First Week of Work in Cordoba
I’m slowly approaching the one week mark since arrival in Cordoba, and it feels like it’s been a decent been longer than that! Michelle Sudano arrived the day after I did, and since we’ve met up with one of the other interns, Stevie, who will also be working at CEDHA. Stevie just finished her 1L year at NYU and the three of us have been working through speaking Spanish and finding apartments together. There are two more interns that we have not met yet, one from France and the other goes to law school at American. They will both be working my same department, so I’m excited to start working with them!
We’ve all been assigned a schedule for the office, since it’s too small to accommodate everyone at the same time. We each go into the office only a few times a week so it’s really nice to have a flexible schedule and to do work from a hostel, café or other nook of the city. Everyone in CEDHA is incredibly nice and going into the office has been good so far. Exhausting, since it’s entirely in Spanish, but that is obviously the best way for me to improve. It’s definitely a worthwhile exhaustion. My Spanish really is a serious struggle, and I’m fortunate that the team I’m working speaks very good English. They speak entirely in Spanish unless I really don’t understand, and then they’ll explain it to me in English. And I hope there is less and less English as things continue. Right now every sentence is a struggle, but it’s all a matter of working at it.
As for the work, I love what I’m going to be doing! Even if I don’t know exactly what work or research I’ll be doing, all of the possibilities under the umbrella are exciting. It’s also a really exciting time because on Wednesday the OECD just approved a new set of guidelines for multinational enterprises (MNEs). Among other things, the newest version includes a new chapter on human rights, and updates on the chapters regarding bribery and responsibility for the actions of supply chain partners. CEDHA was one of the organizations that worked to put together recommendations for the new draft and it’s exciting to see the product of their efforts. There’s a strong chance that my work will have something to do with the implementation of these guidelines, but that’s to be continued.