What I'm looking for

A girl supported by Save the Children and the New Zealand
Government practices her English ABCs at a Reading Camp in Belu district, Indonesia

Five weeks away from New Zealand, and it feels like the world's changed so much in that time. Typhoon Haiyan hits the day I leave, tearing up even somewhere as adaptable as the Philippines. Mandela passes away, and as we're in Eastern Africa at the time, with colleagues who've met Mandela and received scholarships in his name, the news touches home. Many Kiwis pay tribute, but I wonder if we've missed the radical edge that energised Mandela's peace-building.

With the superb Save the Children project team in Belu district, Indonesia

The last weeks working in Laos, Indonesia and Kenya have been stimulating, exciting, and uplifting. I've seen good things in our projects, like staff who throw themselves into children's education, and the respect this work earns from the country governments. In Kenya especially, I've been so privileged to be part of one of Save the Children's truly international meetings, with 150 staff from over 65 countries, from North Korea to Norway. The way such a diverse bunch handled themselves spoke to me about the bigger picture driving what we do as international development workers. In many ways, the challenges we all face are really ordinary - funding, cohesion in diversity, shifting global geopolitics.. But the stories 

Discussing with our hugely-experienced office head
and school teacher in Belu, Indonesia

of individuals there - a CEO showing solidarity with children and his staff in Central African Republic, a global director really listening to his staff, and leaders of a movement meeting and strategising about tangible ways to improve the world for children. Once again, I'm so proud to do what I do.

At the moment I'm in Muscat, Oman, working remotely and catching up on

Getting to know some of the children in schools in Belu, Indonesia

En-route to Nairobi, Kenya

much-missed time with family. We're trekking, camping, sailing, swimming, shopping, clubbing, cooking, shopping and celebrating. Being together again is special, the first time after four years away. In our cousins, uncle and aunt, we've got something really special, that intangible connection that comes from shared blood, that sense of belonging and home. And that's what the I've found over the last five weeks - travelling to the other side of the globe, and across that distance, finding that these connections form a kind of DNA - home, where I belong.

Journey Home

It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune. 

The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end. 

My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said `Here art thou!' 

The question and the cry `Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance `I am!'

Rabindranath Tagore