Finally, I have some clarity and understanding of the tangible deliverables of our assignment! As an engineer, I don’t do well with high level, ‘fuzzy’ requirements and project plans, which has been the biggest challenge for me the past few days. I like to know what the goal is, the detailed activities required to reach the goal, and how long and when those activities will all take place. And I want it to be in a nicely formatted, uniform, bulleted or numbered list; Or even better, a spreadsheet, so I can easily manipulate numbers. (Really, I promise, I’m only slightly obsessive). The good news is that now most of the project details have been flushed out.

We presented the high level plan and activities to the ADEC team this afternoon, including the executive director and manager of new projects. Roman did a wonderful job presenting, which has an added layer of difficulty when everything he says must be translated, and is then followed by sometimes lengthy conversations in Spanish. Veronica had dropped by to give Henk some visa information for Brazil and was able to stay for the presentation. It was wonderful to have her there to help translate and clarify, and hopefully it provided her with a good opportunity to assess our team’s interactions with ADEC and overall plan. The ADEC team seemed very happy with our direction and asked us to include reflections of our month working with them in the final presentation. I feel very lucky to be working with such great people at ADEC!

Today for lunch we piggybacked on a delivery order one of our ADEC team members was placing. I got a delicious and very large dish of lentil stew with some vegetables. The funny thing is that it was the ‘vegetarian’ dish, yet still contained some pieces of meat! Either way, it was really good, easy, and inexpensive. Most of the ADEC team brings their lunch from home, so we may take advantage of the delivery quite often.

#ibmcsc argentina