Akiko recounts the Lion attack, Client Meetings, Cape Town and just about everything else

#CSCSA16

October 24, 2016

AKIKO KISHIRO

We are already in our 3rd week – how quickly time flies! 

Everyone seem to be getting a little nervous for our final deliverables to be presented to our clients next week – a start of the dash for the second half. ☺

I am working on the project for the Department of Health – we’ve been visiting all over the province to understand how people manage data in hospitals and smaller clinics.  Since last week we did 2 workshops with representatives from all the districts to discuss how we could improve the data collection process, which is currently very manual and paper oriented. We had good discussion and hoping our work will be somehow helpful.

By the way all the room doors in the nursing college where we had the workshop were very “securely managaed”.

Work in Joburg starts early – usual hours from 8 to 16 or 17. Our client’s day starts even earlier in the car before 6am every day, traveling 2 hours and doing phone calls on the way (on speaker) … Very energetic.

Uber and the railway “Gautrain” is our main source of transportation when the shuttle is not available, as both were introduced as the most reliable, safe and convenient way. Gautrain is also very clean as no food / drink is allowed inside, we had to throw away full cup of coffee we bought right before the ride. ;_;

A bit about the weekend as well..

A subset of our group had a beautiful weekend in Capetown. Although the townships did look similar to those near Joburg.. it did feel like a different country and felt the same way when we got the message “welcome back to Africa” when we landed back to Joburg.  See the full lion in the picture?

Cape of good hope, originally named cape of storms, is one of my favourite spot as I can “feel” the history of the age of exploration and discovery – Diaz and Da Gama, which had been a story inside the books since childhood. .

And of course some of ….  Needless to say, they were great.

Capetown was also a beautful area with the unique flowers .. and animals. My favourite flower is the “Pin-Cussions” on upper left and down right in yellow. Others are “King Protea”, the national flower and “Bottle Brush” from the way it looks.

Speaking of animals let me finally share this picture that my teammate Kristin bought for me while we were at the Lion park last weekend. 
A sweet encounter moment and now I can officially say I was attacked by a lion in Africa..!!