The Little Blue House
Our house on the main drag of Colonia Ursulo Galván is responding well to its rehabbing. As you can see, it is now a bright blue house. We had our first meeting as a group a week ago with the eight of us who are going to be the governing body. It was not like a US meeting. No body called the meeting to order, nobody had a printed agenda. Neither proved necessary or even desirable. My neighbor Ingrid who made the gorgeous rope of flowers in my house took minutes.
The eight women sat in an informal circle. A topic would bubble up, get discussed, and decided upon, then someone would bring up another topic and so on. No one led the meeting, but somehow everything got discussed and decided upon! The name of the group and the store is going to be Mujeres Creativas, that the eight women present would be the governing body, various issues pertaining to choosing and selling merchandise, that we would have a "pre-opening" to sell things for Dia de los Muertos that the women had made and would make, that the profits would be shared equally by all, that is that even if one person's stuff sold like hotcakes and another's didn't, we'd share the profits equally thinking of them as a payment for labor, both making the crafts and providing necessary work for the coop. There was no objection to this plan at all. We also decided we would sell other people's stuff but take a heftier share of the profits from them. AND that the outside of the store, the entrance, could use some plants and we could also SELL some plants.
The voices swelled and faded, comments jumped around from person to person, and I realized I still had a long way to go in understanding Spanish. Groups are HARD!