It’s been a fantastic experience so far from the time I landed in Chengdu China on 3rd April till now as a part of Team Grasshoppers. Chengdu is a beautiful modern city with tall smart buildings, the best of sport cars on road like the Porsche, Bentleys , Ferraris (you have showrooms all the car makers in the world when you come from the airport to the city) and amazing eating joints serving Chinese and other kinds of food. We are a team of 12 from all corners of the SAP world and assigned in groups of 3 to 4 different projects. I am working with Thomas from Germany and Florencia from Argentina for charitable foundation called Yinghuo (www.yinghuo.org) established in 2005. This is a public service organization (6 people only). aiming at improving rural education in southwestern areas and facilitating community development and youth growth. They have two programs- one is focusing on providing education to encourage reading, Spring bud plan for girls on physiological improvement, giving nutrition in form of eggs to kids on a daily basis) in rural areas for kids. The second one is the "Youth Growth" Program which is their flagship program which organizes and sponsors educational and voluntary teaching through summer and winter camps of around 2 weeks that are run by volunteer university students together with local rural schools and communities. Our main task was to assess and recommend changes to their Youth Growth program. Yinghuo provides training to the volunteers, curriculum materials and finance for the logistics for these camps. In 2015 they already supported over 50 camps reaching over 5,500 children.
In addition, we are also recommending ways for their employees to be motivated with a better work environment which facilitates open communication and sharing of knowledge and learnings so that they are always charged up to keep doing the great work of bringing smiles to faces of kids.
We’ve developed a great bonding with the Yinghuo team through team meetings at their work place where we always had warm welcome, Hotpot dinner and barbecue lunch and visit to the Sichuan University. There is also great help from the student translators who have been terrific in translating both the verbal and written material from Yinghuo team to us in English.
Some great moments below:
It’s also great to hear from the other 9 SAP colleagues on their experiences on working in different projects through weekly sharing sessions, team dinners, exploring Chengdu like visiting the Panda reserve base which was an awesome experience. Made new friends with all :smile:
Not to forget, the guidance and support from the PYXERA Global team (Brandon, Zen) and the SoSa Alumini Mark has been super!!
A big thanks to SAP CSR for this wonderful opportunity!!
This is just the mid-way and I would have more to share in the coming 2 weeks… Stay tuned.