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.