October 22, First Day in Kenya

Jambo Friends,

After 3 months of impatient wait, finally I am in Kenya:) And Kenya welcomes me with a very pleasent sunny day and a beautiful rainbow.



Today is the first day of my IBM CSC assignment. OK, let's start from the start. IBM has a program called the Corporate Service Corps (CSC). If you want to learn more about the CSC, you can visit the following link and if you are one of my IBMer friends I highly recommend you apply for it on the  next cycle:
 http://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/corporateservicecorps/.

Anyway, I applied for this program and with a very nice coincidence, I was informed that I am accepted on my birthday, 25th of July. It has been one of the best birthdays I have ever had. There were several deployment regions that you can select and Africa was my first preference, so I am very happy to be here. In this programme, we are 12 colleagues from IBM all around the world. We are the fourth team IBM has sent to Kenya through the CSC, and hence the name "Team Kenya 4". We have already started to know each other 3 months before our arrival here via weekly conference calls and preworks. And I want to introduce you my team mates whom I will be working and actually living with for the next 5 weeks:

Adekunle from USA

Bahram from Germany

Cammy from Mexico

Jennifer from Canada

Henriette from Denmark

Isabel  from Potugal

Kensuke from Japan

Lotem from Israel

Marissa from USA

Richard from India

Rob from UK

I was the lucky one in the team with the only direct flight (6 hours, 10 min.) from Istanbul to Nairobi with Turkish Airlines. I am a fan of THY:) It took more than 20 hours to arrive in Nairobi for some of my team mates like Cammy, Kensuke and Isabel. Hopefully, everybody arrived safe and with their luggages. I was on the same flight with Jennifer and Henriette, so they were the ones I met first in person. We arrived in Nairobi around 01.20 am. And first time in my life, somebody was waiting for me at the airport with a poster in his hand with my name written on it:) It is a nice feeling:) Afterwards, we went to our hotel in Nairobi which we will be staying until Wednesday.

In the morning, we met with the other team members and had breakfast together. After the breakfast, we had free time until 5 pm, so we went out to discover Nairobi. We walked around the city, went on top of a high building to see the skyline. Here we were provided with a very vivid and interesting presentation of the skyline by an enthuastic tour guide.

Nairobi is a quite modern city with many large and high buildings. Many of them are serving as government offices. The city is large and very green. Everywhere you can see huge trees and very colorful flowers. The people are very friendly to the visitors.

 We came accross an outdoor church event and joined their fest. We sang and danced with them. Moreover, a local TV channel recorded us for a TV program. They found it very interesting that the team is very international. Now CSC Kenya Team4 will be famous in Kenya.

Another highlight of the day was Massai Market. It is held on Saturdays on an open park area. And we are very lucky to catch it. Here you can buy all varieities of African handcrafts like bags, wood carving, jewellery, clothes, pottery, paintings and many many other things. I bought 2 little pretty bags. 

In the evening we met out NGO coordinator Alex Mutungi. He is a very friendly and nice person. He will be with us in Kenya during all our stay. Right afterwars, we went to the Fairview Hotel to have our welcome dinner and to meet Muriuki Mureithi, the Consultant of our CSC programme and other members of DOT. It was a very lovely dinner and I ate a delicious dish called something like Hot Chili Duck. Mmm, yummyyy:)


 Tomorrow, our subteam (Team 2: Me, Isabel, Adekunle and Rob) will meet at breakfast at 7 am to prepare our presentatation to present to the client at 3 pm. So I must go and sleep now. It will be a hard working day for Subteam 2 and I am very excited to meet with the Client. I will talk about our project and client later. For now kwaheri (goodbye)