So, what was it that had provoked such a response from my family and friends?  I had decided to not start a career, but to go abroad and work with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO).

My motives for choosing VSO were not particularly virtuous: having finished ‘A’ levels I had gone straight to university and the thought of going straight from university into a job filled me with horror.   The ‘milk round’ of accountancy firms and accountancies were picking the crop of students with dreams of partnerships and company cars.  Of course I went along to their presentations – unashamedly glad for the free food and alcohol – but it was always their final pitch that made me so suspicious.  After talking for an hour about training, social life, overseas offices and the fun of the work – the final slide was invariably a chart showing how much you could be earning after 5-10-15-30 years.  If money was their strongest seller then I wasn’t interested.  I only had one life, and the thought spending it making someone else rich seemed insane.  Having made that decision then there were only two options left to me: the dole or going abroad.  That was simple: the next choice was where to go?  I got jobs teaching English in Italy and Greece, then VSO said they had teaching opportunities in China.  Goodbye Greece – China it was. 

VSO stands out from the other overseas aid organisations because it doesn’t pay an expat salary.  You are paid the same wage as a local person doing the same job.  When I arrived in China that meant I was being paid £60 a month.  This sounds like a poverty wage: which it was whenever I went to the town’s only supermarket and saw that I couldn’t afford to buy the packet of Polos – but then I never much liked Polos anyway.  £60 a month was enough to live, and live well – as long as I stuck to the simple things of life: vegetables, fruit, meals out in street side shacks, and cycle trips out into the hills. 

If I’d been in London I would have been no better off.  In fact I think I would have been worse off: in China my flat was five minutes walk from my classroom, the college sports field was ten minutes walk away, my students respected me as a teacher, I could afford a diet of fresh fruit and vegetables brought straight from the fields, and I had a job that was fun and challenging without sucking all the energy out of me and spitting me out at the end of each day to sit and watch TV soaps. 

I was working as part of a VSO program that was aiming to improve English teaching throughout China.  To coincide with the introduction of a new middle school text book VSO were working in Teacher Training Colleges to improve the spoken and listening English skills of student teachers.  For most of my students I was the first Westerner they had ever seen.  I went to a friend’s village and I was the first foreigner to go there since the Japanese soldiers had been driven out in 1945.  I was conscious that I was teaching my students so much more than just English skills; and at the same time I was learning so much myself. 

But there was always a rumble of discontent among VSO teachers in China that we should be in China.  There were no starving people to be saved, and teaching English left them feeling oddly colonial: like we were just a weird brand of Empire.  The aid worker is often looking for the glamour of ‘The Saviour.’  Many secretly wanted the school or sports field named after them when they go home.  But education is the key to raising standards of living: both at home and abroad.  And by teaching English to these poor, rural Chinese students you were giving them access, not just to pop music and Hollywood films – but also to a wealth of knowledge and reams of information about the world outside their country.  When I left China after my two and a half year stint, I’d enjoyed the experience so much that I decided to do it again: this time in Eritrea. 

Eritrea had just won its freedom from the colonial power: Ethiopia, after a thirty year war of liberation.  In one of the most conservative cultures in the world the Eritreans were attempting to build a dynamic and educated enclave: they wanted to be the Singapore of the Horn of Africa.  It was a dream that many of us subscribed to: the chance to defy globalisation and Third World Debt and build a peaceful and prosperous state, free from the crime and corruption of so much of Africa.  But first we had to tackle the devastation the independence war had left behind: hundreds of thousands killed, a third of the population in refugee camps in Sudan, a generation who had grown up in a state of terror. 

Again I was teaching English, in a middle school in Keren: Eritrea’s most beautiful town.  But it was a cursed beauty: the bowl of hills was landmined; the endless sun ruined crops; the rains failed.  The mass of students who had missed education under the Ethiopians poured into the schools so the school day was spilt into two: the first school day lasting from 6-45am to 12-30pm; the second from 12-45pm to 6-30pm.  Each class was of about 65 students, ranging from 11-25 years old.  Some were orphans who had seen their parents murdered by Ethiopian soldiers; others were crippled by polio or just stopped coming to school.  ‘Where is Nejat?’ I asked a colleague: ‘She has TB,’ he told me – and that was the end of Nejat. 

I am proud of the work I put into educating my students: there were many problems – the terror and violence of the last 30 years meant many students were very disturbed.  But among that the hard work and intelligence and character of many people stays with me still.  The most disheartening thing is having spent 2 years doing my small part to build an educated and stable Eritrea – the Eritrean and Ethiopian governments went to war in May 1998 – and destroyed so much of what they had achieved.  But at least I had the option of getting out. 

There are two ways of travelling.  Most people move physically around the world, leaving their minds behind: you go to a beach, get sunburnt, read a few novels and get laid – but you haven’t been to a culture or interacted with people who live there in anyway that affects you longer than the time it takes for the tan to fade.  What is special about VSO is that you move mentally as well: you learn the language, integrate with the culture and the people around you, reassess cultural values you didn’t even realise you had.