The other side of life's lottery

The sun starts to seep through the windows of my room. I slowly inch open my eyes and, as I start to regain my senses, I realise that I'm not waking up in the comfort of my London flat. There is no luxurious duvet keeping me warm. No soft carpet to cushion my feet when I stand. Instead, I awake and see that I'm encapsulated by a very small mosquito net, scattered with holes, which negates the point of using the net in the first place, but the thought of some sort of protection, despite its flaws, still provides me with a sense of security. I fumble my way out of the bed and search for my flip flops to provide some respite from stepping onto the cold, concrete floor. I look out at the room and see the boxes which clutter my room, behind which I am certain I have some sort of lizard room mate, based on the sounds I remember hearing throughout the night. I scutter over to the corner of the room and grab my wash bag and some clothes from the temporary table I have made using one of the boxes. I make my way to the shower room, first stopping at the kitchen to fill my bucket with boiling hot water from the stove. Before going into the shower, I do the usual check to be sure I know where in the room all of the spiders, cockroaches, and lizards are, so that I don't get an unexpected surprise. I mix my boiling water with cold water from the tap, and begin my shower from the bucket of what is now warm water. And so begins my day. A world away from London. My banker days firmly behind me.

There is no denying that my 14 week adventure in Eastern and Southern Africa has been one giant step out of my comfort zone. I have been challenged and tested in ways I never even anticipated. At times it felt like there was no respite from the challenges. When I first thought about this idea to volunteer and travel around parts of Africa, I knew it would be hard, but when you are picturing it from the comfort of your life, I don't think you can fully prepare yourself for what you are going to see, feel, and experience. You think you know, but you really don't. It's not just the living conditions, but the emotions of what you are seeing and the stories you hear. Each experience hits you and affects you. At first you don't realise the full extent of its impact, but with each new experience, you start to feel the accumulated weight of every person's painful past and present. Eventually, you get to the point where you just need a break. Where you are emotionally so far out of your comfort zone that it's time to go home. I have no shame in admitting that I reached that point, particularly since I was alone with no Western companion to decompress with. It doesn't mean that I didn't love my experience. I plan to return again one day soon. However, it is definitely time to come home and regroup. People may be reading this and be scared off such an experience, but that is not my intention. Getting out of your comfort zone is scary and difficult, but I learnt so much about myself. I have seen the world in a way that I never expected I could, and that experience has not only allowed me to grow personally, but it has also given me an insight that only enhances the way I see the world, and my ability to succeed in it. I have met so many incredible and inspiring people who have gifted me a perspective that money can never buy. It is true what they say: the magic really does happen when you live out of your comfort zone.

As I said though, there are challenges to living outside of your comfort zone, and I found that the only way I could push myself through was to recalibrate my mind. In those moments where I was missing the comforts of home, when the toll of being on 'cockroach watch' was growing, I had to engage mindfulness techniques to focus on what mattered. In order to keep going, I had to learn quite quickly that happiness is a state of mind. I was in control of what my mind focused on - the positives or the negatives of my situation - and, with that, I was in control of my own happiness. For example, I could focus on the difficult living conditions as a negative, or focus on the reality that this was temporary for me and what I was here to do was help people. Shifting my mindset allowed me to wake up every day and throw my energy into helping the people for whom this life wasn't temporary. I had met so many people in Rwanda who were living victims of the brutal genocide in 1994, and I had been to some of the poorest areas of Malawi - a country where 50.8% of the country lives below the poverty line - and all of these people still woke up every day, with a smile and positivity, and went about their business. I remember one young man in Rwanda telling me that he had lost his parents, aunts and uncles, grandfather, cousins, and siblings in the genocide. It was now just him and his elderly grandmother, struggling every day to get together enough food to survive. Yet, he told me he was happy and that he would wake up every day and thank God that he was still alive and had survived the genocide. Nothing encapsulates more that happiness is a state of mind than this. I began to realise that survival for those living out here was dependent on this degree of mindfulness. Sometimes I think that we, in the Western world, having not gone through these same struggles and gained that perspective, have not developed this skill as well as those out here. Is it fair to say that, for us, mastering this skill is a luxury, but for them it is a matter of survival?

