Got my game face on for the ESSO Forum last week.  Leonel needs to work on his...

Over the course of this week in Benuela, I worked longer hours than in Luanda.  However, my time here has been a vacation compared to Luanda.  Our Benguala office is in a three bedroom house.  We share the office with an agricultural NGA named Clusa.  CAE has two rooms upstairs.  One is the office.  The other is the living quarters.  Life is simple here.  I wake up and walk across the hall and Iºm in the office.  After work I walk to the gym, or catch a ride with a colleague from Clusa.  I walk home, eat, and then sleep.  Sometimes I throw in a walk down to the beach or a nice meal out by the ocean.  Life is simple.  Life is good. 

CAE has three employees in Benguela, Edson, the consultant, Nair, the lady who holds the place together, and an MBA who manages the office.  My main goal for the week was to start building relationships with Edson and Nair.  Neither speaks English, so it was challenging.  However I have improved to a level where daily office communication is not much of an issue.  That being said, my favorite words during the day seemed to always be huh, what, and repeat.   Edson and I ate dinner together on several occasions, including Thanksgiving.  We generally talked about culture, sports, and women, all of which are top notch bonding topics.  Nair lives outside of Benguela and has a little one as well, so we didn’t have the chance to hang out outside of the office.  However, we did talk a lot at the office. 

I am heading back to Luanda today and will be there until December 18^th when I catch a plan back home for the holidays.  I will return to Luanda in mid-January and remain there until the end of February.  On the 1^st of March I will fly back the Benguela for 5 months.  I am thankful that I had this week to get to know my colleagues and begin to get a feel for the business setting in Benguela.  In general, businesses here are at a more basic level than Luanda.  Currently, the oil companies are not well represented in this area.  Those two things are going to be huge challenges for this office.  We rely on the oil companies to provide an incentive for businesses to want to work with us.  When the opportunity to win contracts with the oil companies is greatly diminished, so is our ability to convince potential clients that working with CAE will help them succeed.  We will need to develop relationships with other multinational companies and take advantage of our agriculturally based office partner to drive CAE in a slightly different way.  

On Sunday I had lunch with Pety, Davi, and Rico (my surrogate family in Benguela).  It was great catching up with everyone.  They had been on a trip to Portugal to visit family and friends.  They were impressed with my new found language skills.  Three months ago when I left Benguela to start work in Luanda, I had trouble speaking in complete sentences.  Yesterday was really the first time that I got to sit down with them and have a normal dinner table conversation.  It was nice.

Today I fly back to Luanda with a little more energy in my step.  The last week in Benguela has been a welcome break from the every day stresses of Luanda.  Before arriving, I didn’t notice that I needed a break.  But only after one or two days, I felt the stress draining away.  I have about two more weeks in Luanda to get as much work done as possible.  My first task will be to help Samuel prepare to give a two day course on quality this coming Thursday and Friday.  We have been working together to create the content, but I have a feeling we’ll have a lot left to do when I return to the office tomorrow.  But at least we’ve got a ton of time to prepare…2 days.

          It was Monday morning.  My bags were packed.  My ticket was in hand.  I was Benguela bound.  And then things changed…shocking.  This week CAE hosted a huge networking event with ESSO Angola.  The event was scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday and there was still a ton of work to be done.  The consultants were asked to man the phones and get as many clients as possible to attend each day.  I was, basically, tasked with everything else.  Benguela quickly went from the front of my mind to the back as I began running around the office figuring out what we needed to get this thing done.  I worked with Shaun to make a list of necessary materials, split the list among several of my colleagues and headed out the door to meet with our contact at ESSO for this event.  We met at her office, discussed a few things, like the fact that we didn’t have ESSO’s presentation yet and would have no way of printing out 300 copies.  But I guess we couldn’t blame them since we didn’t have our own presentation ready, or the agenda, or the 2 page CAE introduction, all of which needed to have 300 copies printed, sorted, stapled and placed in 300 folders that we didn’t have yet.  Good times. 

We are extremely lucky to have such a hard working staff that was willing to run around for me and make things happen.  I spent the morning with Catia from ESSO figuring out how to set up the presentation hall we were renting for the event.  We drew up plans for the layout of the tables, networking event stands, entrance tables, and food on the back of a napkin and gave it to the lady managing the setup.  I then headed back to the office to get everyone that wasn’t on a phone to start printing stuff.  Wilson and I finished up the Agenda and then Shaun, the director, actually took the job of printing the agenda off my hands.  I then worked with JC to steal our two page CAE intro from our website and start printing.  All this time I was on the phones with Cremilde, who was out buying folders, name tags, pens, markers and all that stuff.  I had never spoken half as much Portuguese in one day as I did on Monday.  By the way, 400 plain, simple, folders cost a hair over $1000 in Angola.

