What on Earth made me decide to go and do charity work in Nepal?

I had a bit of an internal debate on where to begin all this, and after an unnecessarily long time, decided some context wouldn’t go amiss. After all, it probably seemed a bit out of character for me; flying halfway around the world to help people I’d never met. So here we go, my first proper blog post, the events that led up to me getting on that plane.

As with most things, one journey began as another ended

I graduated from Loughborough University in July of 2017 with a 2.1 BSc in Product Design and Technology (that’s me and my parents at my graduation above). To most people, when they think of product design they probably think of DT at school; a bit of drawing and a bit of sawing. Whilst my degree did include both of those, it also included a lot of computer aided design (read 3D modelling software), electronics, mechanics, material science and quite a lot of Photoshop. However, by the time I’d gotten to final year I had developed a deep-seated hatred of of most of the things on that list, especially sketching, and only really enjoyed the DIY-esque parts.

Luckily for me, the year also included a decent amount of research for my final year project and dissertation. For the former I designed a bedside sleep light, and for the latter I wrote about the behavioural change potential of mobile apps, like Pokemon and Spotify. Those two projects are probably when I first started to realise I had a passion for writing.

I can’t speak for the others on my course but the BSc part of it mostly involved bodging copied code to make electronics work and relying on an Asian guy to smash out mechanics calculations (sorry Ken). Long story short, I had no desire to pursue a career in design, in any shape or form, and coupled with ongoing stress-related illness throughout the year I finished my degree with absolutely no idea what I was going to do next.

Cue a couple of months of slipping back into old ways and playing video games all day, interspersed with meeting up with old school friends who were much further up the adulthood ladder than me. Due to the aforementioned illness, my parents didn’t seem to mind too much but eventually, the question of the future began to get uncomfortably loud. Also, much to my surprise, playing games all day gets pretty boring after a while.

Sometime around late August my mum, in her ever useful way, sent me an email with details concerning the ‘International Citizens Service’. I believe at the time, I was dabbling with the idea of volunteering for an oversees animal conservation charity but couldn’t find anything that wasn’t essentially a basic bitch holiday to go ride some elephants. Whilst the ICS concerned itself more with humanitarian aid than animal welfare, it seemed a lot more worthwhile than anything I’d seen before and had the added bonus of delaying permanent employment for a little bit longer.

As many of my friends will tell you, I’m not a particular fan of other human beings, so my interest in a charity to help them may seem a bit odd on the face of it. However the ICS has multiple different partners that not only work in varying countries, but focus on different areas of sustainability. The partner that really drew my interest were called Raleigh International, and one of their projects focused on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, or WASH for short. While other partners and projects focused heavily on community interaction to teach them skills etc., WASH involved much more practical work, such as building toilets and handwashing stations (outdoor sinks). I could be down for that.