It was a week of birthdays for this #ibmcsc team and our partners!

On Tuesday night, we celebrated Daniel’s birthday at the Buffalo Ridge Lodge restaurant in Mafikeng.  Daniel is way more than just our bus driver …. he has become part of the team and probably sees us more than any other person since he gets us in the morning, comes back for whoever wants to go out to lunch and then drops us back in the evening.  It takes a solid 20 minutes to actually corral all 14 of us and get us on the bus for each of these events, so we have lots of time to chat with Daniel and he always has a smile on his face, always.

Daniel

The IBM team, the Professor and Daniel

On Wednesday night, we celebrated Chandra’s birthday.  Chandra, the Aussie, is part of my subteam and I was glad we got the opportunity to celebrate him.  His trademark “Chop Chop”, booming voice, and happy attitude are contagious. Savi arranged with the chef at the restaurant to put out a vegetarian buffet. Our other vegetarian, Aruna, was in heaven, so much so that she loaded up 3 full plates!  Most of us skipped over the meat that night and ate vegetarian to honor Chandra.

Happy birthday Chandra!

Aruna and her multiple plates of veggies!

The final birthday of the week was John’s on Friday.  John is a PhD student at North West University and our full-time point person while in South Africa.  You name it, he does it. Our Friday was quite a unique day (another post on that yet to come) so we had a cake, candles and card plus very loud singing voices ready as the bus of 14 of us pulled up in front of the University to pick him up at 8:30 am. We will celebrate John properly next week.

John!