Our 2 days in Johannesburg come to a close this morning as 16 of us board a bus to Mafeking.  Our final teammate Savi arrived yesterday morning and we have 2 advisors from the NGO sponsoring us, Digital Opportunity Trust, traveling with us, Muriuki and John.  John is a PhD candidate at the North West University where will be working the next 3 weeks and can show us the ins-and-outs of our new city.  The trip is only 300 KM, but the driver is saying it will be 5 hours.  Guess we’ll get to know each other really well on a bus for 5 hours!

Joburg has been a wonderful welcome to South Africa with all the amenities of home while getting immersed in our new country. Our hotel was like any American chain and across the street from a mall so the team could get food, hit up a grocery store or bank, or swap our SIM cards to get local data plans.  I loved the little dolls, pictured below, to indicate what type of service you wanted on your room.

Yesterday (Sunday) was spent working from the hotel most of the day.  We had a kick-off session with our client, iNeSI, which is the eSkills Institute for South Africa.  They graciously agreed to work a Sunday morning — not only of a long weekend, but also Father’s day — to get us started in the right direction.  Then our smaller teams broke off to work on our first pitch to the client.  My smaller team includes Effie from Canada and Chandra from Australia, pictured below at our kick off dinner (complete with napkin bibs) and working from a coffee shop yesterday.

And finally, here are two more good pics from Saturday in Joburg that didn’t make it to an earlier post.  The first is many of the team at the Apartheid Museum and the second is my admission to the musuem as a ‘white’ (randomly selected when you buy your ticket, not because I am white).

Chandra, Effie, Julie, Suro, me, Tarik, Valentina, Aruna and Wouter

#ibmcsc