Hi I’m Steve Jackson also known as ourman.

It’s hard to know how far back to go but I’ll try and relate it in such a way that it makes sense.

Until the age of 34, give or take a single sabbatical year, I pretty much kept my head down. I worked as a journalist, a PR manager, a marketing manager and later a freelance copywriter.

It was then I decided to do VSO. By pure luck I was posted to Vietnam, a country I had already fallen in love with on a trip some years earlier. I became Our Man in Hanoi and in the two and a half years I spent there that love only deepened as I worked for a wonderful NGO called KOTO.

After that I spent four months in beautiful Nicaragua - where I was Our Man in Granada. In its own way it was no less wonderful than Vietnam though it didn’t work out for me. No job and few mates sent me homeward back to Newcastle.

I spent a year working for Newcastle City Council as a public affairs officer before I couldn’t resist it any longer and once more signed up to VSO. My posting was sorted in double quick time. While I was at home wondering where I’d most like to be sent they contacted me to say: how about Bamenda, Cameroon?

I said that sounded just about perfect, and so here I am - fundraiser and communications co-ordinator for COPAAP.