Wortel

One of the things I really like about the mine I'm working at is how many different cultures there are. Don't get me wrong, South Africa probably has the widest range of cultures in one country. At my new work, there are people from all over the world.

In my area, about half of the team are not Australians. There's South Africans, Indians and Indonesians. My geology supervisor us from Chile and the geology technician is an American. What I love is how everyone gets along and tries to understand each other even through some of the language barriers.

The workplace really has become global with many of my colleagues having worked in several countries. I think that more and more of your cv will be focused on how you can work in a team. How you get along with people who might have very different views and ways of doing their job.

We were about to go home for the day one afternoon when my colleague mentioned she'll be making wortel cake that evening. In Afrikaans, wortel means carrot and when I asked my friend, she replied that's what they call carrots in Indonesia too.

There's a good metaphor for life in that story about how some things may not be as different as you think even between cultures massive distances apart. We just started joking about who might have used the term first :-).