SOME MORE BACKGROUND
My journey to being passionate about being Refreshed, Recharged, Reconnecting and being Re-envisioned
After finishing schooling in Dublin, Ireland I worked in the financial world of commercial liability insurance. There I cut my teeth with figures and spreadsheets as well as completing an equivalent of a BA in insurance-related law, economics and statistics.
However, 16 years in the insurance industry was enough and I jumped completely sideways into managing adventure activity programmes for an outdoor centre in the west of Ireland. I had recently completed a year-long training in various outdoor activity qualifications and this was all around the time of the "peace process" in Northern Ireland. One of the main focuses of the adventure programmes I managed, was to bring youth from all sides of the religious and political divide in Ireland together, using adventure sports such as climbing and canoeing as the medium to build communication and trust.
Working in the adventure activity sector provided a great jumping off platform to start my own business of providing guided trekking and mountaineering trips to places like Bolivia, Argentina, Iceland, the Pyrenees and the Alps before finally moving to Morocco where I concentrated on running winter mountaineering trips in the High Atlas mountains.
Fast forward to the so-called "Arab Spring" and I found myself tiring of guiding (in all, another stint of 16 years!) whilst at the same time impacted by seeing the images on TV, of the huge numbers of displaced people following the conflict in North Africa and the Middle East. Again, I jumped sideways, completed a MSc in post-conflict development and went to work for international NGOs in places like Darfur (Sudan), Iraq and Afghanistan.
I left that world on a full-time basis during the height of Covid in the autumn of 2020 in need, myself, of being refreshed and recharged. Never mind re-envisioned! Hence A Little Cabin in the Alps and my mountain photography to mention just two of my projects that are outlined on the main page.
If you managed to finish reading all of this, congratulations! There's a limit to how much people want to read, but given the variety in things I'm involved with, you could wonder with some justification why!. Hopefully you now see that all these areas spring directly from my different working experiences, passions and interests.
And if they can be of value to you, then it's a win-win!