Roll with the punches.

This project is about education and I want to share with you some thoughts from a great educator that I was lucky enough to share many happy times with...
In 1999, I was appointed Academic Director at The Brighton College School of Excellence and my PA was a wonderful lady newly arrived in England from South Africa. Both she and her husband possessed a remarkable intellect and we very much became a family. Although I was younger than both their children I became very much part of the Fikuarts' life and I learned a great deal from Ian.

Ian Fikuart was a Rhodesian banker with that true Scottish grit that was the backbone of the British empire. He went on to become a university professor in the United States and a leading entrepreneur in South Africa. Sandi always comments on how many qualities Ian and I share and that is a true compliment!

Very much a spiritual person, Sandi is a font of advice when I am in need and Ian always has something to say from beyond the grave...had you known him, you would know that Ian always had something to say.

Throughout his career as an educator, Ian taught commercial skills to a great many business leaders, yet in the mould of a great educator, his greatest talent lay in people skills.

I did not get to know Ian until illness had seen him lose both his legs and given him a plethora of health problems that would have floored a lesser man. Yet, I knew Ian when he was at his greatest. He was volunteering with disaffected youth in the Brighton and Hove area, managing the residents association at Eaton Manor and he was a leading light in the stroke club, to name just a few of his merits.

Ian knew life's traumas better than most and he had known his down times, yet he always told me that "when life deals you lemons, you make lemonade"...whatever happens make your negatives positive.

Thank you Sandi for reminding me of what I can offer these project students, if I only make a tenth of the man Ian Fikuart was then I will know greatness.

I will keep our date for dinner back home in Hove in September 2007, and as you so rightly remind me, by then the building blocks project will have opened the eyes of so many to the opportunities we can all find in education.