Travel with Kat

This week’s travel snap is also my entry for Round 46 of Travel Photo Roulette with the theme of ‘Smile’. If you’d like to enter you’ll find all the details and all the entries on the website 2Away who are the hosts for this round. I took this photo while visiting a school in The Gambia. [...]

Children’s smiling faces and shouts of “Kathryn” and “Shelagh” greet us in Jeddah, a poor district of Brikama. It’s Wednesday morning and we’re off to visit Jeddah Progress Nursery School in Brikama (for children 4 to 7 years old), a school Nyodema has been supporting since 2007. We’ve organised teacher training courses, distributed mosquito nets [...]

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all! This week’s photograph is of the children at Jeddah Progress Nursery School in The Gambia. Although The Gambia is a Muslim country they are very tolerant of other religions and it is not unknown for Muslims to join in Christian celebrations and vice versa. I [...]

Cooking fish benachin and visiting the newly built school at Dairuharu Monday I’m up fairly early today as I’m going on an excursion run by The Gambia Experience ‘Cooking with Ida’. Nine of us from various hotels arrive at Ida’s and are shown two racks of colourful Gambian clothes to change into. Now I wasn’t [...]

Through my role with Nyodema I’ve been sent some wonderful CDs from bands wishing to perform at our annual world music and arts festival. It can be very frustrating when due to our limited budget or other constraints we are unable to promote some of these amazing artists. This couldn’t have been more true than [...]

As co-founder of Nyodema I’m heavily involved with organising its annual festival held this year on Saturday 20th August in a lovely pub by the sea at Bognor Regis, West Sussex. I particular enjoy booking the artists and arranging the running order, however this is never with out it’s up and downs… …so-and-so can only [...]

So pleased to say that the first stage of Nyodema’s school build is finished! One classroom, a store room and an office are complete. Lucy in the Gambia This classroom was completed as a result of donations made by friends and family in memory of Lucy Ritchie from Bristol, England, who died in October 2008 [...]

You can imagine my delight when, on a chilly morning between Christmas and New Year in a very quiet office, I received an email from The Gambia Experience clients Lou Hamilton and Paul Lang saying that they would like to make a short film about responsible tourism, The Gambia Experience’s School Development Fund and Nyodema [...]

Part of my role working for The Gambia Experience is leading their School Development Fund team here in the UK. Earlier in the year I was passed a letter from two of our customers telling us about a nursery school that they had visited that was in desperate need of assistance. As it happened I [...]

With musicians from three different continents it is hardly surprising that, Bristol based group, Baraka’s musical influences reach around the globe as they skillfully blend music from West African highlife and South African township with Caribbean calypso, soca and reggae to produce a unique and exciting mix of polyphonic rhythms, soaring melodies and funky dance [...]