Day 8: Pictures, Productivity, and Pastries

Welcome to my office.  :-)  Ready to go bright and early on a Friday morning.

Rahul and I getting started for the day at the Ministry of Agriculture.  I have Rahul to thank for helping me to figure out how to get my pictures successfully uploaded to my blog.... finally.



I was so proud of myself.... I had just added pictures to my blog for the first time.  I stayed in the office during lunch to get them uploaded and Andrew and Rahul brought me cous cous back from lunch.   It was a good day.



This is my secondary office in my hotel room.  When I'm not able to connect with wifi, I'm able to get ethernet connectivity via a port we found.  It may not be pretty but it works.  :-)

Tracey having fun with our waiters at dinner.

Team dinner at Couvert D'or Restaurant and Pattisserie.  Very fun night of great conversation and story telling.

The Couvert D'or Restaurant specializes in French pastries.   Andrew freely admits that this is his favority restaurant after eating two pastries.  The team has determined that pastries are his weakness.

Wow

Productivity
Today was a very productive day on multiple fronts.   We started our day with a scheduled meeting with Mohammed where we reviewed several key deliverables that we have been working on for the last few days.   We reviewed our four week workplan with tasks.   I think everyone realized how much we have to do in such a short amount of time and our plan clearly shows this.  It was a great discussion though and helped everyone to get prepared for the remaining three weeks.   We reviewed the Table of Contents for our final deliverable.  Rahul, Andrew, and I have worked very hard on this and were proud of what we had outlined.   We made a few changes during our discussion and Mohammed seemed pleased with the outline of our final deliverable.  We also reviewed the list of key stakeholders that we had been creating during the last couple of days to confirm that we had them all identified.   Our goal is to schedule meetings and interviews with each of these stakeholders next week.   Our current plan is to travel to Casablanca next Wednesday to meet with farmers, distributors, wholesalers, etc. to get their perspective and feedback on their needs.   We plan to do the same thing on Thursday with the Rabat market.   We can already tell that next week is going to be an extremely packed and busy week.

We also had several conference calls with IBM resources that we had found via the solution research that we have done.   We had a call today with a PhD from IBM in Zurich who has helped lead a team around 'Spoken Web' technology.   This is technology that IBM has implemented in India that allows diary farmers to communicate to a dairy application via voice rather than text or internet.  This could be very applicable to our challenge since both projects need technologies that can be easily leveraged in rural communities where literacy is lower and traditional communication protocols are not easily available.    In the course of this conversation, I realized what a global company IBM is but also how it is a very small world at the same time.   The IBM resource that we were talking to lives and works in Zurich, helped develop an application for India, but - very concidentially - just happens to be in Morocco next week to visit his family.   We had a great conversation with him today and are hoping to meet him in person next week.   Such a small world....

Pictures
My personal success for the day was that I was finally able to get my pictures downloaded to my blog.  I still haven't figured out how to access the picture files on my iPad via my blog but I was able to borrow a device to download them to my laptop where I was able to access them.   I have to thank my teammate Rahul for loaning me his memory card device and showing me how to do this.   Another technical milestone accomplished!  (ha ha)   I stayed in the office during my lunch hour to get the pictures downloaded.   Rahul and Andrew brought me back a meat and vegetable cous cous for lunch that was one of the best meals that I have had since arriving in Morocco.   It is a custom for the restaurants to serve cous cous on Fridays and it seems like it is something that everyone looks forward to.

Pastries
We ended our day with another team dinner at the Couvert D'or Restaurant and Pattisserie.   The highlight of the dinner was definitely the pastries which they specialize in.   I've attached pictures... the pastries were as yummy as they look.  :-)

Tomorrow our team is going to Marrakech for the weekend.   It is about a four hour drive from Rabat and we are renting a mini van with a driver.   I don't expect to be able to update my blog during our overnight visit but I'm looking forward to updating my blog when I return on Sunday night.  I hope to have some great pictures.  :-)