Meetings, clients and the Kiss

Today's blog may be boring for some of you as it will be full of with meetings, clients, business pictures. But I assure you, next week will be hillarious because we are going on safari to Masai Mara tomorrow. And just to cheer you up a little bit here comes my African lover:) Finally, I found "the one":)

Since my last blog, I could not have any chance for blogging because I must say that they make us work hard hereJ. #ibmcsc During the time we are in Nairobi, we ran from one client to another in a really chaotic traffic. Nairobi’s traffic is as challenging as Istanbul’s, maybe more. And due to the content or processing method of the gas used by the cars I guess, the air is very polluted. The hotel we are staying is just across the Israel Embassy in the Upper Hill area. So, the security is very high. From the hotel’s main gate to my room, I swipe my room-key 4 times. Here  you can see some shots from the hotel with the one below being my only freedom zone in Nairobi. Smoking is strictly restricted in Kenya. You cannot smoke in public areas even if in open air. And there are only a few smoking zones around the city which are actually more like cells or cages. Believe me, you do not want to go in and smoke there. Moreover, it is not common for women to smoke or drink alcohol. Shortly, they made all the things possible that can make you feel inferior if you are smoking. So I could only smoke in this little garden of the hotel when I arrive in the evenings. Also, this restriction makes me think about smoking all the time. So I am having very hard times as a smoker hereL.

And regarding business, we have made a good start. Starting from Sunday, we have met our clients and had a few meetings. The CSC team is divided into 3 subteams. I am in the Subteam2  which will be working with KAM (Kenya Manufacturers Association) to offer them new strategies for membership growth through value proposition to catalyze sector in line with Vision 2030 (Kenya’s blueprint for development). All the sub-teams attended the fist client introduction meetings. And the picture below is from our first meeting with the Client.

Sub team 1- they call themselves Twiga, client is Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology. Monday morning, we had the first meeting with them. The meeting time was at 9 am but it took one additional hour for all the people from the Ministery to come together. So the meeting started at 10 amJ In Kenya, time concept is different. As our Project Consultant Muiriki says, Kenyans are task-driven, not time-driven. Furthermore, there is no specific end time for the meetings, either. Because Kenyans think one meeting should end when all the issues to be handled ends. None of the meetings so far started on time. We had waited between half an hour to 2 hours for all the meetings. The first picture above is taken at the main gate of Ministry. And the one below is with with the Ministry officials.







The meeting with the Ministry was of course more formal than ours. During the meeting, they offered us tea and coffee together with a box which included dishes including one sausage, one samosa (deep-fried Indian stuffed pastry/borek) and another deep-fried pastry. We had already have the breakfast but as it is regarded impolite to reject offerings in Kenya, we ate all of this stuff too just 2 hours after the breakfast. But I must tell you that they were delicious. The same night we continued to discover Kenyan’s cuisine at Ronalo’s restaurant located in downtown. Actually, this place is more like a wedding saloon in terms of Turkish standards. There was a live band playing African music and sometime later, Richard joined them to sing “No woman no cry”. That night I could not eat anything because I already had meat in quantities more than I could handle in just 2 days. I must say that Kenyan cuisine not very vegetarian. A typical menu is a meat dish deep-fried or stewed in dense tomato sauce and a starchy side dish like either plain pilaf, ugali (cornmeal mush) or chapatti (wheat flatbread- very alike to katmer). Below is a sample of this typical menu with ugali. Ugali is the dish that surprised me a lot. My grand grand-mother is Abkhaz and many women who are married to the men in our family, too. And they cook an Abkhaz dish which is exactly the same of Ugali, just darker in color. Can you believe that? Caucasus is thousand miles far away from East Africa but people have the same dish. It is amazing.

And finally comes the Tusker beer. It is the most popular and for me best local beer in Kenya and everybody in the team likes it. There is also Guinness here which I was very happy to see at fist but after trying it I decided to go on with Tusker as the African version of Guinnes is far more smoky and a little bit sweety; pretty strange to me. And no surprise it is called Guinnes ExtraJ

Another pleasant meeting was with IBM East Africa. IBM EA is quite new and small organization at the moment but has potential as it is operating in not only in Kenya, but also in Uganda and Tanzania. And I must add that Tony Mwai, CEO of IBM EA, has this charismatic leadership spiritJ.