Unexpected journey ...

An ex student from Wageningen, now working for FARA in Accra, Ghana, came visit The Netherlands this month. He was in The Netherlands for business.  He also took his Technical Advisor Aggrey Agumya.
I met them at a train station and we talked and talked and had tea. And then suddenly ... they invited me to come to FARA for an IT Consultancy Assignment. 
I was very surprised and totally blown away... and it was at first a bit hard to believe it was not a joke, but a serious request.

After asking my husband and children had no objections I said yes, provided we can somehow work it out together with my employer, VAA ICT Consultancy ... of course ...

What is FARA?

FARA is the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa: http://faraafrica.org/
Citation from this website:
FARA is the apex continental organisation responsible for coordinating and advocating for agricultural research-for-development. (AR4D). FARA serves as the technical arm of the African Union Commission on matters concerning agriculture, science, technology and innovation.

The IT consultancy assignment is very interesting to me due to the combination of several fields of interest: IT, Agriculture, Food, Nutrition, Human Resources and Africa.
It is also very interesting for my company(ies)  VAA ICT Consultancy, and GreenLinQData because we mainly work for the Agricultural Business.

In this interview Yemi Akinbamijo explains that improving Africa’s food security and growing its agricultural economies will require a concerted effort to improve the continent’s scientific human capital and sustained investments in capacity building:
http://newafricanmagazine.com/interview-yemi-akinbamijo/

Preparations ....
After Yemi 's request I got a little busy :-)
.... I needed to
- consult my employer, 
- get vaccinations,
- get informed about traveling to Africa and Health, 
- get a new passport (of course, the one I had had an expiration data of April 2015), 
- and a ticket 
- and visa ....  IN TIME :-) 
- and read information about FARA and some more info Yemi sent me
....and so on and so on.

You'll read more about this adventure in the next posts...
Bye, Wilma