In the afternoon I met back up with Catia at the event hall to make sure everything was OK and to test the audio video system.  After making a few changes and getting huge headaches from hearing tables slide across tile for 2 hours, we headed back to Catia’s office.  She began printing their presentations as I manned the phones between the office and Cremilde.  Catia was able to print 150 presentations before the printer gave out.  I headed back to our office at 7, with 150 unsorted ESSO presentations.  Shaun, Cremilde, and I sorted, stapled, and stacked until 9.  I went to the gym to let out some stress and then passed out at home. 

We met at 7am the next day to do more sorting, stapling, and stacking.  We pulled it off and at around 8, I assigned everyone their responsibilities for the event.  People began arriving at 8:05.

The event turned out to be a huge success.  We had more than 300 people during the 2 days and the execs from ESSO had nothing but kind words to say.  It looks like CAE certification will now be a requirement for almost all of ESSO’s local suppliers.  It’s the first step in what will hopefully be an improved and valuable relationship with ESSO that we will be able to use to stimulate similar interest in our other 4 oil company sponsors.

On Thursday, I hopped on a plane to Benguela.  We opened an office here in Auguest.  The office is its infancy.  Everything needs to be done.  There’s very little structure and not enough communication with the office in Luanda.  I only have one week here so I’m working to build relationships with our two staff members.  Edson, our consultant in Benguela, and I actually drove around today looking for mangos outside of the water treatment plant.  He’d find a good one laying the ground, wash it off at the spigot and hand it to me with a big smile on his face.  After I ate one, I was smiling too.

 Life is relaxing in Benguela.  There’s no traffic and I can walk to the beach.  I will be back for 5 months starting in March 2009.  I’m anxious to see how much progress Jeremy can make before I rotate back in March as office manager.  And I’m anxious to visit the little ice cream shop down the road that has the best peanut (ginguba) ice cream in the world.

Another amazing view from the road south out of Luanda is below...

This was a big week for CAE.  We hosted a group of British businesses, representatives from Sonangol’s new local content department, and put on a presentation for executives from Chevron’s US corporate offices.

The week began with a hurried Monday morning meeting to discuss a Wednesday meeting with UK West African Action Group (UK WAAG).  UK WAAG’s initial scheduling plans fell through at the last minute.  The group’s leader had previous experiences with CAE and called our director, Shaun, on Monday to see if we could provide quality information to his group on Wednesday.  Remember that this is Angola and nothing moves quickly.  Also note that Tuesday was a national holiday.  So we basically had one afternoon to pull this thing off.  Our director committed our offices services and we were off and running.  UK WAAG was bringing a group of 18-20 international businesses interested in entering the Angolan marketplace and we had to step and provide them with a broad set of presenters that could provide them with the essential information necessary to make decisions about doing business in Angola.

The event was a complete success.  Shaun and Caetano did an incredible job of lining up oil industry executives, legal experts, real estate representatives, and CAE clients that could provide partnership opportunities for interested international businesses.  I prepped our Angolan consultants to introduce themselves and was responsible for introducing them during the presentation.  I accidentally called one of our consultants by the wrong name, but he later admitted that he accidentally referred to me as JC all the time. 

After a long day at the office, we headed to a networking event at the British Embassy.  We invited some of our clients to meet up with the British business representatives.  However, the British folks didn’t speak Portuguese.  So here I was, all 3 months of speaking Portuguese, being pulled into a conversation as an interpreter for a client that I had met, for the first time, one week previously.  The British gentleman knew that I had been speaking Portuguese for a short time and was quite impressed that I was able to manage the conversation.  It was a tremendous confidence booster for me as well. 

On Thursday I was asked to prepare and give presentations to representatives from Sonangol and Chevron on Friday.  Sonangol holds the key to everything over here.  If they say jump, everyone jumps.  They have always been financial supporters, but have recently begun questioning CAE’s activities and their future role with Sonangol.  So this meeting was critical.  Caetano, our Angolan deputy director, smoothly handled intoductions and general conversation.  I was then brought in to present a document I wrote on how CAE aligns its processes with its objectives.  The meeting went well and I now have two invaluable contacts in Sonangol’s new local content department.

At around 5 on Friday, after countless reschedulings, delays, and traffic jams Shaun and I finally made it to the Chevron office.  We sat down with Chevron’s local content director and an executive visiting from their home office in Houston.  Shaun took a supporting role as I made the pitch on what CAE does and how we’ve made changes to enhance our abilities to serve our clients and oil industry partners.  We were able to answer all of their questions, and conveyed our message clearly.  Everyone seemed happy.  Shaun and I left the office with a weak and mis-targeted high five that we were both happy no one was around to see.

At 6:30 I headed out of the office ready to kick of the weekend “taco night” at buddy’s house followed by Saturday and Sunday spent camping and surfing at Capo Ledo, a beach 3 hours south of Luanda.  It was a great way to relax after a tough, but rewarding week at the office.

Below is a picture from my weekend at the beach...