I went into the selfie business - below some of my first attempts and some impressions from the village:
We went to the SOS Children village this morning to play with the kids. Jamie and I were invited to House 2 (Peace) and the time just flew by. We really enjoyed it - and not because of the Jollibee kids program or the Jollibee mascot, least the Jollibee food. I think it was that the kids seemed to thoroughly enjoy being with us and teaching us Tagalog, talking to us, laughing, showing stuff, playing, and clinging onto us. It was a really nice morning (if you can say that after visiting a place of orphants and abandoned children) and a different service day to what we had expected, but definitly time well spent. The compound looked well-maintained, the concept of families well implemented, and the kids seemed to be quite happy. I went into the selfie business - below some of my first attempts and some impressions from the village: Pictures from the trip to Intramuros will follow. Just didn't have a change to download them yet (sorry about the quality of the pics above - I photographed them off my SLR camera...).
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As my social network clouds are slowly fading while I'm getting more and more engaged (slowly, as I said) with the f------- tool, Twitter, blogs, vlogs, and apps, what amazes me most is how much time you can spend with it (without actually intending to do so). It's like a technological haze (and maze) that envelops everyone who gets caught in it. Not that there aren't many things that are great and make things much easier -and at no cost: skyping and lyncing with my family - my grandpa almost got the hiccups when I told him I was calling from the Philippines and ordered my grandma to swallow her sandwich more quickly, what's-apping with the Manila Tao team, facetiming and i-messaging with friends,tripadvisoring the next available hotel, dropboxing/onedriving/googledriving data back and forth, snipstitching my photos for this blog (will hopefully save time doing the formatting, this was quite a pain...) and can't remember what else I did today. All in one day, all in a haze...:-) Other people, I just saw in a German newspaper, are spending their time by photographing food paintings (why didn't I have this idea?!) - see http://m.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-123984-7.html. In any case, this sort of electronic haze is definitely not helpful if you want to solve the problems of millions of people who don't even have access to any kind of electricity. Where social media is leveraged to join forces and connect supply and demand, it actually helps a lot. On the other hand, what is actually causing stir and getting the attention of millions is whether dresses are gold/white (which they are) or blue/black... Hopefully our social service day tomorrow will help us to "look up from your screen" (see https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS9Wte1gX9g), get in touch with and talk to people and get at least for a while, out of his haze.... And here my first snip stitches: Getting ready for delivery mode now; only 4 more real working days to go, as we need 1-2 days for handovers and next Friday will already be the final closing ceremony. Time flies by too quickly... Today was quite busy, with Malvin and En from Hybrid Solutions, Dolma, Kat, Bambi and the 3 of us all working from the guest room. Luckily we had different meetings so all went well. Keeping my fingers crossed that the afternoon meeting with the department of education about sponsoring over 100 solar suitcases went well! We continued to work on the Dropbox file share solution today, which will, after talking to Jim, probably become a Dropbox-googleDrive mix. Really interesting to work on the implementation of cloud solutions that people will be working on in offline scenarios in remote areas without electricity and a lot of paper-based hard copies (and probably tons of pictures respectively). So many options but which one will serve the best for the specific purposes and situation? How to store and access all kinds of data across various platforms, people, organizations and locations best? How to unify individual Dropboxes, iClouds, Gmail and other email accounts, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and other inline and offline data sources? And only 1 more week to go... Almost forgot: Jamie's video blog (a so-called VLOG, don't worry, I also only learned this last week) from week 1 is finally ready: http://youtu.be/JZ-Rgfr-zAk
Today is "Edsa"-Day, the People Power Anniversary to celebrate the revolution and restoration of the country's democracy and the fall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. It's sad to see that the country is still fighting with the legacy of what Marcos caused in terms of inequality, corruption, economic crisis, and religious unrest. Marcos was exiled to Hawai where he died 3 years later, but his family, e.g. son Bongbong Marcos (a senator...), former first lady Imelda (with a collection of over 7.500 shoes) and a grandson are still around. The grandson, some people who know him from school, told us how he tweeted about finding a real Picasso in the basement (which got confiscated a few days later). Due to the death of the SAF44 in Mindanao and the continuing inequality, there were lots of demonstrations going on today. As it was a "working" holiday though (big announcements in the paper so that no one mistakes it for a "real" holiday), we joined our PPT presentations rather than the PPA demonstrations. Not