Lyon research group releases Mexico report

Final research report

Lyon College students Madeline Boyd, Clare Brown, and Jessica Soule recently spent three days in Chimalhuacan, Mexico, conducting interviews regarding the health needs of the community’s residents. The research project was sponsored by Tranformación Urbana Internacional, A.C., (TUI) and advised by Lyon faculty members Dr. Scott Roulier and Dr. Patrick Mulick. 

TUI is a non-government organization (NGO) in Chimalhuacan, a slum area located on the outskirts of Mexico City. The organization is involved in several projects, including youth leadership training, entrepreneurial start-ups, urban re-design, and public health initiatives.  

“Given that urban poverty is a complex problem, TUI’s interventions’ are multifaceted,” said Dr. Roulier, the John D. Trimble Professor of Political Philosophy.

Jean-Luc Krieg, a friend of Roulier, serves as the executive director of TUI. Krieg was previously the Latin America and Columbia regional director of a philanthropy performance consulting firm. This job allowed Krieg to study and evaluate the effectiveness of development projects sponsored by large entities, such as the World Bank and USAID, and projects spear-headed by smaller faith-based groups and NGOs. After many years of this, Krieg could easily identify the “best practices” in addressing poverty. With his wife and an international team, Krieg relocated to Chimalhuacan to apply this knowledge in a way that would leverage resources for an urban transformation.  

Dr. Roulier said, “Jean-Luc is an inspiring and extraordinarily bright person—a leading thinker on sustainable and reproducible approaches to urban poverty.  It was a real privilege for the students to interact with him during our time in Mexico.”  

Dr. Roulier and Dr. Mulick, an assistant professor of psychology, created a survey to help TUI understand the health needs of Chimalhuacan’s residents. The survey addresses questions about physical, mental, and civic health. 

“This project affords students a unique opportunity to hone language skills and work cross-culturally, to learn social science research methods and techniques, and to make recommendations for interventions based on concrete data,” Dr. Roulier said. “Having seen the degraded physical environment of the community, and having heard the stories of the day-to-day struggle for survival and dignity of its residents, the students and I would derive a great deal of satisfaction from helping, even in some small way, to improve residents’ quality of life.” 

To help with the project, Roulier and Mulick needed student volunteers. The students – Madeline Boyd, a junior pre-med major; Clare Brown, a sophomore psychology major; and Jessica Soule, a sophomore International Studies major – met the requirement of being proficient in Spanish, and also showed a genuine interest in developmental issues. 

Dr. Roulier said, “It was a delight to work alongside Madeline, Clare and Jessica. They’re bright, compassionate and have a great sense of humor. The team chemistry was excellent; the students made a very favorable impression.”  

Dr. Monica Rodriguez, associate professor of Spanish at Lyon, assisted the students in translating the surveys from English to Spanish. The surveys were field tested on local Spanish speakers. Roulier and the students conducted the interviews from Nov. 12 to Nov. 15 in Chimalhuacan. The interviews lasted 20-30 minutes, and the students did about 120 of them. The responses to the surveys will be entered into a statistical software program, which will facilitate analysis of the data. The research team intends to issue an initial executive summary of findings early next spring, and TUI will use the information to track its progress over the next five years. 

For the time that the team was in Chimalhuacan, the residents of the slum received free medical care, dental care, and counseling services. Dr. Julie Roulier, Professor Roulier’s wife, worked with three Mexican physicians seeing patients as the students interviewed people seeking medical treatment. The students also canvassed the residents in neighborhoods near Chimalhuacan during this time.

While staying a Chimalhuacan, the team was “well taken care of.” 

“The food, prepared by a special team of residents, was incredible,” Dr. Roulier said. “TUI’s retreat house, located in a middle-class town about 40 minutes from Chimalhuacan, is safe and beautifully appointed.”  

The students enjoyed their interactions with the interviewees and their culture. 

Sophomore Clare Brown said, “Overall, the experience was amazing. The slum we researched in was not as poor as I had expected, but there was far more corruption than I imagined. I never once felt in danger, but nearly all of the participants answered the community questions as if they had little or no confidence in their government, both local and national, police, or even with the people in their own neighborhoods.

“It was amazing to me how little interaction there is between people outside of their families. Very few people said they visited friends or had friends over within the last 12 months – something that is at least done on a monthly basis for most American families. Everyone in the community and in the program we were researching was extremely nice, and always prepared us great food. There is no better way to understand a culture than to immerse yourself right into it,” Brown added. 

Junior Madeline Boyd echoed Brown’s thought, saying that the trip “was easily one of the most interesting things I've been involved in while in college.”

“We had the privilege of working with the neatest and most inspiring group of people in Chimalhuacán,” Boyd said, “I felt like we left having done the job we set out to do, and I'm pretty sure that I got more out of it than I could ever hope to give.”