One thing for sure is that living out here requires resiliency. I visited parts of Malawi and Mozambique which had been affected by the recent cyclones in Southern Africa. In countries where poverty is so widespread, you really wonder how much more people can endure. Never underestimate human resiliency, however. We are stronger than we give ourselves credit for. It is incredible what people were being hit with, and yet they woke up every day and just started again. People in Mozambique took me to their houses - their only asset - destroyed by the wind and rain, leaving them to sleep outside now. Children in Malawi, who were ecstatic at a simple high five and smile from me, showed no signs of their reality - their parents' agricultural produce had been destroyed by the storms and they had now run out of food. I was in awe of how these people were able to retain their faith in a higher being and purpose. They weren't dwelling on what, to me, was just so overwhelmingly unfair, but instead had come together and were focusing on how they were going to get back what they had lost. There was definitely a lesson in this. Life is not straightforward; it will hit you with challenges when you least expect it. In those moments, you can either be defeated by the challenge, or step up and face it front on. You can be positive, like the inspirational people I met were being, or you could cower away. What is clear to me, though, is that resiliency in those moments is the only way to survive, and that resiliency doesn't have to be individual; it can come from the strength of coming together as a community to face the challenge together. There is no rule that we need to survive life's challenges on our own. Strength comes from the support of each other. Knowing when to lean on those around you can be resiliency in itself.

With all of these difficulties and challenges, which were so much bigger than me and my life experience, I initially wondered what I could bring to the table to help people. One of the issues with growing up like I did, within the safety of a loving family and school environment, followed by the security of a comfortable job in the corporate world, is that we start to think within narrow bounds. We underestimate what we know and how that knowledge and experience can be adapted and used in unfamiliar environments. The work I did in Rwanda was very different to that in Malawi, but my time in Rwanda gave me the confidence that I was able to have an impact in unfamiliar situations. In Rwanda, I worked more as a consultant, working with local communities to identify opportunities to help them improve their businesses and grow their incomes, culminating in the production of business plans to make the ideas a reality. I had run businesses before and worked on efficiency and improvements through innovation. The work in Rwanda was just using those skills in a different environment. Malawi, however, was completely different. The organisation had no funding, so there were no active projects to work on. Instead, I spent a lot of time going out to local communities, listening to their heart wrenching stories, and then being asked to say something to the group. Being asked to think of something inspirational and encouraging to say on the spot, in the face of the adversity they are struggling with every day, was incredibly difficult.

One time, in particular, stays with me. I was invited to a centre for children with disabilities and had listened to how disabilities are misunderstood in Malawi. Children are withheld basic human rights; they are locked away, separated from the rest of society, they are sexually abused, disowned by one, or both, of their parents, they are forced to smoke marijuana, they are beaten up. I listened to all of this and then was asked to say something. I felt immediate anxiety. What on earth could I say which would be enough to match what I had just heard? Why would they want to hear from me? They were all looking at me in expectation and I had no certainty of the words that would measure up to this moment. All I could do was speak from my heart, say what I felt, and be true to my emotions. I have no idea if I did a good job, but I got through it, and I realised soon after that it wasn't what I said that mattered, but the fact that I had shown up. Amongst the anxiety of being thrown into that situation, I had forgotten that the power of showing up was what was important. I was an outsider who had taken the time to come and listen to them. That meant more to them than any words I could string together. We often forget this. It's such a simple thing to just be there to listen to people. We put pressure on ourselves to do the big gesture, but often the smaller things are more impactful. I thought about this a lot while I was in Malawi. In addition to listening to communities, I had spent a lot of my time running seminars on basic business skills for young people, empowering them with skills to be successful in their small businesses, like tomato growing. I would see the looks of gratitude on their faces that someone from London, with 12 years of banking experience, would come to a small village in Malawi and spend hours teaching them about things like cost analysis and business viability. Helping people doesn't have to be some grand gesture, or a life changing sum of money, it can be something as simple as actively deciding to invest your time in people.

As I head back to London in 10 days, there are so many lessons that I want to take back with me. I want to be more mindful, resilient, open to experiences, and giving of my time to local communities in London. Giving up an hour of my time to share my experiences and skills, and investing in kids who haven't been as lucky as me, is a simple act which can be so powerful. I am so grateful for this African experience. I don't know what comes next in my life journey. Time will tell. However, I do know that what I have seen will stay with me forever. A piece of my heart is here forever. And I do know that the idea of returning to banking, after everything I have been through, is gone. My life has moved forward and it's hard to go back. The security of the corporate job is gone and I'm firmly out of my comfort zone now. Luckily, this is where the magic happens, right?