Day 3, Peripherally productive part 1

Today was an interesting day. We're working into somewhat of a routine. Roll out of bed around seven or so and head down to the lower patio to meditate. This morning we had seven people including our Yogi Anil doing the meditation. The usual 10 minutes of silent breathing exercises and then 15 minutes of om chanting. Afterwards, we had our usual high five into the 50 degree pool water. I'll have more pictures of that later, Craig, our master photographer took some serious film footage of us jumping, you can view his blog here

I then accompanied the rest of the Mega team to the office where they had a meeting and I had hoped to change the rental car (we were getting a cheaper one today). I had figured the plan would be that the meeting would be short and then the team could drop me off back at the hotel, so I didn't bring anything other than a cell phone and my license etc. I had planned that as soon as I figured out the car, they'd be done, so no time wasted. I was wrong and should have brought my pc. 2.5 hours later, we left the office. I now know everything about my cell phone, memorized take out menus that I found in the office, and organized several meetings and trips by text. Oh well, such is south africa, gave me time to figure out the swaziland trip.

Speaking of, we will be heading there this weekend, on Sunday for a day trip to the country, seeing the cultural center and then also heading out into the local culture, sounds like our guide has something set up. It's actually surprisingly expensive in South African terms, but then again, $100 for a full day in Swaziland is fine with me really.

Still figuring out Saturday, we know the morning is occupied by the Chimpanzee farm at the Jane Goodall Institute or something, so that's going to be great. Might head to a cultural festival at the Mozambique, Swaziland border for the afternoon, there's some monument being erected.

In the afternoon, the five of us gathered the mighty envelope, the collection of all of the IBMers here on the program to go and buy things for the kids. All told, the 14 of us put together over $500 which bought lots of great stuff for the kids. We also had a bunch of gifts which we brought with us which you can see in the video below that we'll take to the kids, which kids?

Next up, the shopping trip...

Second day of work and school visit

An interesting and rather moving day today. I mentioned before that we were the only group with a flexible schedule and thus it was the job of Chris and myself this morning to head out to make the school visit. The Edswaleny school was about thirty five minutes out of town, and has 917 students, in 22 classrooms ranging in ages 5 (preschool) through 11 (end of primary school). Our plan was to meet with the educators, determine an appropriate program for a Thursday visit and then attempt to assess the needs of the school and children in the hopes that we would take up a collection amongst ourselves and then buy the school supplies and sports equipment.

The motto to the school, "To produce multi-skilled learners through effective teaching and learning involving all stakeholders".

While we were there we had the opportunity to witness one of the classroom activities in action. As part of the economics class, the children have to create a small business and do the economics of it. Here the children are selling little bits of candy and chips, and of course we were happy to buy some.

After meeting with the administrators of the school, we were led on a tour of the buildings. There are three buildings, two of which are connected by a room and brick floor which makes for kind of a general assembly area used both by the school and the community. It's in the right of the picture below, flanked on either side by classrooms.

Part of the school's education program is something called Room 13, started apparently in Scotland. It's an afterschool program that teaches kids about and encourages them to create art. We saw everything from drawing, to painting, to handicrafts, to poetry. This is, in fact, one of the larger demands for the school, art supplies to support the Room 13 project.

Below is a typical classroom that we saw while we were there. They have around 22 of these on-site and have between 35-40 in each classroom.

Below is the kitchen at the school which supplies all the food. The government provides the school weekly and monthly with the nourishment for the kids. They eat a rotating menu of cabbage, mealie meal, or other vegetables and beans. This meal at school is often the only meal that the kids eat each day so it's all the more important. Along these lines, it's also a significant problem for certain kids on weekends and especially holidays since they do not get food at home. There are times when a child will come back from the weekend break, having not eaten since Friday. The school has started trying to send food home with the children in the most need.

Below are the preschoolers who sang for us in English while we were there. The ages of the children are between 5 and 6 years old. There's a video of them singing at the bottom of the page.

I tried to capture it, but apparently missed. Turns out that pulling your pants up really high is humorous no matter where you are. I saw a couple of kids with their pants pulled up to their armpits walking around goofy. Always funny (especially when Terra does it).

Below is another example of a hands on learning experience. This is a vegetable garden tended by the children. They learn how to grow and rotate crops and then the harvest is incorporated into their diet for additional nourishment. While we were there, we saw lettuce and tomatoes growing.

This is an example of one of the larger shacks that the people in the area live in. It was hard to get good pictures of the living conditions, but the places were quite small, maybe 8'x10' and there could be 8 people living there, maybe a mother, father, and 6 children.

