Plateros Centor Historico Rotary Club of Mexico City

Stan and I are trying to make the best of our time here in D.F. (Mexico City), and like many situations changes in plans brings new opportunities.  One such opportunity we are taking advantage of is with Ferando Becerril (a colleague of Hector Chogoya Cortes – from my trip to Geneva in Jan). Ferando is a member of the “Plateros Centro Historico Rotary” here in D.F. Hector invited us to join him at their weekly breakfast meeting.   We were “distinguished visitors”, and I gave a 20 slides in 5 minutes (like an Ignite pitch) about our work with the Hunger Project.  I did my first Ignite style presentation at the BGI alumni meeting a few months ago and it was a great test run for the pitch I gave today.  Meeting Ferando has already been very helpful. This Mexico City Rotary club is collaborating with the Ballard (Seattle) Rotary club to help build a community center in a challenged area of Mexico City.  Many of the members in attendance were excited to learn of our work and are very excited to have us join their efforts in collaboration with the Ballard club.

The meeting was held in the Club de Banqueros Mexico, which is downtown in the historic district.  We took the subway from our hotel and arrived much too early (we are gringos) so we stopped at a very upscale coffee place Puntos del Cielo, which has some very fancy and the most expensive espresso machines I have ever seen, to kill some time!  Yes ,the coffee was great 🙂

The meeting was very formal and started promptly at 8:30,  We were introduced as the “distinguished visitors” and we apologized for our casual dress as we were not planning on having these kinds of opportunities on this trip..  We were given about 10 minutes of the pre-programmed time to be introduced by Ferando and give my pitch promptly at 9:10.

I think the pitch went great with Stan advancing the slides every 15 seconds (as I could not figure out how to get PowerPoint to do it).  After the meeting Stan and I were invited to do a site visit to the community center site on Thursday for us to see and think about the possibilities.

Our next adventure with the subway began when we misread the transit map and took the wrong train.  We then were like “prairie dogs” at several stops.  Coming up to street level and realizing we were not where we wanted to be.  Thanks to Google maps we got our bearings and after several stops and transfers we got the correct train, only to find that it was not running!  Thus we had a 20 minute walk to get to the THP offices.

Now, after the great lunch by Sylvia we are stuck inside due a big thunder storm.