Day 29 & 30 - IBM office in Lagos & last day in Nigeria

Last Friday in Nigeria we left Abeokuta and headed to Lagos. We had a quick meeting at the IBM office in Lagos and met some of our colleagues that work there. We shared some of the recommendations we made to the Ogun State ministries.

 We had a great dinner at a Indian restaurant to celebrate Nilesh's birthday, and also everyone's last night together. More than a team, we become a family in one month together! What a great experience to take with me forever! Great job team :)

Day 28 - Community Service

Our community service day was at the Orphanage “Stella Obasanjo Motherless Home”, the name was in honor to the former first Lady of Nigeria. We helped cleaning and spent most of our time playing with the kids.

#ibmcsc nigeria

Day 27 - Closing ceremony

All good things come to an end so on the last Wednesday in Nigeria we had our last presentation, the final executive summary of all our short term, medium term and long term recommendations to the government ministries. It was a great closing ceremony!

#ibmcsc nigeria

Last week - Days 22, 23, 24, 25

We worked long hours on the weekend to be able to finalize the presentation to the Ogun State Water Corporation on Monday. On Monday we have the last presentation with the General Manager and the Assistants and Directors of the Ogun Water Corporation. It was a long session delivering the outcomes generated during this 3 weeks of work.

During this time, we gathered all the process documentation for each department, analyzed the current documentation, interviewed staff from each department, researched successful best practices, successes and solutions world-wide and finally we generated several recommendations for the water corporation.

There was a lot of discussion when we delivered the recommendations for every department but they were all well received and the management will support the implementation of these recommendations.

The Ogun State Water Corporation vision is to become the best water service provider in Africa so we hope with our 100 more recommendations they are able to achieve this vision and provide a better quality of water and service to the community.

 

#ibmcsc nigeria

Week 3 Days 19, 20, 21

Third week in Nigeria, and we still had a lot to accomplish on our final recommendations to the Water Corporation but we see daily reminders of why we were chosen to be part of this amazing experience. Not just being our last week before we had to present our final presentation but we also managed to meet the Governor of Ogun State, Senator Ibikunle Amosun for a special ceremony, and along that provide a full day training on Thursday on basic and advanced excel to the Water Corporation employees. What a week!! So the next thing we knew we were setting up a training session and still had to prepare and review the material. We weren’t really sure how the training was going but considering that the room was just as full at the end of the day as it was at the beginning, we counted the training session a success, and a extra achievement for us!

 

 

Day 18 - Ceremony with the Governor, Senator Ibikunle Amosun

Tuesday morning the team had a special ceremony with the Governor, Senator Ibikunle Amosun, to review the projects for each Ministry, and the event was on local TV news at night.

 

#ibmcsc nigeria

 

Day 16 - Some work and rest at the hotel

Some of the group worked in the lounge area up on the rock on some emails, blogs updates, twitter, and facebook updates. It was a relaxing day!
 

 

Day 15 - Otapele Rock, Osuuru Spring & Benin Republic Border

On Saturday we started early our trip to the Otapele Rock, Mount of Salvation in Imeko, a place where people of the Oke-Igbala congregation have pilgrimages.  There are few buildings and a church all build around a couple of huge granite boulders stacked precariously that look to be ‘suspended’. The tradition is that they display God’s blessing on the area. The first person of discovery this place was the prophet Frederick Akanbi Adeoye. The prophet was led to this place by a series of dreams where the Lord spoke to him, after few trips there he saw a picture of a man’s face and praying hands on the side of the set of balanced boulders, so he returned to this spot and built his church. Many people say that who travel to the rocks are blessed with answers to their prayers. 

As this place is considered a holy ground, we have to take off our shoes and walk around bare foot. 

Our next stop was in a natural spring called Osuuru Spring. The water pours out from underneath a rock with no obvious source. The interesting part is that it has never stopped even in the driest season and they believe to have healing powers.

On our next stop, we saw the tomb of Captain Freighton, a British Traveling Commissioner who contracted malaria and died in 1899. He had treated the local population so badly that they did nothing to aid him when he became ill and after he died they went to the extreme step according to their traditions of burying him standing upright. The tomb itself is just a grave marker between 2 huts in the village. Then while we were walking back to our bus we were blessed with the best part of our trip when a group of kids started singing for us. Here’s a link to the video Krisztina posted on her blog http://krisztina-v.tumblr.com/post/89537001858/kids-are-singing-a-song-for-vesna

 

 Our last stop was at the border with Benin Republic, we only stopped to take few pictures and kept going on our journey back to the hotel

It was a long day, not just because of the distance, but the time we spent in some unexpected ‘stops’. I could see in everyone's face the relief to get back to the hotel safe and sound.

It didn't take much for our group to agree that next weekend we will add an extra day of community services in one of the local orphanages instead of a tourism trip!

  
#ibmcsc nigeria