Two and half week ago I stepped again in one of the big Boeing 747 jumbo jets of KLM to fly via Amsterdam to Johannesburg. So many flights made between these cities during the past 30 years. The purpose this time was to contribute to project delivery work in Mozambique and Kenya. After having caught up briefly in Johannesburg with one of my old university friends who has lived & worked in South Africa as mining engineer the past 35 years, I flew with one of my colleagues to the city of Tete in the north-west part of Mozambique. This was on a flight of South African airlines in one of the excellent small jets produced by Embraer in Brazil. A true global experience...
In Tete the Seneca team organized a first conference on college leadership. This was a conference organized for and by the Mozambicans with whom we have done leadership training the past three years. Teams of the five local colleges we work with made presentations and reflected together about possible ways forward to work on continuous improvements.
Paulo is a young professional from Brazil who came to Seneca four years ago as an exchange student. He liked it some much that he decided to stay and completed his civil engineering program at Seneca. Currently he is a part-time teacher in that same program at Seneca and he is also starting his own business in app development. Since late 2017 he has been assisting us in the Mozambique project with entrepreneurship training with the colleagues in Mozambique. His first language of Portuguese makes him a very effective consultant in our activities in Mozambique which was - just like Brazil - a former colony of the Portuguese. Paulo played an important role during the conference.
While most of the presentations were delivered by the Mozambicans to the Mozambicans, we brought Tom as our special key-note speaker. Tom lived and worked a few years in Portugal and speaks Portuguese very well. Tom is at the moment the VP Academic at BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology in Vancouver) and he gave a great talk on the new developments in applied technical education and the need to develop more and more interdisciplinary training programs.
At the end of one of the conference days we were entertained by a local community dance group. The Boabab tree next to the hotel we stayed - which has been there for hundreds of years - looked at it all. These trees are so typical for the African sub-Saharan landscape.
In our hotel I noticed they were selling Simba chips produced in South Africa. That is the company where I did an internship while I was studying at the University of Technology in Delft. That work with Simba during four months in 1980 was my first visit to South Africa; now 38 years ago...
The last evening in Tete we had dinner somewhere and I ordered a fish filet. Instead I got the entire fish with head and all. It was a fun dinner with colleagues from Canada and Mozambique. Then we flew to Maputo again, the city where I lived and worked with MSF during 1988-1990. But before flying to Maputo I had an hour to soak up some sun in Tete, a city where most of the time the temperatures are between 35 to 45 degrees and where the sun is super strong. Half an hour in the sun there is equal to 3-4 days in the sun elsewhere...
Here are Paulo and I overlooking the Indian Ocean in Maputo. I am telling Paulo stories from when I lived here in the late eighties. So many memories from a few crazy years of work with MSF during the end of what was a civil war of more than 30 years.
Quinn has managed this project during the past three years and she is doing a great job. We met with our colleagues at the Ministry of Education in Maputo. A building where I have been many times during more than 10 years of working on different development projects with Niagara and Seneca. From Maputo I flew to Nairobi in Kenya where we started in 2017 a similar academic leadership capacity development program. This time our colleague Pat - who has been in charge of International at College of the Rockies (BC) and who has worked in Kenya on such projects for 15 years - did an outstanding job with the three days of workshops.
Back home in Niagara now after this whirlwind of a trip. It continues to intrigue and fascinate me that we can move around in a few weeks time. The work is humbling and always so interesting with wonderful people from all over our planet earth.
