Late summer of last year I heard that I’d been accepted for an assignment with IBM’s Corporate Service Corps. Here’s a tweet from back then …

The CSC is a programme that sends a group of IBM employees to a developing community, on a month long assignment to use their skills helping an organisation there.

A couple of weeks ago, I heard more about my assignment. In August of 2017, I’m going to spend a month in Campinas Brazil …

I’ve never been to Brazil, so I’m excited to be able to learn more about their culture, and continue learning more about South America.

I don’t know yet what we’ll be doing in Campinas, but I’m intrigued and excited to hear more about that too.

I’ve been thinking to blog a little more about the assignment as I learn more, and maybe make some Instagram stories when I’m there.

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For now I have a mix of feelings … excited about living and working in Brazil for a month, excited and hopeful that I can make a little bit of a difference for someone with my design and development skills, anxious about being away from home for a month, intrgigued to meet the others on my team.

For a long time now I’ve been trying hard to use what I’ve learned in industry to give back to others. With the project I worked on for ShelterBox, with the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathons that I helped organize and hack at, even with the advocacy projects that I’ve worked on with Bluemix in recent years … so this is another attempt/step.

I’m conscious that I’m benefitting a lot from this too … I love traveling, I’m very interested in South America, and every problem I work on helps me improve too.

Most of all, my goal with my CSC work is to give at least as much as I get from it.