My first ever blog post

At the suggestion of a friend (Greg Head), I am writing a blog to tell my story.

I am an Aussie that moved to Taiwan 3 weeks ago to create a new business based in Taipei. This blog will capture my experiences, observations, frustrations, daily life, and hopefully provide a small window for the reader to see what modern day Taiwan and its people are like, and how a foreign entrepreneur goes about trying to establish a successful business in a very foreign land and set of customs.

I am sure this will evolve over time - but this is the goal for now.

Some background....

For the past 25 years I have been involved in the IT industry in Australia. The past 15 years running my own business implementing custom CRM solutions for the SME marketplace based on packages such as SalesLogix and Microsoft CRM.

One thing that I loved about the IT industry is that things are always changing. That kept things interesting. I hate the mundane and have a very short attention span for such things. But after 15 years of designing and implementing CRM systems it was becoming much less satisfying.

In around 2006 I read a book that changed my life. It was called "The Diary of Ma Yan". Ma Yan was a 13 year old schoolgirl living in Ningxia, a very poor province in Northern China, just below Mongolia. The book is her story as recorded in daily entries on scraps of paper of her struggle to get an education, whilst dealing with constant hunger and poverty. When living in such conditions a good education is a means to make a better life and escape poverty.

In November 2008 I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit Ningxia and stay with Ma Yan's family and see first hand how people in the region survive with so little. I visited a number of schools in Ningxia and also in Southern China in GuangXi. In GuangXi I was lucky enough to be able to teach a class of 4th graders for a week. Working with these children and interacting with their local community changed my life. Whilst these people have close to nothing - whatever they have they are willing to share with you.

During this trip to China I realised that I want to work full time in the future helping children in poverty get access to education. As part of this I want to learn to speak Chinese fluently and this is a contributing factor in my decision to move to Taiwan.

Another thing that I gained from this trip to China was an ability to appreciate simple things in life that we in the west take for granted such as hot running water, or a sit down toilet that flushes. We have so much compared to many people in the world, and the gap in living standards between the west and those in poverty is not acceptable.