Meet Cisco's Most Beloved Employees: Bringing Telephones To World's Most Desperate People

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Cisco TacOps 13

Cisco

Cisco TacOps team

Rakesh Bharania, a network engineer for a team at Cisco called Tactical Operations, tells a moving story about his work.

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TacOps is a group of Cisco employees that swoops in after a natural disaster, (like the Philippines typhoon, or Hurricane Sandy), to get Internet and telephone service back up, so that rescue workers can do their jobs.

Cisco donates all equipment, supplies, transportation, covers all the costs. The team consists of 10 full time workers and another 300 or so employees who volunteer as needed, Bharania tells Business Insider.

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The work is is emotionally challenging. For example, the team went to the Philippines just after Typhoon Haiyan killed 4,000 people, injured another 18,000 and displaced four million. They saw mass destruction and suffering, team member Tim Woods, told Business Insider (Skip straight to the photos.)

"There's extreme sadness and devastation. You know it's very dire situation, so you have to have an A-game on. You are there to help," Woods explains.

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But it's also extremely gratifying, Bharania says. After arriving in the Philippines, the team was driving a military truck through a rural area between cities, areas that a few days earlier were filled with villages. Rescue workers hadn't gotten to this part of the country, so survivors were walking or hitchhiking to the nearest city to get help, 60 miles away.

The truck stopped to pick up four women who had lost their homes and were looking for missing family members.

"It was very clear that we were foreigners," Bharania said. "One of us was from China, two from the States. This woman grabbed my hand and said, 'You are such a blessing.'"

Although the women didn't understand the technical nature of the work, they knew that "People from the outside world were caring about them and they were really thankful," he said.

Imagine being cut off from all communication after a disaster only to discover people from all over the world have come to your town to help you. A touching thought, isn't it?

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