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Flag of Tanzania

I’m heading to Africa in a few days as a part of the IBM Corporate Service Corps. Despite the mildly awkward name, it’s a rather interesting program. IBM is sending 600 of its best and brightest to work with NGO in emerging markets. It’s a mish-mash of corporate citizenship, good public relations, philanthropy, and advance market research. I’m joining 8 other IBMers from around the globe — the Philippines, India, Brazil, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and the United States — to work for one month with three organizations in Arusha, Tanzania. We have never worked together as a team before, let alone ever met in person. We’re all hail from various backgrounds which run the gamut from technical skills to sales to marketing to management. Some of us don’t speak English very well, and none of us speak any Swahili.

I learned just a few days ago that I’ll be working with the Institute of Accountancy Arusha (IAA). They offer various undergradute and postgraduate programs in business, accounting, and information technology. I’ll be working with them to assess their current infrastructure, plan upgrades, and various other IT-related tasks. Other team members are working with the African Wildlife Foundation and the Tanzanian Association of Tour Operators on projects ranging from AIDS outreach to marketing to business planning. We’re not the only IBM team that has been to Tanzania. Two teams visited in 2008 to work with TATO and AWF. They accomplished a lot, including creating the current TATO web site, numerous business plans, and lots of consulting work. A fourth team is leaving in a month to go work in the capital of Tanzania, Dodoma.

Overall, I am quite excited for this. It is certainly the most interesting task I’ve taken on in my short tenure with IBM, and I have no doubts that it will be the most challenging. It’s a bit intimidating going into a new country, culture, and pace fo life. Things I take for granted here like instant, always-available Internet access, are simply not available there. What will I ever do with out Google? But that’s all part of the experience, and I look forward to it. I am also quite eager to join this new team. Just from the few weeks of conference calls and uncountable email chains, they have demonstarated a great level of capability and profressionalism.

I am a bad writer. I can string words together into sentences, and for the most part get my point across when I have to. But rarely am I ever happy going back and reading my writing. It’s why I don’t write a journal, don’t write letters, and why I loathe long-winded emails. I have a college-era LiveJournal account, locked behind privacy settings as it’s not fit for the world to see. Writing, to me, is a chore, and best left to the professionals. Or at least those who enjoy it.

So why, then, would I do something as silly as start a writing a weblog? Mostly because I have been looking for a convenient way to post some of the things I come across, silly stories that I get tired of re-telling to friends at the bar, and pictures that don’t belong on Facebook. But I also am starting this because I want to become a better writer. I figure if I have the tools, I can bumble my way through finding my writing “voice.” Practice makes perfect, right?

I read plenty of blogs that I love, some by strangers, some by friends, and I find inspiration in them. I admire the free-ranging topics my dear friend and colleague John Tolva writes about (how you can go from SXSW to prairie fires to Legos to wine making is a feat in itself), the succinct but always amusing link lists Craig puts together, and the sheer absurdity that was Aaron’s (now defunct) candy blog. The “big” bloggers out there, like Kottke, Gruber, or Sullivan show how finding a unique voice and sticking with it pays off in the end. I can only hope that what I write will be fraction as interesting as the other stuff out there on the Internet.

Oh, I refuse to call myself a blogger, so don’t even start with me on that.