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IBM employee finds enlightenment in Tanzania
(by Karen F. Mrnarevic - October 07, 2008)
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Photos courtesy of Matt Berry
Matt Berry, far right, is pictured here with his expedition group at the summit of Mount Meru, an active volcano that towers above Tanzania’s Arusha National Park. The group set out at 2 a.m. to reach the summit just after sunrise.
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Matthew Berry is a changed man. The Park Ridge resident and Global Media Relations Manager for IBM recently returned from a trip to Tanzania, Africa. Though the official purpose of the trip was to strengthen his job performance and encourage professional growth, Berry took much more than that away from the journey. “It has changed me in terms of how I see everything,” he says of the trip, which helped him put life’s little letdowns in perspective and truly appreciate its joys.
Berry was one of 100 IBM employees selected out of over 5,000 who applied to participate in the IBM Global Corporate Service Corps (CSC), a new program is designed to help IBM employees enhance their skills and expertise in order to better adapt to the ever-changing global market. As a “high performance” employee, Berry was afforded the opportunity to join an international team of IBM employees from all over the world on the first CSC mission to Tanzania. His team’s mission: to bring different perspectives and expertise to problem solving, while interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds.
Upon arriving in Tanzania on Aug. 21, Berry, 34, met with eight other IBM employees whom he had never met before. The group got to spend its first two nights in a hotel in Dar Es Salaam, a city on the Indian Ocean, in a luxury hotel. “We started off at this beautiful resort, and we said, ‘Africa’s not bad,’” says Berry. But the team quickly realized that the trip was not to be all play and no work. “Then, we spent two days traveling on bumpy roads through the middle of nowhere.”
Along the way, the team stopped in various villages where local farmers were using a technology developed by a company with whom the CSC group was to be working with throughout the trip. The “MoneyMaker,” as it is called, is a simple water pump system developed by an organization called “Kick Start.” The technology was developed to aid farmers whose crops had previously been at the mercy of nature and who frequently faced famine and poverty as a result of droughts. “This thing looks like a Stairmaster, and it pumps water out to the crops,” explains Berry. “Some farmers talked about how it’s changed their whole lives.”
The problem, however, was that many farmers would receive donated “MoneyMakers,” or buy them from local purveyors, but would have no way of learning how to install or operate the machines. “A lot of the farmers would get the pump and hoses, but no education or training materials,” says Berry. “So our team was tasked with putting together educational materials.” Berry describes how this was the perfect example of the true purpose of the CSC program – to force IBM employees who have already proven their worth as members of a corporate team to approach new, unfamiliar problems in creative, enterprising ways, thereby making a difference on a global scale.
“I learned more in this trip than I could have in any business school,” Berry says. “I was learning the whole time.” And while there was plenty of fun to be had, exotic animals to observe and people to meet, he says that working with such a diverse group of strangers to solve complex problems was by turns highly challenging and incredibly invigorating. “Some days it was like the show ‘Survivor,’” he laughs.
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Park Ridge resident Matt Berry poses with a group of students from a Tanzanian school. Berry spent a month in Tanzania as part of IBM Global’s Corporate Service Corps program. He and a team of eight other IBM employees visited the school to educate the students about careers in science and technology, and donated various supplies to the school.
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Berry spent the bulk of his trip working closely with representatives of the Tanzanian Association of Tour Operators (TATO). Tanzania’s number one industry is, incidentally, tourism. And that’s no surprise, says Berry. “They have so many things to do. There are beautiful national parks, mountains, islands… But tourism hasn’t really taken hold.” In other words, a country that could be thriving on tourism proceeds is not doing so. According to Berry, this is largely due to the misconceptions of Americans and other travelers that Africa is somehow not suitable to tourists, unsafe, and hard to navigate. “People from America have these perceptions of Africa, and lot of them are incorrect,” he says.
“I tried to put together a plan to help the tour operators who are members of TATO to get tourists here and raise quality of tourism.” From making sure safari vehicles are properly maintained to updating and improving the TATO Web site, Berry and other team members applied themselves to the task of working with local tour operators to make small improvements to their business practices that could, in the long run, greatly improve their success.
In between projects, Berry took some time to experience what makes Tanzania an amazing place. He spent time with representatives of the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), learning about Tanzania’s incredible fauna, and also got to meet Masai tribesmen. He also climbed to the top of Mount Meru, a 15,000-foot active volcano located west of Mount Kilimanjaro, an experience he says he will never forget. Through his interaction with the AWF, Berry learned that many of the tourist activities that attract foreign travelers are so overrun and crowded that they lose much of their charm. “Tanzania is a huge country,” Berry points out. The question is: “How do you take advantage of all this land to find new tourist destinations?”
This, says Berry, is something the AWF should be thinking about in order to bring more funding into Tanzania. “Their main focus up until now has been about the conservation of land, and now they are realizing there are opportunities to raise money and put it back in the land through eco-lodges.” Berry and his team hope that through addressing these issues, they can “help them [the AWF] move to the next level to generate some type of money.”
But of all the places Berry visited, it was perhaps the humblest that made the strongest impression on him. He had resigned himself even before the trip began to take some time to visit a school and an orphanage in Tanzania. Berry says of his team’s visit to the school, “We brought supplies and talked to the children about pursuing education in math and science… We did experiments with the kids and left the science supplies behind.” Berry also spoke to the school’s headmaster, who said that frequently, she has a difficult time affording basic supplies and even food. Berry is still in contact with the headmaster, “helping her figure out ways to promote the school to access funds, like putting together a Web site.”
Berry also visited an orphanage, where many of the children had lost their parents to HIV/AIDS. Before leaving the U.S., Berry had gone to say goodbye to a couple of his close friends, who are parents to a 5-year-old daughter. When he was about to leave, the little girl, Siera, went into her room and came out with her piggy bank. She handed over its contents, about $10, and told Berry that he should give it to the orphans in Africa. “She wanted the kids to have it,” Berry says, touched. “Who would have thought that a 5-year-old would lay out the road map for me to have one of my most special moments in Africa. Had she not given me the money, I would never have gone to that orphanage.”
Professional growth and rewarding corporate development aside, Berry says that his trip to Tanzania was one of the most life-changing experiences he has ever had. In particular, his perspective on the quality of life he enjoys here has changed. He says he brought back with him “a whole new appreciation for everything we have – like roads and medicine,” he says, pointing out “the little things” that many people in affluent America take for granted.
“I have been preaching to friends and family to just appreciate what we have,” he says, joking that many of his friends and relatives are already getting a little sick of the new Matt. “I have only been back a week, and I have caught myself ready to complain about something… But things are rolling off me a little easier now.”
Somewhere between here and Tanzania, Matt Berry misplaced his petty concerns. He doesn’t miss them.
Karen F. Mrnarevic's e-mail address is Mrnarevic@northjersey.com.
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