Alumni Spotlight: Keith Ledbury

I chose this programme because a teacher who worked for me when I was a Primary School Headteacher got involved with the charity and he recommended it to me as something I might like to get involved in when I retired. It suited me because I was keen to use my experience in education to support a charity in a third-world country.

The Tea Leaf Trust has a designated Volunteer Co-ordinator who works with any volunteer who expresses an interest in helping with the charity. This included a couple of initial telephone conversations and then lots of further advice once both parties agreed it was a suitable placement. I felt very well-supported in terms of my preparation for the experience.

I think the main piece of advice I would give is to expect the unexpected!

In the same way that it is very difficult to explain to someone what a huge impact having a child will have on your life, it is hard to explain just how life-transforming supporting a charity in a third-world country can be. It is certainly not something to enter into lightly, but, if you go into it very well-prepared, it could be one of the most amazing experiences you will ever have in your life.

There was no average day/week for me in the work I did with Tea Leaf Vision, as it was so varied across the 3 months I spent working for them.

I had two 'home-bases' in Nuwara Eliya and Maskeliya, where I was attached to the Tea Leaf Vision Schools there, but I also spent some time travelling around Sri Lanka, visiting Sri Lanka Unites Regional Youth Reconciliation Centres, as Tea Leaf Vision provided many of the teachers working in those centres. The fact that it was so varied made it all the more enjoyable for me, but it also meant that I had to be extremely flexible, as I was never quite sure exactly what I would be doing from one day to the next.

I didn't find that particularly challenging, as being a Headteacher in a Primary School was also never the same from one day to the next, so, hopefully, I entered into the experience as a very adaptable, flexible person. Had I not been like this, I think I might have found it quite daunting at times.

I think my biggest fear was that I would not be as much use to the Tea Leaf Trust as I hoped I would be. As a Primary School practitioner all my working life, I knew I would be working with 18-24-year-old students learning English, so I was apprehensive about how my skill-set would adapt to the situation out there. However, my reservations were very quickly dispelled as I found out that my skills were very generic and ideally suited to the tasks I was given once I was out there.

My other big concern was how I would adapt to living in an extremely different culture, but I was delighted to find out how much I not only got used to living in a very different culture but actually embraced it and began to learn a great deal from it too. Alternative cultures are not better or worse and should not be treated as such; they are just very different and there is so much that we can learn from and benefit from in a new culture. I loved that aspect of being in Sri Lanka and I felt it had a huge impact on me, to the extent that I think I came back a different person.

I think prospective travelers want to know a variety of things, depending on their previous experience of working abroad in a very different culture. For someone like me, who had never lived or worked abroad in a third-world country, I had very little idea of what to expect, so the thing that made the biggest difference to me was to make sure that I was as well-prepared beforehand as I could be. Taking on board the advice of the charity you are supporting is crucial, as is speaking to as many people as you can who have actually spent time in the country you are going to.

I think, given my time again, I would have read up even more about Sri Lanka so that I was more aware of the political and social context of what I was entering into, as this would have helped me to understand the local people more quickly.