Back to work (temporarily)

A first glance at our calendar when we arrived home from Cameroon mid afternoon on Friday 25th told us that we were due to go on a five day road trip around Andalucía starting early the following Monday morning. However neither of us could face more travelling just yet so we opted for staying at home for the week to get a few things done. Sevilla and the Alhambra will still be there in a few weeks time and by then we might even have got over the disappointment of Arsenal blowing the Carling Cup Final.

The house resembled an office last week with the principal task being to build a website for my Dad - something completely new. While in Cameroon we both got slightly frustrated with slow progress on Dad's community health website and I rashly offered to build him a better one. This one is focused on his other main area of work, the provision of medical education in Africa. Dad has been acting as a consultant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which has been funding a study on quality of medical schools in Sub-Saharan Africa and is currently in Johannesburg attending a conference on the subject.  He has many ideas and wants to use the website to progress the debate on getting quality standards in place.  So we've been sitting over our laptops learning how to build a site from scratch. Fortunately some great tools are available and the output is surprisingly good (if I say so myself).  I have sent the output off to Cameroon for approval and when Dad gets back from South Africa it should be ready to launch.  Meanwhile,  as well as acting as my technology consultant, Su has been building a new site for her coaching business.

A stethoscope over a map of Africa -
the image chosen for the Medical Education website

The challenge is to keep momentum going on the projects we have got involved with in Africa and to continue to contribute remotely from Europe.  As well as the websites, last week also brought an investment programme for upgrading Dad's Conference Centre ahead of two meetings being held there in the next month, which will be important for the reputation of the business.  We have also been looking at options for Dad's development site down by the beach which is to be built on using the new family property company that was established before we left Cameroon.

Having made progress on a few fronts with Dad's projects we called a halt to work on Friday morning and headed for lunch at La Seu in Denia where we raised a glass in remembrance of Mum, who passed away exactly 23 years ago on another Friday morning, back on 4 March 1988.  She always encouraged me to learn about Cameroon so the work we have been doing is very much with her memory in mind.