14 Days to go

    In 2 weeks, like today, I will be on a plane heading out to Belo Horizonte.  The 3 month pre-assignment period went by a lot faster than I expected.  There is still so much to do.  After checking my todo list, I realized I'm in better shape than I thought.  The travel logistics are taken care of.  My visa and tickets are ready.  I leave from JFK on Friday August 10 at 10am.  I have a layover in Panama city then straight to Belo Horizonte.  In BH, the transportation to the hotel is all set.  We will be staying in the park flat apt.

    One of the biggest unfinished items on the todo list is learning Portuguese.  I am probably half way done, but I never thought learning another language would be so challenging.  I guess I always took it for granted.  Back home, everybody speaks 3 languages before the age of 5, and we usually speak all 3 at once. One of the typical sentences you would hear in Lebanon is "Hi (English), Kifak? (Arabic for How are you) Ca va? (French for you're ok?)".   So learning a 4th language as an adult is a totally different story.  I realized I can speak it a lot better than I understand it, so I will be having one way conversations with people, where I speak and they listen.  For those who know me, this couldn't be more perfect :)  Hopefully, I can be done with all 30 lessons before August 10. If not, well, there's always the 20 hour plane ride.


    Another thing I did was book my hotel in Rio.  5 of us so far changed their ticket on the way back, to spend a couple days in Rio post assignment.  Since we are going to be there on a holiday weekend (We are going to be in Rio starting September 8 and September 7 is Brazil's Independence day), hotels are filling up really fast and are ridiculously expensive.  I will be staying in a hotel RIGHT by the beach:

And according to the hotel website (which can mean nothing), this is the view from the room:

   The team is discussing the things we want to do over the weekends.  We have a pretty nice guide of the places we need to visit around Belo Horizonte.  We're also trying to coordinate a trip to Iguazu Falls.  That place looks gorgeous so hopefully it works out.  

   We are also doing some real work in between planning for all those trips.  On Monday, we have our first meeting with our customer.  We want to introduce ourselves to them and get to know them better.  We also welcomed a new person to our team.  John from New Zealand will be joining Vinod, Michael and I.  I will write more about that next week.

Until Next time
Nada #ibmcsc Brazil

Starting to Feel Real

Everyone who knows me probably heard this a couple hundred times already, but I am going to say it again anyway :) In less than a month, I will be heading to Belo Horizonte, Brazil for a month as part of the IBM Corporate Service Corps.  I will be part of a team of 15 IBMers from all over the world (12 countries).  The team includes 3 people from the US, 1 person from Lebanon (me :)), 1 person from Austria, 1 person from Spain, 1 person from Italy, 2 people from Korea, 1 person from Malaysia, 1 person from Ireland, 1 person from Australia, 1 person from Hungary, 1 person from Canada, and 1 person from New Zealand.

I can't start describing how excited I am about this.  It all started in April of last year, when I was reading the links on W3 (and I never read links on w3 so talk about fate) and I saw that the applications are open for the CSC.  When I read about what the CSC was, I just had to apply.  On May 31st, I was getting ready to start  my 2 week vacation in Peru, when I got a call from my manager telling me I got accepted.  I could not believe it! It wasn't until November that I found out I was going to Brazil and met the team virtually late April.  This is when the real work started.  First thing I did was look for a Crossfit box in Belo Horizonte! (First things first, and yes, I am addicted) and I found one, 8 minutes from our hotel.  I'm not sure I'll have time to go give it a shot but just knowing I have the option is great.  Next, I started learning Portuguese.  It is NOT easy.  I thought that knowing a little Spanish would make things easier but it's actually the opposite.  Spanish is completely messing me up.  Hopefully I'll know enough to get by.

The team meets once a week to prepare for that trip.  In one of the meetings, we were paired up and asked to introduce each other.  I was partnered up with Michael from Austria.  We scheduled a 1h phone call to get to know each other, and by the end of it, we still had so much to talk about! It feels like I've known him for years.  It has also been great learning about everybody else on the team.  We all have so much in common.  One thing I noticed is that most of us listed "gets bored with details and gets annoyed when things don't go according to plan" as a weakness.  It is going to be interesting to see how that goes in Brazil. We were told that they are very laid back in the way they do business over there, and then you can't rush into it but have to get to know the people you are working with first.  I am going to have a lot of self control to do :)

Last week, they split us into 5 teams and gave us our assignments.  I am on a team with Michael from Austria and Vinod from Malaysia.  We will be working with Rede Cidada, a Brazilian non-governmental organization dedicated to training disadvantaged youth and helping them find jobs.  We will be helping them create a Portfolio Management System Project that integrates all the different projects they have.  Hmmm... I think I just went from really excited, to super nervous, to Google :)  After looking up what all of that means, I feel a little better.  We have a subteam meeting next Monday to discuss the project before meeting with our client.   

Being assigned a project and a client is making this real! If it was up to me, I would be ready to leave tomorrow.  I have my passport, visa, vaccination, tickets and hotel reservations ready!  

Until next time.

23 Days to BH

Nada #ibmcsc Brazil

32 days till BH

Can't wait

#ibmcsc Brazil