Before the video, here's a couple of other things to think about, and this is from the mouths of the teachers, unedited. Many of the children are orphans, often because their parents died from HIV/AIDS. The HIV infection percentage is around 40%, and there are several children at the school with HIV. Because of this, there are households headed by 11 year olds. Think about that for a second, being 11 years old, in fifth grade, having to be responsible for your brothers and sisters, the house, and trying to go to school. It's not a very good predicament.

Another thing that came up when we were talking about the school needs was improved transportation. Some of the children live up to 7 kilometers away (4.5 miles or so), and have to walk to school each day. There are criminals on the road who have in the past at times raped the children. Again, these are kids between the ages of 5-11.

Clearly a school in need. It's not all lost though, we've got 14 IBMers here determined to make a difference, and I'm not sure that there are many forces in the world that can stop that. It may be a little cliche to talk about it, but I do truly think that IBMers, and in particular those on this trip are cut from a different cloth than the every man.

Preschool kids singing in English for us:

The wedding

We've decided on a date for the wedding, June 26, 2010 and of course the location is Challain. For more information about that, please feel free to check out Terra's blog, she's got some great pictures and descriptions up about the chateau.

On another wedding related note, so people don't have to ask, please don't assume any wedding invite, or potential wedding invite includes a plus one to the invitation. To be blunt, I'm not paying a significant amount of money for someone I don't know to vacation in Europe. All guests not invited are welcome either to attend the reception later that year in Michigan or choose not to go. The chateau itself is at capacity and will not accept any additional guests.

Well where to start for day four maybe? Not sure, first work day in Nelspruit. We started this morning with Yoga! Our friend Anil led us in a Yoga exercise this morning as four of us followed him in breathing exercises for ten minutes and then chanting om for the next fifteen minutes while sitting in the lotus position. Craig, Ethan, Mirko, and Veronica all had a great time and then Ethan and I jumped in the icy cold pool. It was quite a morning ritual.

Here's a picture of the pool we jumped into:

I then made friends with Rica, one of the people that works here and is an amazing cook. She's also the one that cooked the Braai (south african bbq) later that night. This is her in the kitchen at the main lodge.

As I think I mentioned earlier, the manor has a ridiculous amount of sitting areas, this is a view from one of the sitting areas down to another sitting area.

This is the spot at the bottom of the manor where we did yoga. Anil sat on the podium and we all laid out towels and relaxed. It was pretty amazing, we had an amazing view (See below) in front of us, and a waterfall fountain behind us.

This is the view from the breakfast area of the hotel. It's incredible. I also did a landscape panorama that i'll try and post up here later once I stitch it gother.

You'll notice the next picture is nighttime, so let me tell you what happened during the day. It was our first day of work, and this morning we met with all of the partners together to hear about what the projects would be. We have three groups here, Business Against Crime (BAC), Mpumalanga Parks and Tourism Agency (MPTA), and the Mpumalanga Economic Growth Agency (MEGA) which is the team that I'm part of. This team as I've mentioned before is further subdivided into two teams, one which will be focusing on doing a consulting revitalization for a painting production company, and my team, which is really just me and Chris, which will be doing the foreign investment project. We're still trying to get a handle on just what the project scope is, but as we understand it now, it's a couple of related things. First, Mpumalanga has to go to all of the South African country road shows, regardless of whether that country will be likely to invest in the province or not. This is considered an inefficient use of their budget and they'd like to be able to present and independent study (produced by us) which shows which their most and least likely investment countries would be. Another part of the project may potentially be doing a deep dive on a potential business plan and determining where the real potential is for investment and why it's value add for another country. This is kind of where the last group left off, so it may be likely where we pick it up. We have a meeting tomorrow with someone at MEGA to go through some of the further scope.

Tomorrow Chris and I will also be traveling to the third school that SA1 was unable to visit, hopefully to line something up for a visit to the school on Thursday. One of the things about our project that is both good and bad is that it is rather nebulous, very open scope. So while the other teams have many meetings prearranged and will spend a great deal of time working with people, we will spend a lot of time doing research and other analytics, so a more liberal schedule.

This is a picture of Marvin, he's our security guard, here he is looking pretty fierce.

This is Rica, right after she made us our delicious food for the Braai. We had a dinner with the tourism agency fall through so John and I thought it'd be fun to have a Braai in house with traditional south african fare.

Here's what that actually looks like. On the left we have mealie meal (a corn meal type dish), covered in a delicious tomato sauce, roasted squash in the top middle, salad top right, and then a tenderized beef steak covered in the same tomato and onion sauce.