dropping it!Finished the rework of our process overview; more Powerpoints - but looking good now, and the file sharing recommendation: After analyzing a number of tools, Dropbox turned out to be our favorite. From feature perspective all were pretty close, some even better in terms of user authorization, collaboration, file versioning. But Dropbox seems to be the easiest and most flexible tool in terms of working across platforms and being compatible with thousands of apps. And, most importantly, the clients knows and uses it already -> low learning curve. So we started working with it today, collaborating, downloading, sharing, moving our file structure over to test things out, dropping something here and there, testing it out. We'll keep you updated on how they like our recommendation! Jaw-dropping:Lunch with Bambi, José and Ging in the basement brought with it (apart from a really nice Bangus = Milkfish) the surprising fact that Ging is buying 20 kg rice every week. That's why she needs such a container to store it: Remy took up the challenge and surprised up with real Indian veggie samosas for Merienda and some home-made lemonade. They are really spoiling us - completely and utterly. |
Today, we really dived right back into work. We decided to stay "home" (in the hotel) to save a lot of time in traffic. Traffic is completely unpredictable here. Asked for the way or a distance, Filipinos almost always casually add: "...depending on traffic". 3 km can take 10 min or 2 hours. So today, it was breakfast, lunch and dinner in the Flying Pan, our favorite (and only) restaurant. Everyone else of the Solar Energy Foundation was out of the office: Boyax is back in Mindanao, getting two new schools ready together with partner NGO Pasali; Bambi was in the mountain village Apia (see blog from last week) to attend a big community meeting on the future process of the solar lamp concept (e.g. rental or ownership). I'm really curious what Bambi will tell us tomorrow about the outcome as this will have a big impact on our overall process mapping and set-up. And that is actually what we did today: we worked out an end-2-end process overview of how the Light4Education process will look like in its 5 stages (Program Development, Preparation & Foundation, Pilot, Roll-out & Execution, Evaluation & Scaling up) for the three main stakeholder groups (the foundation, the partner organizations, the schools): what deliverables (e.g. agreements, reports), activities (community mapping, kick-off meetings, inventory management), requirements (e.g. documentation, training, bank account, shelf space,...) are to be done when and by whom? It's easier to imagine if you think of a book - our job is about bringing all the single activities and documents, which are currently floating around on different laptops, together in order to form a coherent and consistent story, with the chapters (and words!) in the right order, available for everyone. This story will be important to share with the schools, partners, donors, the Department of Education and any stakeholder interested in scaling up Light4Eduction to bring light, education and, as a consequence, opportunities and a better life and future to underprivileged kids and their families. There was a sentence in Yasar's blog today that I really liked: "Don't just read the index page of the book of people. Read the chapters." All of our process charts, heat maps (Simon today managed to get SAP Lumira going with the numbers from the department of education regarding schools in need!) toolkits, etc. will only work if the people who work with them find them really useful, intuitive, easy to find and easy to use. And if they actually use them! Only then this project will scale and we'll get new and exciting stories, new chapters, and new books of how kids managed to overcome a tough start in life - just by the means of a solar lamp with costs of around 900 Philippine Pesos (= 18 Euros). |
It started out great (vulcano tour, visiting Taal) and wet (some drizzle, wet boat rides) and continued so today with 2 amazing dives. Dirk-Jan (from now DJ), Caroline and I went to the Tagay and Cathedral dive spots in Anilao with dive masters Bunny (!) and Justine and a Australian-Philippino couple. Did refreshs and saw, apart from the usual suspects, big buffer fish, hugh triggerfish and a even bigger sea turtle (also a smaller one). She (turtles are females, at least in German) just lay there, 1 m in front of us in 18 m depth (the only drawback: I couldn't take my camera with me, 12 m only... would have loved to share this with you), looking left-right-left for 5 min before slowly and elegantly lifting and gliding past DJ. Awesome! (BTW: Anyone knows this book: http://1000awesomethings.com/book/)? Another awesome thing: having hot towels, tea and TimTams on a dive boat!
Then 4 quite straining hours back to Manila to share an easy, light and healthy home-made dinner. Now looking forward to diving back into work tomorrow!
Some impressions:
In Starbucks, always add if you want a hot or iced coffee, even at 8 in the morning. Bambi bravely dealt with her iced latte caramel...
If you feel so stuffed that you only want a salad fo lunch, don't go for Spaetzle Jambayala, even if it sounds just so exciting.
Rather use animal comparisons like lipstick on a pig (talking about how we can get some good analytics done from the data we have so far) or tuna in a can (planning our first ride in a jeepney) than having to explain why the devil is a squirrel or how to deal with your inner pig dog (not to mention the egg-laying wool milk pig).
