First weekend - Go Super Eagles!!!

Ek'aro!!! (Good Morning)

Oh, what a weekend!!! It’s has been a crazy, exciting, exhausting weekend. I’m loving it!  So let’s start from the beginning, flight to Madrid at Thursday afternoon, 9.5 hours in the air. It was a good flight, but I think for the first time I got the worse place possible in the plane, right at the bathroom door, where people come and go all the time and the noisy flushing never stops, so I got only a little sleep and arrived at 6:30 am local time and had to wait until 4:00 pm to take my other flight to Lagos, so what to do with all that time? Let’s explore Madrid! I’ve left my luggage in the airport lockers and took a bus to downtown, got in Atocha (one of the places of the terrorist attacks in March 2004) station about 8:00 am. Man, that’s big! Zero degrees Celsius. After asking around I start my walk heading to city center. What a beautiful city! Got a ham sandwich at the Museo del Jamon along with some coffee and then I went to the Almudena Cathedral and the Royal Palace. Both huge buildings and very pretty.  It’s hard to think someone actually lived in there at the past. How rich can some people be? And how can this people be so rich while almost everyone else is totally poor (worse than how it is today), just because they are the “chosen ones”…. Anyway, I’m not here to discuss Monarchy, and not also to talk about how nice it is to finally been in Europe, something that I wanted to do for so long, so let’s continue and just say it was amazing and totally worth it! After eating some paella I got back to the airport and got my plane to Lagos at 4 pm. Tired.

Ek’abo!!! (Welcome)
10 pm, Lagos Nigeria…Toyin, from Nigeria Government was waiting for me and took me to the hotel where I met all my IBM colleagues that arrived earlier and where finishing dinner. They were along with Daniel and Ann from CDS and as nice as they are (found that later) they all offered me part of their meals, as the kitchen was closed. Ate a bit, went to the room and got back to the lobby bar, where Christina, Daniel, Bouke, Peter, Rodney and I had a few beers. Was really nice to know the guys a little better.
Morning in Lagos and after breakfast we had a little security briefing with an IBM official in Nigeria and we met Remi, from Nigeria IBM as well. Traded some US Dollars to Nairas and left to Ado Ekiti in a small bus. This was something very different, because the traffic is chaotic and we have a private security car going with us with 2 guys with AK47’s who were opening our path and on any sign of stopping because of the traffic they left the car with the guns and open the way. Really felt like a state chief getting somewhere …. lol The drive was long, but we could see parts of Nigeria and got information from the CDS representative who will stay with us the whole trip, Ayo. There are people everywhere! Nigeria is the 7^th largest country in population and as it is not so big in land there is no place empty here.
Got to Ado at night and after getting to our rooms, setting our bed nets (Malaria is a real danger here and a bed net is very important to avoid it, as the mosquitoes attack mainly at night) we went down to have dinner and chat a bit more. By know we know each other a bit better and I can tell that everyone is very interesting and nice. Here is our team:
Ann Oden, CDS representative in Nigeria
Bhuvana Natarajan, IBM India
Bianka Bognar, IBM Hungary
Bouke van der Voet, IBM Netherlands
Christina Hu, IBM USA
Cinthia Vega, IBM Costa Rica
Daniel Elliot, CDS program manager for our IBM Nigeria team 6 (son of Brazilian mom, speaks Portuguese fluently)
Kelsen, you know this one
Laura Sharp, IBM Canada
Leslie Turner, IBM USA
Mariana Salvarredi, IBM Argentina
Minh-Hai Nguyen, IBM Finland
Mithilesh Pandey, IBM India
Peter Thompson, IBM USA
Robert Ellis, IBM USA
Rodney Cornelius, IBM Sweden
Sundar Rao, IBM India

Suddenly Toyin comes in with a surprise: the Governor of Ekiti, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, invited us to his birthday party and we had to leave soon. The governor, received us and after formal introductions he order some drinks and we got to talk a little bit informally with him and other government members that were there. The governor impressed me, as he told us the state of Ekiti is know to be one of the most well educated in Nigeria and that he wanted to keep and improve that, providing besides education, also skills to his people. One could tell he is all for development, just from this small conversation we had, what I really think is a good start to fulfill Ekiti’s needs. We had dinner again, lol, and had back to the hotel. (I’ll post more about Nigerian food later, as I get to know it).
-Sunday
After a late breakfast we had some more briefing with a local doctor and security officer and also some group dynamics to know each other better. It was very nice and also funny. It’s weird as in just a couple of days we are all very close and comfortable with each other. I believe this kind of experiences can cause this unique response in people. I gave out some Senhor do Bonfim wrist band and explained to them the meaning and everybody seems to like it.
After this meeting we headed out on the bus to know a bit of the city of Ado and had a stop and a local private university where received by the dean who showed us around and then we got back to the hotel for the real big event of the day: African Cup final match between Nigeria and Burkina Faso. Nigerians, like Brazilians, are crazy about football (the real one, played with the foot lol ) so, I can really relate to them and they are very surprised to know someone from another country who knows their players and is excited as they are about this game.

GO SUPER EAGLES!!!!

