Today I spent most of the day in my favourite hotel in Accra, Ghana: Afia Beach Hotel. Even though the view from my window, behind the screen of my laptop, was pretty OK, I had to focus more on the screen itself, so that I could have a good Powerpoint presentation ready tomorrow.
Tomorrow I have to present 3 years of work in the National Environmental Impact Assessment of Mining and Exploration Areas, and Strategic Environmental Assessment Project, a component of the EU-funded Mining Sector Support Programme (MSSP), all within less than half an hour. There were some 7 or 8 projects in the MSSP, and we've already set up our booths in Accra's International Conference Centre. It's quite possible that we'll end up with various consultants and some chaps from the EC Delegation here, looking at and listening to each other.
Now, while I really don't enjoy talking in front of people, and I wish it was all over already, I do wish that somehow some people will hear and see and remember some of the outcomes of our work: The need for communities and mines to work closer together, the fact that there is so much arsenic in the surface waters flowing away from certain mining areas, already affecting people, and the absolute menace of “small-scale mining”, with it's big-scale impacts.
After tomorrow, all this information will be deemed to be in the public domain, and then I may just show some of the images in this blog…
