In the beginning . .

At the beginning of the 2013/14 academic year, I had no idea I would be writing a Blog from Mozambique at the end of it. Today, I'm sitting on the terrace of Sunset Boulevard, a community hotel in Mossuril, a coastal village in the North of the country, with my colleague Iain Macdonald and five students, trying to get my head around the extraordinary journey we have been on to get to this point.
It started with some conversations by email, and the possibility of a couple of small graphic design projects, for initiatives in development at  The Teran Foundation - could we produce identity and design work for a women's soap co-operative and a local film festival?
Why yes - of course we could, it was exactly what we were looking for - live projects for our year three students on the BDes (Hons) Graphic Design programme at Edinburgh Napier University.
To cut a long story short, we did the work, we were given very generous support from our University, and now we are here - in Mossuril, working to progress the work we started back in September. Iain and I will stay for two weeks and the students for a month.
Two government delegations have just arrived, and we are really delighted to be able to support local people in getting their projects off the ground and noticed - all the work we do will be posted on this blog daily, we hope you enjoy our story. I'm going to take some pictures now, of the first things we are doing - with little in the way of tools, it's graphics from the ground up. 
This poster designed by one of our group, Ross Sneddon, will be appearing in some new forms today -