The Mañana Syndrome

At the request of Megan Horejsi, it is time for me to update this blog. The reason for not having updated was that I literally just found out new information about my internship a few days ago. I had been waiting for an e-mail with a complete internship description for over a month, but every time I checked my e-mail there was nothing. I was literally just torturing myself. I guess I can’t complain I am going to be working in Latin America a place famous for its ‘mañana’ syndrome.

Anyway, last Thursday I finally got an e-mail from Jack Kerry, my boss. Here he tried his best to explain my internship position; it was obvious he was making it up as he went along. What was included in the proposal was nothing new, all stuff you can literally get off his website. However, what was important was that he finally got to it, and I finally had a concrete idea about his intentions for me this summer. The proposal essentially said that my tasks will not be any different from the ones I currently have. This really surprised me, because I have to write a 60 to 80 page thesis on my internship experiences. Quite frankly, I don’t think what I am currently doing right now is suited for the development of an 80 page Masters thesis.

So after thinking about the internship proposal this weekend, I decided to call my boss. When I got a hold of him I let him know what was going on and how I had just learned from my professors about the thesis. I told him that I was not happy with the proposal. I let him know that I would not want to do the job if he expected me to do any part of my internship from the confines of my home in Delano. Not that I don’t like being around my family or anything, but this is supposed to be an internship abroad and the way I projected this proposal evolving was with me stuck in Delano waiting for him to fly me to DC for a few weeks and maybe Colombia for a few days if I got lucky. I let him know that I am willing to pay for my own flight to South America if it means that I will get to work at the ground level, not from my home in Delano.

He went on to tell me that he had been thinking about sending me to Brasilia, Brazil with one of the Inter America Foundation representatives working with the Brazilian RedEAmérica, that actually sounded pretty cool, but who knows. I told him that I really can’t stay in California for any length of time. I will be finishing school in about 3 weeks and I need to know where I will be living. I need a definitive date so that I can buy a plane ticket to who knows where and even find an apartment since I will probably be living there for an extended period of time.

So I guess at this point I still don’t know where I will be living or going to in the next month. It’s getting close for me to finish school and I still have a lot of things I haven’t prepared for. I’m really worried since I don’t know anything about my own future and that makes me very uneasy. Jack said he would be getting back to me tomorrow after talking to one of the guys from RedEAmérica, maybe then I can get some more concrete information about what I will be doing during the next 6 months.