#cscsenegal5

It has been a week since I have been back and getting back into the swing of things has been quite the whirlwind.   First, the jet lag!  The first week back the 18 hours of travel really took its toll. Not to mention day light savings time had happened so the time difference went from four hours to five hours.  The whole week I was pretty tired from the traveling and to boot my body kept waking my up at 4 AM telling me that I had slept far too late.  I elected to roll around in my bed trying to sleep until about 530-6 AM and then got up and went to work.   The first day back of course I get to see how my co-workers decorated my desk for Halloween!!

Despite my biological clock sending strange signals, it has been good and strange to be back.  The good part is that I get to see my friends and family to catch up on what as been happening in everyones lives.  The strange part is having all of your habits that I used to have at home and at work be completely non-existent.  It was as if I was coming back with a blank slate and so it was time to start to construct my life from the experience I had had from the previous month.

In my personal life the chance to build new habits gives me the opportunity to fine tune my training, diet, and what I spend my spare time on.   For my training I have decided to try to keep training sessions shorter and less intense but keep a high frequency of training sessions per week

For my diet I have decided to keep with carbohydrates I started eating again in Senegal as I noticed improved energy and mood overall.  However, I will have to make sure to keep total calories under control, something that is hard in the world of French fries!  Finally, for my free time I was doing quite a bit of reading before.   Now after a month away from it, working almost constantly, it is now time to be more targeted with my reading and trying to integrate more skills improvements as well.  I am still thinking through it, but it will probably be a split of reading and skilling up in the end.

In my professional life The really encouraging part is that I know how much I accomplished in four weeks in Africa and now I get to think about how I can port that momentum forward.  Still being relatively new in my area I still have the opportunity to grow in so many directions.  I know I personally want to shoot for the sky in my career and I will only get there one building block at a time.  Here is where I think my personal and professional goals align around skills.  There are many technical skills that I need to acquire in the near term with thoughts of business and leadership level skills to come down the road.  One must build the foundation before building a tower!  I think one thing that CSC taught me professionally is that I can move faster and feel uncomfortable, but that will allow me to grow even faster.  

One week past and the world is still my oyster!

Still missing this fun group! Cannot wait for Reunion! 

A common practice I have done since I went on long field trips with classes in elementary school was to take a moment to reflect about the experience through thinking about a rose - the positive, a thorn - the negative, and a bud - things that you are hopeful for to come down the road.   With the Corporate Service Corps experience, the occasion is no different.  

Rose

The positives?  The list here is almost endless.  The CSC Program puts fifteen of its top performers in a foreign country for a month, where the team spends almost every waking moment together trying to use their skills to help the world become a better place.  The alignment of work and purpose almost never becomes as tangible as it did at the end of our month here in Senegal.   From healthcare related topics like e-Health for all and the 90-90-90 UNAIDS objectives to top level strategy for the education and woman empowerment, our missions were clear and it took a lot of work to lay framework for the vision of the future for each of these projects.  I think each and everyone of us accomplished something amazing at the end of the day and it does not get anymore positive than that!

We will also not forget all of the other invaluable experiences that came along with the journey.  The time spent out each weekend seeing something new and different as a team was incredible.  Especially, in getting to know so many cultures and the ways things work across the world. Although here, we must talk about the richness of the Senegalese people as part of those invaluable experiences.  Everyone of them that we worked with opened their heart and welcomed us with open arms to their country.  Had it not been for the warm welcome, or “Teranga” as they call it, we could not have accomplished so much in such little time.   Not to mention how the food and music stand out in amongst all cultures our team had experienced in the past.

Thorn

For the negatives, I do not think that I can point to a single enormous negative over our four weeks.  What I do know is that almost everyone was uncomfortable at one point or another.   Most of that initial discomfort came from the different food and environment that makes just about everyone feel a bit strange when they travel to a different part of the world.   Second, I am also sure that almost each of us felt exposed at one point or another in the way we work.   Our working styles stood in contrast to others with such a diverse set of working styles on the team, and of course such exposure can lead to tension and conflict.   Finally, a thorn for many was not being near my loved ones for such an extended period of time.  Some of the team members had children who missed them dearly, while others had significant others they had to leave to come to a place they did not understand.

Bud

Despite all the uncomfortable times with the food or the work and missing our loved ones back home, we pushed through the thorns.   We pushed through, not by charging at them full force like a bull, but by lifting each other up above the thorns through our supportive efforts, in effect becoming the family that we had all left at home.  Once we jelled as a family there was no limit to what we could accomplish and those results are the buds of hope that will grow into the future of Senegal and it is up to the Senegalese we worked with to grow those buds into saplings and then trees to create an even more amazing country.

On the flip side, the Senegalese people, the team, and our work left a bud inside of each and everyone of us. From the amazingly friendly nature of the Senegalese to the iron clad support of our team members to our work styles being exposed in the contrast of cultures, each of us saw our weaknesses and strengths in full action, leaving buds of ideas of how to improve ourselves in our heads.  In order to cultivate those buds we must not return to the same day to day routine, we must till and irrigate our land.  From that fertile soil will come beauty, but only if we take the time to make the bud grow into the beautiful rose bushes that live inside each and everyone of us.   In effect, if we can nurture the buds inside of us, then Senegal will have no problem nurturing the buds that we left inside of it.

A Final Thank You

At the end of the day we also have to thank IBM for the opportunity and all the administrators (Jamie McDonald, Monica Murray, Gopalakrishnan Kolathu, Julie Elliot, Tidiane Gueye, Sidi Ali Maelanin, Samantha Chaou, Kotheid Nicoue, et al.) that made this amazing journey happen - Thank you!

And from the bottom of my heart thank you to everyone who made this journey possible, especially to the special 15 of Senegal 5!