Again, one of the many sitting areas as the manor, here's the whole group sitting down to dinner.

Things got ghetto at one point...atleats for me. Ethan and Craig went for mudras, while I found myself westside for the picture.

They set a bonfire up for us where we had a great time with everyone sitting around chatting trying to figure out what our plans were going to be for the weekend and for future weeks. Plan right now is to go to Jane Goodall's Chimpanzee reservation saturday morning, head to the third largest canyon in the world after that, and then head up the panoramic view to see God's window, the potholes and whatever else. And that's only Saturday! On Sunday, we're hoping to head over into Swaziland for the day and get some culture.

This is our fearless leader John from the CDC, he's fit very well into the group and I'm sure we all wish he was officially part of the team and staying here to work on projects with us, a really great guy. He also gave the german a hilarious hard time. More about that later.

More of us around the fire, remember, there's fifteen of us including John, so we take up a lot of seats.

Aforementioned German. This guy just wanders into the bonfire pit saying hello, asks where we're from, we say America, he says he's sorry to hear that and within like his first thirty seconds, despite us offering him a beer and a seat, managers to offend the four of us sitting there. At one point, John turns to us and says something like, This man has managed to annoy me faster than any other individual I've met. He gave vague answers to every question we asked, insulted every nationality there (there's nine countries represented), threatened to grow a hitler mustache, etc. To that last one, John's reply was classic, That [nazi germany level racism] is a little to close to what South Africa just went through, so seriously, not funny....no really, not funny.

It was at that point that Ethan had enough and decided to eat the german. It's a little grainy because of the speed at which the whole scene unfolded, but I can tell you that he was chewy, not very nutritious and henceforth spit out.

I guess that's it for now. We had a busy day and it's only going to get busier as we get more of a handle on the scope of our project and start meeting with folks.

Sunset Manor

So let me say first off, that my expectations were exceeded by what sunset manor had to offer. I don't know so much if it's the quality of the hotel, the rooms, etc, but moreso the atmosphere that the hotel itself promotes. There is a great amount of community space including two pools and atleast four bbq patios around the property. We hung out by one tonight for several hours and had a pretty darn good time. But before that, we had to go and get the alcohol. As any reading this know, I don't drink, but I certainly couldn't pass up a chance to head into the downtown area to find the illicit drinking establishments selling beer when they really shouldn't be. There's a picture somewhere of me guarding the car, I'll see if I can dig that up.

We have a guy here named Sartorio, who basically is at our beckon call for anything we need. We want a ride to the grocery store, we call him, we want to go on a beer run when all the stores are closed, we call Satorio. He'll also be instrumental in arranging much of the side trips since he works for an agency that is contracted by the CDC to support our group.

We ate again tonight at News Cafe, which while sitting there, could have been located just as easily in a California Suburb. It's definitely very easy to forget at times that we're in South Africa. Tomorrow is the first day of work, but it doesn't start until around 11am. The partners are coming to the lodge to meet with John, our CDC contact (great guy btw), to discuss the projects and the scopes of work. They'll then be presenting an overview of each of the projects to the entire team, after which we'll head into the office for an afternoon of work. We're also expecting to get a little more freedom tomorrow with the rental of three cars.

Tomorrow I'll try and post some more pictures of the hotel during the day time and also of my room so you can get a feel for it. The latest developments are that the water in the room has been shut off for some reason...yes, just checked, still off, so we'll try and get that fixed tomorrow. Plan for the morning is Yoga at 8am, led by Guru Anil, now known as the "Little General" nicknamed by Mary in the car this morning after she made the comment, "I hope we're going to stop soon" (en route during a 4 hour car ride). He turns to her and says, "What do you need to stop for?" Good guy though. He'll lead us in Yoga at 8am, then I think Ethan and I are jumping in the pool, assuming greater than 50 degree temperatures, and then it'll be a nice breakfast and a mellow morning. On to the pics! (which are in reverse order since I forgot to upload them the right way.)

A view of the back of the hotel, or part of the hotel, there's probably four or five buildings, from one of the many patios. The balconies that you can see in the background are people's rooms (my room also has it's own private balcony with a nice view of the city in the distance.)

There is also a stray dog who we've named Manchito, which is translated into spanish as, "a bastardized version of a male spot". We also tend to call him burrito, churro, and any other spanish food words on the top of our head. And yes, he really is a stray dog that just hangs around the lodge without a name. I feed him. The guy in the picture is my pseudo suite mate and office partner Chris.

One of the two pools with a nighttime view of the city of Nelspruit in the distance.

