really never experienced direct feedback from their clients, instead using how they interacted with the product without any outside help to dictate their next move. In our design of a UV sanitation device for local mothers’ feeding bottles, we intend to utilize their feedback heavily as their knowledge of the product will be so vastly different than ours and they can detect blind spots we looked over in our perfecting perspectives. I have always wanted to dabble in designing, but never realized how integrated it is with finance, business, and the endless connections you need for all of the parts of the process (and there are many!).
In this week, a lot of what I can think about is how crazy it is to have all of the objects we have available to us in our daily lives. The time, money, and planning that went into each and every one of them is so much more than I ever expected.
Brian Messar