My First Few Days

I’m staring out at the Indian Ocean, right now. I’ve never said that before. But you can see the ocean from sitting in my living room. It’s not a bad deal.

But yeah, I made it, and just fine I might say. I haven’t had travel this smooth in a long time. From London I flew to Johannesburg, from Jo-burg to Durban (where I met my teammate Heather), and then a cab ride an hour and change to Port Edward. With all the travel, layovers, and time changes I arrived not too tired and after one good night of sleep on Saturday, I was back to normal.

On my flight to Durban, I sat next to two girls from The Netherlands who were coming to SA for 8 months, working in Durban on a development project about HIV/AIDS… so we chatted the entire way as we were all just arriving to new projects, first time to South Africa, and discussed our excitement about our upcoming jobs, all the things we wanted to do/see with work and travel in our time here. We exchanged emails – so who knows if I gained some travel buddies somewhere along the way.

My Accenture team is great, so welcoming! There’s Cathy from Minneapolis, Mike from NYC, and Colleen from NYC, all who have already been here 3 months - Colleen actually leaves on Saturday, I am taking her role on the Local Economic Development (LED) team, transitioning with her this week. Then it’s me and Heather from Chicago who are just joining. It’s nice to have a few teammates who have been here because they’ve gotten a lot of logistics down and they have answers to my non-stop questions.

We all live in a villa together in the Estuary Hotel in Port Edward – 3 BRs, living room, kitchen… perfect accommodations. I’m pretty much set up in my room and feeling right at home. Already have had a taste of the few of the Port Edward restaurants, driven around a little bit, plotted out a running course… it’s a pretty small town.

My work promises to be enlightening, challenging, edifying, but I’ll have my first idea after our weekly Monday morning 8:30 meeting… more to come…

This blog should definitely get a bit amusing when I learn to drive standard in our car, which alone should be an adventure, never mind on the opposite side of the road.

It’s certainly exciting to be here! As Big Dave (my Dad) told me when he dropped me off at the airport… “Soak it all in!” I know he was referring to this entire experience… but I guess those will be words to live by when I do my laundry by hand in the sink the first time too.