A different patio area more up near the main lodge area. We had cake and tea here for us after we got back from the restaurant. It looks very dark in the picture but it's only about six o clock. Because we are so far south and it's winter, the sun sets before 6pm.

The big group of us as we arrived at the hotel with all of our luggage.

IBM in SA

Here's an interesting fact. during the 1970's IBM boycotted South Africa because of Apartheid. We literally pulled all of our resources out of the country and stopped selling here until they became a democracy.

This makes for a very interesting dynamic because not many companies did a thing like that (also known as the "right thing"). Because of this, we are not the number one player in the marketplace, in fact, we're not even the number two or three, I think the General Manager of SA told us that we're number four. While we were gone for 20 years or so, local competitors popped up and took over the marketplace.

IBM still struggles today to claim share back, in particular without any advertising. I'm not sure why we don't have any advertising here, but apparently, if you talk to locals, they aren't even sure that IBM came back after apartheid ended. The place that we're going is going to be even more-so isolated from IBM so hopefully we'll be able to have both a significant impact for the area and also the company.

Last night, after the day described below, we came back to the hotel for a couple hours of rest and then gathered at 6 to head to dinner. 6pm really was a south african 6pm, so it was more like 6:30 by the time we had the 14 of us rounded up together. We piled into our mini vans and headed over to a restaurant called Moyo which was in a really upscale part of Jo-burg and accordingly had appropriate prices. It was pretty cool though, with authentic entertainment and face painting!

This is the group of all of us at the table, taken from my end of the table. The two guys on the left are Anil and Zack from India, Craig from Illinois is at the head of the table, in the red is Mary from Australia, Mirko from Italy, and then next to him, Shigaru from Japan and Veronica from Uraguay. Had a great time at dinner, lots of laughs and great conversation.

I mentioned they had face painting. A woman came around with paints and everyone had a design on their face...well almost everyone, I believe we had two abstainers for whatever reason. In this picture is Carolina from Mexico getting hers done. The same woman before the face painting came around with a steaming hot pot of water to wash our hands in one by one. Talk about service.

Apparently my struggle with the technology blog continues, because I can't move the stupid pictures around below, so I guess I'll just describe them. (This would be so much better if I was just programming in HTML.)

Picture 1, with the tv in the background is of Mary, Veronica (Vero-chan) and Craig with their faces painted up. In the background was a SA soccer game (they lost, much to the disgruntled noises from fans in the restaurant.)

Picture 2 is a shot from the other side of the table, and in it are people from SA, Taiwan, US, Mexico, Canada, and Australia. A great international crowd. I should also mention that this place we're sitting was in a part of the restaurant that was four floors below ground.

Picture 3 is my main course meal, a chicken Tangine. I may have to avoid ordering chicken again, I'm not such a fan of eating meat off the bone, and when it's in a stew like this, with low lighting in the restaurant, it's a little hard to tell what you're eating. I ended up putting chicken bones in my mouth and trying to chew atleast four times, which can be awkward spitting it back out.

Picture 4 is the result of too many pictures. I asked for my friends to make a surprise face, turns out they don't get surprised in India, so this is what a surprised face looks like. Carolina I thought did an admirable job of looking shocked.

Picture 5 is my dessert, one of the best I've had. It was a ginger, cinnamon, baked apricot cake, covered in a vanilla cream sauce. My new policy, which also led me to this dessert, is to rely on the advice of the waiter. This was his favorite and it worked out so far. We'll see how well that rule holds up and whether it gets applied to things other than desserts.

Arrival in South Africa and IBM SA

Slowly but surely I'm getting the hang of this blog. I now realize that to get the pictures in the order that I want the pictures in, I have to upload them backwards.

The trip to SA was somewhat eventful. Ended up calling a cab to pick me up from the house and then took the metro north down to GCT. From there, I inquired about a bus which would have cost $15, since I'm lazy, I ended up taking a taxi. From GCT to LGA was about $40 in traffic, so not horrible. The funny thing is that the program only covers $25 each way transportation to the airport, so really my one trip to the airport more than ate up my cost. Oh well, I'm expecting a lot of out of pocket expenses on this trip, so might as well start early.

LGA - ATL wasn't a problem. Had a lot of time in the airport there. The only big event that happened was the naked old man in the bathroom. And this wasn't really big, just shocking. I walk into the men's room, and standing facing me, between the toilets and the sink is an old man with his pants down using papertowels to do something below the waist. I'm not sure what. Either way, it was clearly "stall" behavior, so counting the Hangover, I have now seen more old man derrier in the last week than I have in my lifetime.

