Project planning session

Yesterday after meeting a variety of project stakeholders during the past few days, we started the planning and working on the timelines. Our main project partner is the Continuing Education Center (CEC) of the Aga Khan Foundation in Aswan, Egypt.

The CEC needs to expand its offering of programs and  improve on its operational capacity. We will work on these two aspects with them during the coming 3-4 years.

Work done (for this trip) and ready to return home. Today we left Aswan and from our hotel we "crossed the Nile" one more time. The photos below show the tourist boats. Many of the larger river "cruise" boats lay idle at the moment because of low tourist numbers.

This is our little boat from the hotel (as seen on the other side) to cross the Nile between the hotel (located on a small island) to the road (from where I took this photo). The boat below flies the Dutch and Canadian flags brotherly together here on the Nile in Egypt....

Aswan in southern Egypt

The past two days we have been meeting colleagues in the city of Aswan which is located in the south of Egypt not far from the border with Sudan. The former Aga Khan has a mausoleum here. The photo above is from my hotel room.

The city of Aswan is located on the river Nile. It is a beautiful dry setting with warm temperatures during the day and quite chilly temperatures in the evening.

We met a variety of stakeholders in the project here from people running small rural cooperatives to the association of local business owners. It will be a very interesting next 3-4 years on this project.

OK, I am ready for dinner......where is everybody else?

Saturday in Cairo

The view from my hotel room in Cairo: the famous Nile river flowing all the way from Lake Victoria to the Nile Delta a bit north of Cairo. We arrived last night and had today time to rest and see a little bit of the city. Close to  our hotel we found ourselves at the large square where the protests took place a few years ago which brought so much change in Egypt.  In the background the government  building where the first protesters gathered.

We then found a small "bazaar" near one of the museums where we were  explained about the many natural flower scents and the origins of the "papyrus" paper production of 5,000 years ago...

Tomorrow we start the work with the colleagues of the Aga Khan Foundation and the following day we will travel to the project location, the Aswan region in the south of Egypt.

Aviation training at Seneca

This week I visited our aviation program campus which is located at the small regional airport in Peterborough about an hour away from the other Seneca campuses in north-east Toronto. It was a snowy day so no training flights took place and all our planes were stored in the hangar. Seneca has about 20 small training planes used to train about 200 students in the Bachelor of Sciences Aviation to achieve enough hours for a commercial license during the four year program.

The small campus also has six flight simulators for different types of planes. This together with the training in the small planes makes this quite an unique program at an unique campus.

Off to Egypt the coming week to start a new project. Afterwards to Tanzania to do the same...

A week in Cuba

Mary, Hilary, Mark and I had a very nice week together in Cuba during the last few days of 2015 and the first few days of 2016. All four of us relaxed and in a good mood. The year 2015 was a year of a lot of hard work but also of rewards. We have hopes that 2016 will also be a good year.