I will be spending the next four weeks working in Bangalore, India. IBM Corporate Service Corps is a corporate social responsibility program that focuses on bringing needed skills to developing countries. My focus will be to help an organization called Enable India better its ability to place people with disabilities in jobs in the IT sector.
I arrived in Bangalore late Thursday night. My team members, IBMers from all over the world, arrived over the course of the next 24 hours. The first full day was primarily spent decompressing. For most of the team that included easing into the Indian food, adjusting to the time zone change, and beginning to learn even more about the culture.
Saturday we spent touring Bangalore. We saw the Bangalore palace, Parliament, a beautiful park, and the Ulsoor lake. We also had a delicious dinner at the Noodles restaurant in our hotel.
Today, Sunday, was spent doing our first day of formal preparation. We spent the morning doing exercises on trust, communication, teamwork, and empathy. For trust, we played two truths and a lie. For communication we sat back-to-back and drew images via verbal instruction. We loved the teamwork exercise, which involved a compeition between the two teams to assemble hand made post-it notes. For empathy we did a role play exercise.
At the end of the day we enjoyed a wonderful team dinner at Sonny's in Bangalore. The food was European so many of us enjoyed delicious pasta dishes and other enjoyed steak!
Tomorrow will be spent meeting and introducing ourselves to the client. My team for Enable India, pictured above, is looking forward to it. We are all very excited to see what the day brings!
