I remember spending hours in the library during my final year at Newtown School in Waterford, surrounded by piles of dog-eared notes, the Leaving Cert looming, thinking only of Africa.
I spent hours poring over the gap-year guidebooks until I discovered Village Education Project (Kilimanjaro), an organisation set up by a former tax lawyer in the City of London called Katy Allen, who first met the people of the Chagga tribe while climbing Kilimanjaro.
She gave up her life in the UK and set up educational facilities for children in the tribe, building schools and bringing in equipment and voluntary teachers (us). The idea of teaching in a rural village in the foothills of Kilimanjaro fitted perfectly with my 18-year-old notion of adventure.
After a series of interviews, eight of us were selected, including myself and Caragh Thompson, a classmate. With exams over, we set about waitressing and doing various odd jobs to raise the money we needed; then we took a course in teaching English as a foreign language, teaching skills and basic Swahili.
On January 1st we boarded a flight together, petrified yet bubbling over with excitement as we flew to the slopes of the white-tipped mountain of Kilimanjaro.
We lived in a house with a red tin roof draped with pink bougainvillea. We had a bucket and jug for a shower and a wooden shed with a hole in the floor as a lavatory.
Our skin colour, nationality and education set us immediately apart from the people we had come to live with.
We were the new English teachers, and children would run out from every bush as we passed, shouting "goodmorningteacherhowareyoufinethankyou" in one gasping, continuous breath. We were invited to village elders' homes and treated with incomparable hospitality.
We worked for eight months, teaching English, dancing, art and netball to children who adored us. We learned to respect a fascinating, completely foreign culture. We brought children to see the sea for the first time in their lives. We trekked up Kilimanjaro, the mountain they had grown up on, with 40 of our students, We worked hard at teaching, having been students ourselves for so long.
In the school holidays we hung out on the paradise beaches of the Spice Islands, scuba diving and drinking palm wine on white beaches. We travelled on trains and buses packed with chickens, goats and children, going to Malawi, Zambia, Kenya and Uganda, went bungee jumping off Victoria Falls and white-water rafting on the Nile.
I arrived back in Ireland - to a severe dose of culture shock - just in time for the excitement of freshers' week at Trinity College in Dublin. I hated every minute of it. Binge drinking, dodgy nightclubs, high heels and layers of make-up, inane conversations centred around debs dresses and maths papers.
It was at this point that the gap-year experience began to affect the choices I had made the previous year. Taking a year out didn't jeopardise my studies: it gave me space to decide what was important. For starters, I changed my course from French to geography.
At five years old we walk into our first classroom, tiny and terrified, and for 14 long years teachers tell us what to learn, what to think, what is right and what is wrong. If you have no experience of anything you have chosen for yourself, outside the system, it makes it difficult to be able to answer the old chestnut: "What are you going to be when you grow up?"
You can find out more about Village Education Project (Kilimanjaro) by visiting www.kiliproject.org.
