“Training”.

Fast forward to late September and I was on my way into London to attend an ‘ICS assessment day’. I went in assuming you had to be a complete idiot to not get picked, surely the charity wanted as many able bodies as possible. To my surprise, I later found out that the selection process was actually very rigorous and only about half of people at those events actually get through to the next stage. I doubt I’d have been as relaxed about the whole thing if I’d known!

To give you an image of what the day was like I’ll ask you think back to those ‘extra -curricular’ days in primary school, where you went round doing random activities with different teachers. There were a lot of team building exercises, including the classic of building bridges out of newspaper, to see if you played nice with others. However, the day wasn’t all fun and games. There was also a 1 to 1 interview, which included the question of if I have any preference on which country you would like to volunteer in.

At the time Raleigh worked in Nicaragua, Tanzania and Nepal. For some reason, my gut reaction was that Nicaragua sounded most appealing. Maybe it was the photos of idyllic, sandy beaches on google that made it look like a tropical paradise. My parents, on the other hand, had been to Nepal years ago and immediately began talking my ear off about how great it was… I didn’t have a chance. So when Beverley, the adorable 60 something who was my interviewer, asked the question, “Nepal, because of the culture and stuff” was my answer.

Another couple of months later I attended my ‘training weekend’ at the Kingswood centre in Conisbrough, Doncaster (see above for the best quality photo I could find). Think PGL school trip but with a bunch of 18-25 year olds. As it turned out what Raleigh meant by training was basically sensitivity and emotional preparedness activities to check that you weren’t going to offend the locals of whatever country you were going to. It also acted as a great way to see if the 18 year olds, who’d never left home before, got homesick.

Maybe, at 25 I was too long out of school, but I found the whole thing to be a waste of time and spent the entire weekend trying to mess with the inevitable hippies that were among the group. There was one girl in particular, who had a massive nuggety dreadlock she liked to suck on, and kept banging on about Gaia and mother earth. She really didn’t like it when I told her that I’d read an article on climate change that stated we’d already gone past the point of no return.

There were some alright people there too, who gave me hope that I wouldn’t be living with a complete group of insufferable twats for 3 months. I found myself chatting with a girl called Momina the most out of everyone, with the topic of “Is that guys name really Storm Toombs?” coming up more than once. In the end, I treated the whole weekend as extension of uni, just another excuse to have a laugh. I can’t have been too annoying because come February 5th I had all my packing done, my Nepalese visa sorted and was ready for my flight from Heathrow airport.

Now as mentioned previously I had been playing quite a lot of games during my gap in education/employment, with one, in particular, dominating the hour count; PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds. If you haven’t heard about it, the basic premise of the game is that 100 people drop on an island and you murder everyone else until you’re the last ones remaining. For some idiot reason, my mate Alex convinced me that to avoid jet lag from the 5 and 3/4 hour time difference between the UK and Nepal (yeah I dunno why they couldn’t just make it an even 6 either), we should pull an all nighter playing this game before my flight, and for some idiot reason, I agreed.

To be fair we won quite a few games that night, but things also got really weird the later we went on and we finally decided to pack it in at 6 or 7am. I had breakfast, which I remember taking me ages to eat because of how tired I was, hugged my parent’s goodbye and I was off.