Question: You appear to have spent so much of you time and effort working on you studies. During this time, could you always see yourself working in places like Kenya? Studying in modern universities and working with underprivileged in Africa seem like such different lives. How do you see your future?

Nicola Greene answered on 8 Nov 2015:

Nice question.

People assume that you don’t need good skills to work ‘in africa’ but actually my name work and the aid industry is highly professional and competitive. ‘Charity projects’ are something very different and actually some times when a bunch of unskilled people come from somewhere like Ireland to ‘help people’ they can really interfere with our work and peoples lives as they have the complete wrong assumptions about poverty and how to fix it.

Personally I have studied a lot as I just really like learning and think it’s a gift to have the opportunity…. But don’t mistake my job for an easy one that anyone can do. It sounds basic….but its he most challenging job I’ve done. Working as a civil engineer in Ireland was much easier than this. Let me know if you want to know more on this.