Fall 2015: Emmanuel Marquez and Katia Rodriguez

Emmanuel Marquez and Katia Rodriguez

VO’s Mexico Outreach Coordinator, Emmanuel Marquez (above, left), has personally reached 68,412 students at 61 different schools this semester! And Adopt a College activist Katia Rodriguez (above, right) has leafleted 7 of Mexico’s campuses this fall, handing out 11,601 booklets as a volunteer!

Katia and Edgar at ITESM

Emmanuel, Katia (above, left), Edgar Jimenez (above, right), Monse Iga, Miriam Reyes, and fellow activists reached 3,100 students at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey:

We had the support of a lot of people who came to help, like Fernanda Rios (she is 13 years old), Leonardo Rios (her brother, who is 10), and their mom, Elaine Cuevas [below, left]. They are all vegan but were looking to do more for the animals, so they leafleted for the first time and rocked, reaching a lot of students with a big smile; nobody was able to refuse taking a booklet from them.

Carlos Contreras came to help once again, and he met Sara [below, right], who decided to go vegetarian after reading a booklet.

Leonardo, Fernanda, Elaine, and Sara at ITESM

At the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Campus Ciencias de la Salud, Katia reached 1,600 students:

Gabriela [below, left] received a leaflet and asked if I’d heard about a special date that was coming up, where people from different places were going to leaflet; she saw AnimaNaturalis’ Facebook post about FARM and wants to leaflet for World Day for Farmed Animals, so she took 100 leaflets – she’s trying to go vegetarian.

I offered a leaflet to a guy; he said no in a rude way and walked away. Then, he came back to where I was standing and asked for a leaflet, said he was sorry for rejecting it and explained why he did it: he said he kind of knew what the content was going to be about, and that he knows eating animals is wrong, but he has been avoiding reading more about it; he said it was time to face the truth, so he took the leaflet and continued walking.

At UANL Campus Mederos, Katia had help from Andrea Reyes (below, right), and together they reached 1,100 students: “At 11:00 am, Andrea showed up and volunteered; while chatting with her, she told me she received one of these leaflets there last semester – she was already a vegetarian, but the Fresco leaflet made her vegan.”

Gabriela and Andrea at UANL

Emmanuel and Katia reached 800 students at Preparatoria 15 Unidad Madero:

An easy day of outreach but with good experiences at this high school. Many students were reading the information, and we were able to hear groups talking about it; we noticed how impressed they were. A group even gathered around me and started asking questions [below, left]. I felt the majority of the students were very receptive and reacted to the info according to their values.

At the Universidad Emiliano Zapata (below, right), Emmanuel and Katia got Fresco booklets into the hands of 1,800 students:

The UNEZ is a university with a college and a high school, located in an area of Monterrey with a not very high income. The principal of the high school granted us permission to leaflet inside the school and even suggested we visit the classrooms, meaning that each booklet we handed out today was followed by a positive explanation with personal examples and a veg eating myths-busting speech.

Katia joined me, and to be honest, we didn’t have very high expectations on the response of the students, but were about to have a very good surprise. We visited 37 classrooms that had between 12 and 68 students. We planned to take five minutes in each classroom to visit as many as possible, but the kids were so engaged and curious that they were asking a lot of questions, so we spent 10 to 15 minutes in each instead; and even some teachers were interested and happy that we were there.

The majority of the students didn’t know a vegetarian, but we ran into four within the day, and all of them were men. After the talk, we asked for a raise of hands from those interested in changing their diets or eating veg, and an average of four to five in each group did so.

The administration was so happy to have us that they invited us to come back to visit the college and also give presentations for them and the high school students too. The day was exhausting, moving from building to building, going up and down the stairs with heavy backpacks full of booklets, but we ended up very excited and with big smiles on our faces.

Emmanuel and students at Preparatoria 15 and UNEZ

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