Cyprus has its merits, especially if you have a family: beautiful weather, safe surroundings and beaches galore. However for a new foreign mum, often away from immediate family and friends, it can be a lonely place. When you leave the hospital or clinic there is no follow-up service to see how you are doing, whether you are coping, no-one to offer helpful advice on matters such as breastfeeding. There are limited facilities regarding counselling in Cyprus, only a handful of mums groups and very little social activity for new mums. So to finally have a website available geared specifically for mums in Cyprus, for some, it’s a godsend. Logically it’s called MumsInCyprus.com and its slogan is ‘where we all get together’.
The brainwave of Carine Khoury, the website has been designed to become a comprehensive hub of information and social interaction, to provide solace to those feeling isolated and offer helpful advice from both professionals and experienced mums on a vast range of topics directly and indirectly related to motherhood and babies.
Clearly Carine has tapped into something since in its six months of existence, the site’s membership has grown exponentially with hundreds of mums signing up for the free registration – nearing 400 at last count.
“I wanted to create a supportive, online environment that was made by mothers, for mothers and about mothers in Cyprus. The internet is such a valuable resource and there was no website that catered for women here on the island,” Carine says.
With two boys of her own, finding the time to create and manage the website might have been a bit difficult but Carine insists it is not a struggle. “It is a passion,” she says, “admittedly a time consuming one but easy to balance with the children because I work from home. I do most of the work when the boys are at nursery in the mornings. Once they are tucked up for the night, I get back online, sometimes for a couple of minutes, sometimes for a couple of hours.
“I spent 15 years in the management of hotels prior to becoming a mother. As much as I would enjoy getting back into the business it’s a difficult one to work in as far as regular hours are concerned and I simply do not want to miss out on raising our children. This way I am getting the best of both worlds.”
Once you sign up, the menu bar expands to incorporate a whole other range of options available to members only, so the saying don’t judge a book by its cover is doubly applicable here. You can post your own blog, pictures or video and interact with any other registered members.
Events showing what’s happening from coffee mornings to CPR courses organised by mums to women’s business networking meetings and Shakespeare at Curium are featured. If a mum has anything to do with it and she’s a member, then it’s on here. And for mums on the lookout for a bit of company, then the tab labelled Playgroups shows what the island has to offer.
Naturally, there is the commercial aspect. After all, why would someone dedicate the majority of their day and the many months prior to setting up and maintaining a helpful, useful, and interesting site, completely free of charge? MiC’s Mall is an online shopping facility for those that don’t wish to or can’t leave home to get something. All shopping outlets offer delivery to Cyprus so there’s no disappointment at finding exactly what you want and not being able to get it here.
There is also a range of Groups you can join, which include mums grouped by language (there are over 10!) as well as by region. “The response has been absolutely great. The language groups are proving popular and so are the town groups as they help people connect. Taking the network into reality has also been successful, we had a good number of mothers come to the last meet-a-mum drinks evening in Limassol,” Carina says.
However the two most unique tabs are labelled Rent-A-Mum and WaHM. Rent-A-Mum is a service to help both mums looking for help with anything from cooking, cleaning and babysitting, as well as mums who have extra time on their hands, looking for work. WaHM on the other hand (Work At Home Mums) is a section that aims to promote those mums who work from home by offering a little free advertising – which never hurts.
Overall, the site is extremely informative so it would be hard to justify not joining, even if just for a quick peek at what’s going on and who’s online. The trouble with that is, that once you start joining a few good conversations, discover some gems of information you didn’t previously know, or actually meet up with some of the other mums, you’re hooked…
