As I type This there is news of the Bangladesh factory fire on the news and it fills me with sadness and reminds me how important the message is that my colleague and I are delivering in Africa right now. Today we explained that the managers had responsibities, legal responsibilities to look after the health and safety of their staff and this surprises them - tomorrow I will be discussing the legal aspects and looking at the criminal and the civil laws, these subjects really opens their eyes - especially when they find out that they risk going to prison. My friend Esther who I have spoken fondly of before has had twins "Joy and Josie" here women are entitled to 3 months maternity leave and she is not really coping with being away from her ... read more

Hi all We have come to the end of the week of training the managers in managing safely and so far they are doing very well ... And apparently my training skills have improved immensely - not bad considering its been 6 months! We got back to the hotel and it was straight on with the swim suit and straight into the pool - off to Kenya tomorrow so have packed everything and am looking forward to a lay in and a swim tomorrow La la salaam Lisa X... read more

Hi all yesterday was a great start to the training, we discussedthe managers responsibilities, and as they had no idea that they had any responsibilities in Health and safety their eyes nearly popped out of their heads. Mark said I started off a bit wobbly but picked up quickly and was good - I felt better after that! I worried as I hadnt trained for a while and havent done this course at all! We are in the new training school and on first looking at it it looks amazing, it is clean and has all the mod cons but the floor is shiney and slippery - I am wearing rubber shoes so I am ok but Mark is in leather shoes so is slipping everywhere! Today I will be mostly discussing Law, I cant beleive ... read more

We arrived in the evening at Khao Lak, it was cooler than Bangkok as there was a breeze from the coast "ha ha, they are playing animal noises through speakers here" Joe said to me, I laughed and thought he will work it out soon enough. Khao Lak coast is a rainforest area, the hotel is built within the rainforest and we have the sounds of birds, baboons and barking deer as well as crickets and frogs at night. we also soon came to realise that we could not have come to a more German part of Thailand if we had tried, we were greeted by Thai staff in German on a daily basis! Khao Lak coast was the hardest hit in the massive tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004, many of the people living and ... read more

I offended someone. I think. The gentleman in question has never actually said he was offended, he forwarded my blog and said “Look what Lisa Kelly wrote about us.” After which two men wrote some rather nasty comments about me. However if they had read the blog properly they would have realised it was NOT about them at all but a general comment about expats globally. As you all know my job is important to me, I love what I do so I decided to delete the “offending” blog and sent an apology to all the men that received the blog. Two men came back and told me not to worry as they enjoyed what I had written as it was accurate. This incident led to me temporarily closing my entire blog and then making it ... read more