Tropical Storm Ondoy

Last weekend the Philippines was hit by Tropical Storm Ketsana (locally called Ondoy). While the island nation is no stranger to these types of weather events, it was clear in talking with the people in the Philippines that this was not expected at all. It is the wet season there right now so tropical storms and heavy rains are par for the course. No one had any warning that this particular storm would dump as much rain as it did - over 16 inches within 6 hours. To give you some idea of the magnititude, the Philippines typically gets 13 inches of rain for the entire month of September.

Our team was obviously very concerned about the welfare of the people there as well as the future of our upcoming mission. There was much discussion on how we could help - whether we should stick with the original plans or redeploy the team to the impacted region. In the end, we decided to stay the course and look for other ways to help while we are there. IBM will also be considering deploying the next CSC team to the Philippines to help with the recovery efforts. The woman who is our in-country coordinator had her own home flooded and family displaced yet she is still committed to being there to support us when our team arrives next week. Her resiliency is remarkable to say the least.

So much of our pre-deployment training has been focused on the role of international aid in developing countries - it is interesting to see how this plays out. The United States has pledges $100,000 to relief funds thus far while the EU has pledged 2M Euros. In both cases it is unclear how these funds will arrive and how they will be used. For our part, IBM Philippines is coordinating efforts currently to collect and distribute food and supplies for the Gawad Kalinga sites. We are also working to stand up and run the Sahana Disaster Management System which is the open-source application developed after the 2004 Tsunami.

I signed up for an adventure and it certainly seems like I'm in store for one now.

T-15 Days: The Assignments Are In

Something really brought home the magnitude of what we're doing. One of my teammates pointed out that if you treated corporations as companies, the GDP of IBM would still be $12B greater than the GDP of the Philippines. In IBM, we use that productivity to support our 300,000+ employees and our shareholders. The population of the Philippines is approaching 97 million people.

The big news that we got today was our project assignments. There's a good mixture of business and IT focus and clients across government organizations, universities, and local enterprise. I'm going to be focused on an initiative with BNeFIT - a public/private partnership focused on making Bacolod a global leader in contact center outsourcing. In the short time since inception, BNeFIT has already accomplished a great deal - bring thousands of jobs to the region. I will be working with them on a strategy to accelerate this growth even further.

Our team also had a good discussion on the role of international aid in developing countries. Personally, I'm not a big believer in the tops down "big push" approach advocated by Jeffrey Sachs and others. It hasn't proved to work at all and it has spent a lot of money. I do like the idea of linking those willing to help with those who need help more directly although this is obviously more complicated. One of my favorite "trendy" approaches is micro-lending. Organizations such as Kiva have been successful at getting money directly into the hands of the people who can do something with it with the different levels of bureaucracy and loss of funds along the way.

3 Weeks to Go! (Slow down you move to fast....)

When we were first assigned to the project we were told to expect a different pace of work in the Philippines. I've already begun to experience this in the time leading up to my departure. I sent my passport off to the Philippines Embassy in Washington, DC about a month ago to get an entry visa. While my teammates around the world received their passports and visas back in a few days, mine did not return in the expected time. I began to call the Embassy and got very polite messages from the receptionist assuring me everything as okay but very little detail on what was going on. Eventually, no one answered the phone, no one answered the emails.

I cannot be certain of the reasons behind this odd behavior but eventually my passport did show up in the mail a few days ago. If I had to guess, I would say that the receptionist was trying to 'save face' for whomever in the embassy was responsible for processing visa applications but acting as a blockade. My lesson learned is that I am going to have to be A LOT more patient with things while I am there.
In other news, the rest of the logistics seem to be in place. We all have our flights and confirmed where we will be staying. This week we got a brief glimpse into the types of projects we will be working on but no firm assignments. I'm hoping that we get more information soon. Only 3 weeks to go!