All in a Good Week's Work

Friday arrived! At the beginning of the week we had such a large task looming over us that I thought the week was going to feel very long. However, it ended up going by quickly and the work days have been full of many new and fun experiences. Prior to our beginning the work we are doing I had a difficult time fully explaining to people what Corporate Service Corps is. Now, I get it. While we have a Scope of Work to focus on, in a lot of ways we are being used as consultants and new sets of eyes to look at issues our host organizations have been struggling with. We may not be experts in the fields we are working in during our assignment, but we all have skills we have learned in our careers at IBM (and before IBM) that have given us knowledge and best practices to share.

I am happy to see how comfortable we are all becoming with each other - both at the sub-team level and as an overall team. At the sub-team level we have good relationships with our PA and our additional translator. For lunch today Donnacha rode on the back of Bayou's motorbike to help him pick up lunch and rode home on the back of it holding drinks in one hand and hanging on for dear life with his other. Have any of us ever gone to lunch before with a co-worker in that fashion? I've not come close. I went to dinner with a smaller group - just four of us - and we visited for three hours. I'm really enjoying the more intimate times when it's easier to talk and really get to know someone.

My cultural experience for the day was that I had my laundry done by a local woman in her own home. The place is located near our office.

Yesterday morning we dropped off our clothes in bags and this afternoon we picked them up. All my clothes were washed, dried, ironed and folded (even my undies) and the cost to me for 4kgs was $2.54 IN USD. I am in awe of this for many reasons - the fact we trust someone enough to leave our clothes with a perfect stranger (no receipt, no phone number, nothing), the fact that someone earns her living by doing laundry out of her own home, the level of care that went into cleaning my clothes...

But the main thing I am coming to terms with (and really not even close to coming to terms with it) is the standard of living and the cost of living here. Being in the city I am not seeing many painful, visible signs of poverty like I have seen in many other areas of the world I have visited. However, when I think about how much it costs me to have my laundry done or buy a nice dinner or take a taxi somewhere it's a stark realization on how little people have in a monetary sense to exist here. The city doesn't look poor, but I have a hard time thinking that this is just what I am seeing on the surface and below this is a whole lot of pain and ugliness that people simply don't want to have to look at.

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