Put on at least 3 layers of 5 different insect repellents you brought along before going running in the park around dusk. Don't put them on in your 20 square meter bed room.
Don't try to find a table for 12 in a restaurant the day before Valentine's Day. Don't even think about having dinner if you had Spaetzle Jambayala for lunch (wih a free dessert of maple icecream on hot brownie crumble) and caramel-glazed African bananas for merienda.
But this also keept us going in detailing out a huge process mindmap (with all the gory details) for hours, beautifying the main template in 5 minutes, defining new file structures and challenging each other to find files in each others' newly designed structure for a wee bit. Will be interesting to see, how intuitive Bambi, Kat and Dolma are going to find them tomorrow ... So - really good day. Hope things will continue like this. And hope the other teams will also have less hours in the car, and more clarity on their Statements of Work. And hopefully we'll manage to get a grip on our aircon as well. For a solar-driven person who loves everything beyond 30 degrees, 18 (today even 16) degrees room temperature is just a bit out of the comfort zone.
By the way: I'm taking orders for Rags2Riches products: https://www.facebook.com/Rags2RichesInc
And while I'm at it: The ManilaTao team (our group of 12) now also has a facebook account, which collects stories and pics across all 4 teams: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Manila-Tao/1608779976000062?fref=ts
(And can anyone please tell me how to add it as a friend in facebook? It's just the most un-intuitive software I ever had to use...)
So far, Philippine cuisine keeps its 100% yummie promise. Had sapin-sapin (colourful rice cake, see pic). And thanks to Jan and Jin, we enjoyed a potato curry (with raisins) and shrimps with weird-green-vegetable-and rice lunch in Jim's basement today - so thankfully we don't have to go to Jollibee's, the national fastfood chain you can find in every corner, in the near future.
And we had our mug shots taken at the Dasmarina Village municipality so that we are allowed to leave and enter the compound (took Brandon 1 hour to get in today when he wanted to check in on us...). Compared to that, the officials who sent us back and forth incl. queuing up, as in any proper administration, almost rushed to finish our permits....
More input?
Then I can recommend this video about a school who went from last to first after going for solar lights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNHyb0_-2CE
And of the school in Apia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV3ljeD8og4 - funny to see the people we met yesterday on "TV".
- how solar lamps are incredibly important and useful in helping children to grow, learn, and take on responsibility - but how adoption is really low because of glitches in the process;
- how life without wifi, electricity and running water is mastered by over 300 households;
- how solar energy can be used to charge various appliances;
- how motivated and passionate parents and PTAs (Elternvertreter) are to get this solar project running - for their families and their kids' future;
- how much energy and heart the Solar Engery Foundation puts into this;
- how fundamental societal and religious structures may be impacting the success of the project;
- and how the list of challenges we want to solve grows larger every day.
Here are some impressions:
Nice views of today:
The key take-away: It's Mango season in Manila! 2 Mango Smoothis, a Mango cake, and Mango for dessert - all in one day and all of it extremely delicious. The Filipinos love food. Just to clarify that this is not me talking about food all the time but that I'm just adapting (not such a big struggle indeed ...) to local circumstances.
The second take-away: We will survive here for a month :-)
The third: We are a cool team! Did some bonding today, get-to-know games and neighbourhood explorations (there are - it felt like - 10 malls interconnected; you can walk for miles without ever seeing daylight again).
The fourth: Everyone is looking forward to finally meeting the clients tomorrow. Darren and Carel, MD and Head of Marketing of SAP Philippines joined us for dinner and shared interesting insights: Struggling for 19 years to get everything going with 50 people, they now have grown into more than 1.000 people in 4 different locations in Manila in the past months, with 800 (!) Concur colleagues as the largest group of newcomers. So there is quite some momentum here. Interesting, too, to learn about the sales (e.g. decentralized customer contacts) and business (how to reach everyone in a typhoon emergency) challenges and the huge support wave that reached them after the Yolanda typhoon from SAP colleagues all over the world. They will be hosting our kick-off tomorrow - first time this is taking place in a local SAP office!
For day 2, Jim, Bambi and Dolma have planned a day trip to Apia for us. Apia is important because we'll be able to talk to the kids, families and teachers of one of the first 3 schools that piloted the Light for Education (L4E) program. Luckily, it's not rainy season, otherwise the road to Apia would have looked like this: