Journal Entries Week 1: #1

Part A: Reading institution's annual reports, getting familiar with objectives, long term goals and the role of Fundacion Alpina in the company. 

Part B: The first day of work was unusual. I was highly disappointed when I found out that my supervisor was out of the country and that I did not have to go to the company during that week. However, her absence was not an obstacle for me to begin my job. She constantly communicated with me via email and through phone calls from her secretary. From the first day, I realized that the amount of work that I was going to handle was going to be intense. Here is where my assumptions began.

I realized that I could not start analyzing a project that I barely knew about and that I had compare to other projects that I did not exactly knew how they worked. So my first assumption was that I was going to be doing large amounts of reading and spending a lot of time investigating the roots, the process and the results of the project (to the moment) before I could move any further. The second assumption is that I would have to work mostly by myself and not as a team while I read and fully understood the concept of the project. I finally assumed that I would be granted access to contact information from people in the Sopó community that I could interview and find a humane voice behind the statistical information to see what the community thinks about the project.

By the end of the first day, I already had a large amount of reading to become familiar with Fundación Alpina, its role in the community and a couple of highlights of the project. This first day I was assigned my first task which consisted on analyzing a couple of reports from the institution and with that information, create a report (due Friday, December 24, 2011) on how the Nutritional and Alimentary Security project could be replicated in other communities in Colombia. I was excited, and felt that this responsibility will contribute to the success of my project because big tasks were assigned to me since the beginning of the project.