Jordan

I have not been doing much on my e-waste research lately. It is high time I get to it. 1:05 am, crazy time to be writing, isn’t it? Crazy times requiere crazy changes in life. That is how I have felt lately. That is how the research trip started. It started as a way to move on with my personal life and my career at the same time. As beings who feel, our decisions are very much influenced by the situations that surround us, persuaded by our emotions. 

 

2020 and 2021 were very difficult years. Life has a name for being tough. Quote Victor Hugo, Mary Shelly, Miguel de Cervantes, Jane Austen, and every writer you like. No one here intends to compare these two difficult years with other historic events. At least I don’t. What I do intend is to explain why there is a general feeling of difficulty within this time. We lost many of our loved ones to an invisible enemy. Disease knew no age, race, borders, money. It did not care where we were, what we had. It just struck and immobilized most of us. We could only make decisions based on a few lines of information. Information which kept changing day by day and whose reliability had always to be questioned. 

 

It took me a year and half to move. How much did it take you? Or have you? As I started to acknowledge the new world order, I also considered options for my career (and love life too). I drafted out a new path for achieving the things that I have always wanted. Those things did have a plan but the plan had expired without the time to be completed. The new plan included two simple things: taking time to myself. I wanted to see, explore, learn, visit my friends, eat their food, watch their landscapes, drink with them once more, talk to them about our life in college. The second aspiration was equally as important and as simple: understanding a world-impact issue. The issue could have been anything. Anything: health, policy making, business, computer science, music. 

 

As an economic student and someone who has always questioned inequality, I decided to go for social mobility. In concrete, how do electronic waste management provide jobs for low-income recyclers? I discovered tons of things. The first one is that I was wrong. Electronic waste recycling does not represent a meaningful gain to most low-income recyclers. There are other findings I will present to you, each in one post. I will tell you about the adventures I lived and how we reached interesting research conclusions. I hope that you enjoy reading about this journey and find inspiration to go for meaningful impact in each of your life decisions.

 

September 2021. After I swore it was the last time I cried over a heartache, I figured: what if I went somewhere else in the world? Since I cannot go to the place I want to be now,  maybe I can go to another place. Or places. I can go visit some old friends. Not only can I do that but I can dedicate my time to gathering data on a topic that could take me to my long-wished Master Degree. If I was committed enough, I could make out of this trip a short film/ documentary and a publishing paper. And so my mind began to work around the idea of a research trip for the first time.