Nana Awere Damoah, Ghana

MSc Chemical Engineering

University of Nottingham

"As a Chevening Alumnus back home in Ghana, I am serving as an example to the youth that it is possible to achieve your dreams."

Morning of 18th April 2005. Returning to the office after three days. Opened my yahoo email. Saw an email with title “Scholarship reference Number 5869”; thought it was spam. I opened it, and almost fainted! I had been offered a Development Solutions Joint Chevening Scholarship to study for an MSc in Chemical Engineering for 2005/2006 at Nottingham University. Thus began my wonderful journey as a Chevening scholar.

The opportunity the Chevening scholarship gave to study in the UK changed my life and outlook, reinforced my leadership potential and challenged me to seek to achieve the best. Studying in the UK meant studying with exceptional students with different cultural backgrounds and experiences, resulting in total learning, and networking – absolutely invaluable. I was equipped with technical skills, increasing my versatility in confronting challenges in my engineering work, currently as the Production Manager (Foods) for Unilever Ghana Limited.  

As a Chevening alumnus back home in Ghana, I am serving as an example to the youth that it is possible to achieve your dreams!

 I have been writing since 1992 – short stories, poems and essays. Excursions in my Mind is a collection of reflective essays and poems, supported by quotations from literary sources, the Bible and contemporary leaders. These reflections cover a broad sweep of issues that confront the average individual in everyday life. The topics are selected as randomly as events and circumstances confront me, but are cogitated and ruminated upon, over and over again in my mind, intertwined with my own experiences and stories, a sort of perambulation in a labyrinth, but with an eventual egress, escorted by cogent lessons for life’s improvement.

As a writer, I see myself as a distillation plant, taking the issues around me, processing and producing various fractions, fit for use by my readers. In my book, I seek to convey the message that life is a business to be worked at and lived, not just dreamed about, and that in doing this, we need to be ‘learning people’ – there is an example, a message, a lesson, a warning or a moral you can discover in every scene of the play that is your life; he is never old who continues to learn and he is already old who ceases to learn. As Harvey Ullman stated: “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether this happens at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young but becomes constantly valuable regardless of physical capacity.”  With my scripts, I seek to instigate thought, provoke reflections and educe action.

The unwritten, tacit message, that I endeavour to convey with my literary accomplishment is this: as an African writer, who is in a technical discipline (a practising Chemical Engineer), it is my aspiration that via my literary work I can enthuse our youth to experiment and not to let their scope and influence on their generation be bounded or restricted by their training, to discontinue restricting themselves to the box when they can go beyond the perimeter and reach the pinnacle of their potential, to grasp the verity that talents cannot be tamed and should be employed for the universal good of mankind. 

I keep three blogs of my work. Essays in the ‘Excursions in my Mind’ series are updated at www.excursionsinmymind.blogspot.com, my poems can be found at www.patmoscollections.blogspot.com and all my short stories are at www.storyloom.blogspot.com.

Excursions In My Mind is published by Athena press London (www.athenapress.com)