Urm Rach, why are you in Mexico?

This is my blog about my travels...and other stuff in life I guess. I am currently in Mexico city and everything I have been through in just 2 short months urged me to finally start this blog. To be truly honest, so much more has happened than I ever expected. I have MANY stories to tell about this place - some good some bad - but I really want to share this whole experience.

SO...

I’m sure many people (friends and family) are still wondering how I ended up in Mexico City. So I guess I’m going to start there.

Why am I in Mexico?

Well, it just kind of happened.

The first picture I took at the Uni I'm studying at in Mexico City

At uni, part of my degree is Modern Languages - Spanish and French. My language major is Spanish, so doing a year abroad is actually compulsory. I had to choose a Spanish speaking country to do either an internship or study abroad. To be completely honest, it was never in my plans to study because I thought, cool, I’m already doing three years of uni so why not use this year as an opportunity to earn some money, expand my CV, gain some freedom and experience a different kind of independence. From the get go, I always knew that I wanted to do an internship.

But, things don’t always go according to plan and it wasn’t in God’s plan for me.

When second year began I knew that it was time to start looking for placements or whatever options I had available. Now, if you know me, I tend to be a last minute person and it somehow it works for me. So in my head I was literally just thinking - it’s the beginning of the year and I have plenty of time because my year abroad would be starting in the next year (around September 2018). I literally have a WHOLE year.

We had quite a few year abroad meetings in first semester with a timeline full of deadlines that seemed to be years away - and this made me even more relaxed and unbothered. Me, with my last minuteness just took a seat and continued to attend these meetings without even looking once for possible places whilst my peers were pretty quickly finding places.

First year abroad meeting in 2017 - I found a bunch of pictures of the year abroad lecture slides as if I was actually going to look back at them. I didn't know I had these pictures until I looked in my camera roll

Time went on and I started to feel a bit more pressure because certain deadlines were actually coming up for us to inform the university on what we intended to do. But at the same time I had this blasé “Yeah I’ll start looking next week” attitude. It’s because I knew exactly the kind of internship I wanted to do so I wasn’t so concerned and only maybe had a look at potential companies that I was interested in the UK to see if they had places in Spain or Latin America.

THEN. One day, it was almost as if I was being slapped in the face with deadlines and I should’ve seen it coming. The deadlines were just passing me by like PIM. But, the wrong kind of flip switched. Anxiety came in. All these weeks of putting of finding somewhere and applying suddenly turned for the worst - a big looming cloud of anxiety. I had left it so long that I just became an anxious mess, afraid to properly begin applying because I was scared there were no vacancies left.

The more meetings I attended relating to my year abroad, the more my anxiety grew. It was constantly on my mind. It got to point where, again, I just ignored it and put it to the side kidding myself that I’d get back to it. As last minute as I am, I had never felt this much anxiety in my life and this attitude was actually unlike me because I like getting things that I set my mind to done. In this circumstance, things were just so messy. But at this point I had to give myself a serious TEDx talk and pull it together.

Finally, I took a big dive and just started applying for internships where, at first, I was being so particular that it wasn’t helping me find anything and with most of the applications closed it was looking hopeless. It was looking like my internship would have to be delayed until second semester.

So around May, one of my friends, who was basically in the exact same position as me, suggested that we study in Mexico. The reasons: we didn’t have enough time to keep looking for internships and the deadline to study abroad was also very close. As well as this, most of the study options started and ended at really weird times of the year so if we were going to study this would be the best option in terms of timing. It sounded like the best option - a quick, easy solution.

But definitely NOT for my parents.

They were completely against the idea, to the point where my mum said to me “No. Abena. PLEASE. Don’t go there.” and she started actively looking for internships for me in Spain. This was kind of funny cause my mum is so bad at writing emails and applications but she was willing to do it. I understood the skepticism. I mean it’s Mexico City, known to the world for being the home of Drug Lords, crime and violence, narcos and poorly treated immigrants trying to cross the border that Trump is trying to build a wall on, and me, Rachel Abena Nyamekye, was trying to go there and get caught in that world.

NO WAY. Not on my parents watch.

The many negative connotations related to Mexico really wasn’t sitting right with them and they just didn’t want it for me, they just wanted me to be safe. To be honest, it even started to scare me a little, because my mum, in particular, was worried. But at the same time, this is where I felt different. Maybe it’s that I was being naive or that I have quite an adventurous personality, but going to Mexico seemed like this huge new opportunity to live and experience through. I was more so thinking that, fair enough, there will definitely be places that are unsafe but that is like anywhere in the world, so I would just need to watch my back and be smart. So I went ahead and signed up for it. I even googled the safest places to live in and tried to do some research on how the people were there, especially towards black people. I went as far as googling the population of black people and their treatment in Mexico City. What I found wasn’t exactly what I had hoped, but it didn't stop me, I still wanted to go.

First, my dad came round to it because he’s generally a pretty chill guy and was actually easy about the whole situation. It did, however, take a few more conversations and reassurances ( with the help of my sister) to get my Mum to finally accept it...but we got there in the end!

So that’s the story… And here I am, studying in Mexico City and living life like a mamacita.

Me - a failed pic, overly smiling at the top of the mountain at Tepoztlán