In the Air

Ah...I am on the plane and I just sat back down in my seat and for the first time just breathed.  I am ready to start thinking about Ghana.

I am 4 hours into the flight, 5.5 hours left to go.  I got a bunch of emails off that I didn't get to before I left and hit Function F4 -  Shutting it down  - very symbolically in addition to literally.  I got a glass of wine (Chardonnay or Merlot out of a box were my choices, though not as bad as you'd think), put Kermit Ruffins and Rebirth (Brass Band) on the iPod and exhaled....

This week was really stressful, my mind was still reviewing it and all the things I still didn't get done when I can't even list all the things I did manage to cram into the past 4 days.  Amen my eye doctor squeezed me in when I realized I was out of contacts and my prescription was expired.  Going away for a month to a place you know you can't easily get certain things puts a different "lens" on your to do list (cheesy punn intended).  I didn't fare so well on the gifts, we are supposed to bring things for our teammates and people on our projects.  I just ran out of time other than a thorough study of NYC souvenir stores in Times Square on Monday afternoon.  Hopefully I heart NY will be popular.

I should be tired, I set the alarm at 5am (and we all know how rare that is) so I could get my expenses from last 2 trips done and avoid AMEX flammograms and had every hour mapped out til my 2pm pickup which I was still late for..but I am not even close to being sleepy.

The flight is refreshingly empty and I have a bulkhead to myself.  I'm turning my mind towards what lays ahead, I have a bunch of Ghana documents to read.  2 of my teammaes are on the plane with me, they connected from Toronto and were in JFK since 9am! (our flight left at 4:40pm).  I met Kristina briefly before we took off.

One of the benefits of my travel schedule over the past 2 months is I had the opportunity to meet 3 other teammates: Shikha in Bangalore, Jun in Beijing and Denis in Sao Paulo.  Shikha invited Malia (from my work team and we were traveling together) and I to her home.  We had the pleasure of meeting her husband and enjoying a home cooked meal including this awesome pancake type thing called Appam, we even got to participate in making them.  Jun and I went to this cool place around a lake in Beijing and had hot pot.  For those of you that know fondue, hot pot is the Chinese version.  We had an awesome mushroom base and cooked a lot of good stuff. and had a sweet rice wine served warm which was really good - both hit the spot given it was FREEZING outside.  Denis and I met for lunch in the IBM office in Sao Paulo.  We didn't have a lot of time between meetings so stuck to the cafeteria and got to know each other.  I do love the fact that they have the Nespresso coffees in the Sao Paulo office...

We arrive in Accra, Ghana's capital, early Saturday morning and the rest of the team gets in across the day.  I am looking forward to meeting everyone and getting my first taste of what life in Tema will be like.  I am not even sure how we are getting to the hotel but I am guessing these documents I am about to read will tell me.

Well I guess that's a lot to read for now so I'll be back after I've met the rest of my team and have some first impressions of life in Tema.

Going to Ghana

I'm not much of a blogger but I've decided to take it up for my upcoming adventure to Ghana.  IBM started a program a few years ago called the Corporate Service Corp.  It's sort of like a business version of the Peace Corp.  A team of people from across the company are put together to go in country and volunteer their time and business skills to an assigned project.  The in country projects are all in developing nations, I know people who have done projects in Egypt, Philippines, Poland, Brazil and China but there are many more locations across Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.  There is an application process and thousands of people apply, I was lucky to get in.  Multiple teams deploy each month between Feb - Nov so it's quite a lot to coordinate.  IBM partners with NGO's (Non-Government Organizations) who have a presence in a specific country to coordinate a lot of the logistics and project assignments.  The pre-work for me began in December, getting a visa, vaccinations, a weekly meeting and some online education.  After our team was announced we all turned in resumes and then our in country coordinator, Barbra, matches our team to different projects based on our skills.  My team has 11 people and 2 or 3 of us are each assigned to a different project.   The city where we will be located is Tema, Ghana.  It's a major port city not very far away from the capital Accra.  Tema will be my home for a month!

One of the things we learned early on is that everyone has Ghanaian name based on the day you were born.  I was born on a Saturday so my Ghanaian name is Amma.  You can figure out what day you were born here.

My life has been nuts so I feel like I haven't really focused on the fact that I am going to Ghana even though I say it out loud to people.  I'm used to a lot of travel but this year has been crazier than usual, I have been in a different country nearly every week since the beginning of the year for work.  I wrapped up work stuff just in time for one of my closest friends to get married this weekend so it was 3 days of wedding festivities and now today I finally got down to realizing I only have 4 days left!!

Now I'm making lists so I don't forget anything, racking my brain and the NYC souvenir stores for gifts to take that will go over well and be representative of my home country (I'm the only one coming from the US) and really wondering how I'm going to get it all done before Friday.