History of How I Became Involved

On May 8, 2001 I was laid off from my high-tech job I was presently working at. After being laid off I decided to spend the summer with relatives who were visiting from Germany rather than start searching for a job. This turned out to be a bad choice because the current economy was starting to go bad. Then September 11 hit and the job market became worse and worse. Getting by on EI and small contracts time slowly but surely rolled by and it was already the new year. In the new year I went to dinner with a few of my friends who I used to work with. The day after dinner I received an e-mail from one of the people who I went to dinner with the night before, it read:

An opportunity that I would consider were I a young buck
with an attitude, no wife, no kids, and no job...

Underneath of this small comment was a link to a job-site that had a posting for overseas volunteer IT work. I quickly read up on the organization and found that VSO Canada was a very respected NGO that had been sending volunteers for over 10 years. I thought to myself this would be a perfect opportunity for me to get to travel (something I very much wanted to do) and still retain my IT skills and at the same time being able to help out in a third world country. I quickly applied for a position and within 4 days I was asked to come to an assessment day.

At the assessment day there were only 2 other possible volunteers (the other 3 didn't show up). We spent the day doing activities where they assessors could judge how well we worked in teams, who were leaders and who were listeners, etc. Finally we got to the part of the day where we all go off and have a personal interview. My interviewer comes up to me with a smile and asks, "You're from Nakusp right?". I replied with a "yes", and then she states, "Well, I have very close relatives who live in Nakusp, I can't wait to talk with you.". Well the interview went great as well as the rest of the day. I left in the rain feeling quite happy about the day.

A week later I received a phone call from VSO telling me that I had been accepted to be a VSO/Netcorps intern. I was thrilled and quickly accepted the new challenge. After that the process of me becoming a VSO Intern took flight and now here I am going to Uganda (maybe when you read this I will already be there).