We won and the people here are very happy! It was pretty cool to watch with them and see them really happy and now they are expecting for the Confederations and World Cup in Brazil. I hope they do well, as long as they do not meet Brazil during the competitions, lol.
Dinner, some more drinks and conversation by the pool and now I’m here, going to sleep under my net and expecting a long day tomorrow, which will be our first business day, where we’ll participate in a press conference with the local media, the governor, our clients and other local officials.
This first weekend was great and I promise my posts will be shorter from now one, so you guys don’t get tired….

Nigeria, here we go!!!

Well, better late than never....so, here is my first post to this blog, where I intend to share my experiences and findings during my participation on the CSC program by IBM at Ado Ekiti, Nigeria where I'll be between Feb 8th and March 8th of 2013. Right now it’s almost 8 pm in Campinas, Brazil and I'm working in the last details for the trip, which will be tomorrow at 5 pm. But in order to this to make sense, I have first to go back a little bit and explain how the whole process worked and how did I find myself in this position.

Since I first heard of the Corporate Service Corps program, by IBM, I really found it very interesting and exciting and wanted to take part on it. Here is some information from the program web page:

Corporate Service Corps Overview

"The Corporate Service Corps was launched in 2008 to help provide IBMers with high quality leadership development while delivering high quality problem solving for communities and organizations in emerging markets. The program empowers IBM employees as global citizens by sending groups of 10 - 15 individuals from different countries with a range of skills to an emerging market for four week community-based assignments. During the assignment, participants perform community-driven economic development projects working at the intersection of business, technology, and society.
This program increases IBM's understanding and appreciation of growth markets while creating global leaders who are culturally aware and possess advanced teaching skills. The Corporate Service Corps offers a triple benefit: leadership development for the IBMers, leadership training and development for the communities, and greater knowledge and enhanced reputation in the growth markets for IBM.
Since its launch in 2008, the Corporate Service Corps program has sent over 1600 participants on over 150 teams to more than 25 countries around the world. The participants come from over 53 countries and have served communities in Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, China, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines, Romania, Russia, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, UAE and Vietnam. The program continues to expand to new locations each year."

Ok, so let’s continue, the first time I heard about this was in 2008 and I thought about applying...I even filled part of the application, but at end I thought it was not the time for me to take part in such effort and I really think I would not be chosen to take part of it. After that I did not paid too much attention at the program.

Now in 2012, around April, I've attended a presentation by a fellow IBMer who works in the same account as me, Felipe Piccirilo, who have participated and was now spreading out the word about how good it was and how to apply to it. This has reignited my desire to participate and I felt ready to such challenge. So I applied to it.

YEEEEAAAHHH!!! Congratulations on your acceptance to the Corporate Service Corps!!! 

This was the email I've received in at the end of June and immediately got very excited. I was finally going to fulfill a very old dream I had, which was going to Africa and help people as a volunteer. I had always talked to my wife about it, but it seemed to be something very hard to accomplish, since its a place very far, where is not so easy to make such arrangements when you are not involved with any organization that does this kind of thing, especially for my career type. (I believe that for healthy professionals might be easier to do something like that, for example, as there is a lot of organizations developing this kind of volunteering).

After the first excitement rush and a long wait for knowing our final destination (about 2 months), I was finally informed that my destination in Africa was Nigeria. I really liked, as I'm a big soccer fan I knew something about Nigeria. I knew we have at least something in common, as they are known for loving soccer, but that was all. Let's start the research! 

After some research I got to know more about the country and got more excited than ever, and along with my personal research, we start the training provided by the CSC, which was very extent, but very good. All of this happened in the last 2 months, and by January we finally found out about our projects. There will be 5 different projects done by our team of 15 IBMers from all over the world (I'll make other post to introduce everyone): 

Local Client	Project Title	SOW Description
Ministry of Education (MOE), State Government of Ekiti	TBD	TBD
Information and Community Technology (ICT) Department, State Government of Ekiti	Citizens Information Management System (CIMS)	Design an online Citizens register for the Social Welfare program for Senior Citizens (65 years and above) and provide sockets through which it will be integrated with the State’s CIMS.
Information and Community Technology (ICT) Department, State Government of Ekiti	E-government and Improving Work Flow	Provide appropriate solutions, best practices and framework for work flow automation in Ekiti State and provide template with enabling implementation methodologies to achieve smart governance generally in Ekiti State.
Ekiti State University	Database creation for University records and Training in Database Management and statistical packages	Help in the design of reliable databases in the University and to engage the university community in the efficient use of ICT
New Initiative for Social Development (NISD)	Capacity building for program staff for electronic monitoring and evaluation for diverse projects.	To design a methodology that will assist the entire program staff on  how to use the monitoring and evaluation system for  current projects in the organization and to assist in the management process for planning, policy advocacy  and decision making.

My project is the CIMS and now (Jan) we started to study our project in depth, so we could have good ideas and plans to have a good start once we get in Ado.

So, coming back to Today, here I'm, finishing this first post and a bit tired, but tomorrow will be the day the real adventure starts!

Odaaro! Orun n re lao sun (good night and have a nice sleep in Yoruba, main ethnic group from Ekiti state)

Kelsen