Trip to Jo-burg wasn't bad, just long. Longer because it took us 2 hours to get out of Atlanta since the ground crew had to replace a broken fuel pump. Nothing like mechanical issues to make you look forward to a long flight over the ocean where a plane just recently crashed. Read about 300 pages of Kaffir boy, recommended to me by one of the participants last time and enjoyed it quite a bit. Definitely helped set me up for the Apartheid museum. Also enjoyed my newly purchased PSP, highly recommended.

The south African airport was pretty cool, they had all of the south african flag colors on the floor, which I had plenty of time to look at because we had a small luggage problem with one of the people on our team and flight. (There were three of us on the plane from Atlanta). About an hour and a half later, we finally got the luggage, thankfully it wasn't lost, and we made our way out to find a sign with our names on it. Turns out we had another teammate that had been waiting for us since 5pm, which is when our flight was supposed to be in. Didn't leave the airport for the hotel until almost 9pm.

We dropped our stuff off and then four of us headed out to eat at a "Pub/Restaurant" which turned out to be more like a loud college bar. The food was good though, I had spicy mini burgers and a Chill Cucumber Smoothie. Let me say that again, a Chilli Cucumber Smoothie, which tasted like dill, cucumber, mint, with a spicy aftertaste. I'm not going to say it was delicious, but I definitely don't regret ordering it.

The hotel room was pretty basic, tv, two twin beds, reasonably sized bathroom with shower, and internet in the lobby and bar. Can't really ask for much more than that.

The next morning we all met at 8:45 and headed over to the IBM South Africa site where we met with the General Manager of South Africa and some of his team. They also had several of the local CSC members chosen for the program who had either already gone or were going to be going in the next phase which was cool. Had a good overview of the country/company and then had an excellent SA history lesson given by Nathi, one of the local employees.

We gathered outside the building, which was quite nice, as we waited for our shuttles to take us on a little tour of Jo-burg, including the Apartheid museum.

I went through the museum pretty quickly, entirely on my own. Somehow I managed to lose my group within two minutes of going into the museum, so I moved quicker than I probably otherwise would have and made it out about 40 minutes before the rest of the group. This turned out to be nice since I was able to sit on a bench in the sun and reflect on what I had just seen, the tough times that SA went through, and just in general relax. I find the times when I'm free to think fewer and fewer these days; always seems there's something to distract me, whether it's driving, working, tv, video games, Terra, cell phone, etc. Sitting there with nothing to do but relax was nicer than I would have expected. It'll be interesting to see how much of that I get on this trip.

After this we went on a little bus ride of the surrounding area. We had SA IBMers with us, but unfortunately we were in two different vans, and all of them got into one van (not the one I was in) so while the other group got a nice tour, we had to make it up. Fortunately I had read up a bit, so realized as we pulled into Soweto, that this was where the riots all started that would eventually end apartheid. Believe it or not, the picture to the left is better conditions that it used to be back then, when there were miles and and miles of shantytowns throughout Soweto and Alexandra (the setting for Kaffir Boy).

A preview of future souvenir purchases perhaps?

A view of Jo-burg on the way back to the hotel. There's quite a "downtown" area although we haven't really seen it yet. Tonight we're going out to some kind of restaurant or other with the ever gracious local IBMers. Speaking of, my faith is once again affirmed as it seems that everyone I have met so far on the program is what I would call "good people" and IBMer is an IBMer round the world.

Going away party

Well, it doesn't get much better than this, we had a bunch of friends over for a little going away soiree and had a grand ole time. I will say that it's hard to find South Africa themed stuff, so some of the things turned out to be african/jungle/hawaii/pacific island themed, but it all worked out. Among the attractive decorations: A cake decorated like the South African Flag (Terra is a genius), a large inflatable monkey, a lion pinata (thanks Erin and Katie!), and a giant tribal type looking tiki mask cooler.

Other than the decorations, it was just great having everyone around, both people and dogs. Dogs you say? yes, we set a new household record with three of them. Always fun watching the dogs running around the backyard, and even with it not fenced in, they managed to stay quite well behaved.

Weather was the only downfall and that was intermittent, causing a temporary rain delay in whatever badminton/volleyball game happened to be going on at the time. Badminton sets were the best $15 I spent, lots of fun for everyone but the now muddy yard. Fortunately, it has 5 weeks to recover before I get back.

Terra did her own version of homemade African masks and those that were left after dark tried them on for a photo.

Some cranium.

The aforementioned three dogs, all shapes and sizes.

A large monkey.

My girl with a south african cake!