AoH Buenos Aires

This is a letter I sent to some AoH friends when we finished the training in this city... It was very interesting to see how 37 participants + 7 in the team came from all over South America (we just missed Ecuador) and even North America with two people coming from the US even if living in Argentina, so the call resonated in them as well.

We also had an apprentice in the team with a lot of value to give already from his experience but this being his first AoH design and delivery process. His name is Cristian Figueroa and his project is called Tejeredes. Pablo Espinosa from La Arenera in Colombia also came to support the team and start weaving a latinamerica network of practitioners.

It was amazing the fact that participants seem to be going deeper in a faster way, right to the important issues. In this sense we think that the crafting of the invitation and making the call really attracted and invited the "right" people! Unfortunately, the Hub Buenos Aires team members could not make it, they were shy to really ask for what they wanted on time (if it was too much money you could ask for a "scholarship") but basically there was a timing confusion with them as well apparently.

We did it in Spanish and are feeding forward 1000USD to the Latin America community of Art of Hosting, for the community of practitioners for the next regional art of hosting. In this sense, the AoH Porto Alegre helped us with Marcello Lacroix´s flight coming from there and it was great.

Personally I felt very well and in service, with my own experiences to share and a lot to keep learning too! I enjoyed the residential AoH for the first time as somehow all the ones i was in before were urban ones. I agree that it is better in a way to be residential as both the team and participants have more space internally. It was great to be in the team with Maria (with whom I work a lot for the Hub network but never outside so far), Cristian from Chile, Pablo from Bogotá, Marcello from Brasil and Cecilia and Martin from Rosario in Argentina.

Oh, and Guido from the AoH Madrid in 2011 came to visit the last two hours! He had just landed from the flight from Europe but wanted to come and join for whatever he could. It was amazing because just by participating for that amount of time he also felt transformed and very genuinely happy about this taking place in Argentina. You will see people already posting in the spanish group of Ning and also Facebook page (Tendedero Social we called it) created for this. There are also three videos available as a visual harvest, one edited by Cristian on-site and the other two by Marcello: one teaser and a longer one here.

I wanted to acknowledge and express gratitude for your support in an indirect or direct way for this to take place, either holding space, introducing potential participants, the past steps the callers made for this or even supporting other team members or myself into stepping up for it. This was very smooth process in the end. Thank you Tatiana Glad, Ria Baeck, Mary-Alice Arthur and Jan Hein Nielsen!