After having spent 12 years of working in the same company and describing the last 4 years as „exhausting“ being the understatement of the year, in 2015 basically everything job-related changed. “Thank God!” I toast my first coffee to that in the morning silent kitchen of my shared apartment. That is, by the way, another thing that has changed. I moved from my little own flat into a pretty big shared apartment. But anyway, back to the topic.

Never has a job-related Good Bye been so easy and suddenly I have so much time for myself like never before. So the main question basically is: “What do I do now?”. Indeed a pretty general and big question, but at least, since the middle of last year, I knew that I had to use this chance and go abroad and, which was even more important: “No more content lacking, superficial Corporate Identity!” – the more social the work the better. Another coffee toast to that.

If you combine these to aspects into a Google search, it takes you 0.34 seconds to get approximately 163,000 results. Helplessly I stare at Google and Google stares back – in a somewhat provocative way I feel. But as you have to start somewhere I refill my coffee and – nothing ventured, nothing gained – click myself through the world of volunteering abroad. 3 coffees and half a day later I have come to the conclusion that volunteering can be as profitable as my last marketing job for the provider and definitely dangerous for the volunteer.http://www.sueddeutsche.de/reise/freiwilligenarbeit-in-costa-rica-horrortrip-ins-paradies-1.1730132. (german article, sorry) I decide that I neither wish to cope with Costa Rican drug lords nor pay a little fortune to coddle up some little monkeys. So I brew my 6^th coffee and continue my quest. And then, with a little help of my shared apartment friend, I find this: www.fairmail.info

A little dutch company in the middle of Peru. The concept is rather simple. Fairmail is a social enterprise that produces greeting cards fair trade. The pictures for the cards are taken by a group of teenagers, that are guided and supported by volunteering photographers. This project could not be more perfect. Thus I started taking some specific photography clases and most of all started to learn Spanish over the last couple of months. A definitely exhausting but also great time. With all the effort I put in, luckily everything went well and I will go to Peru on the 24^th February for approximately 2 months to participate in this wonderful little project. And if everything else turns out as well as I am hoping, I will be studying photography at the end of August this year.

Now standing at the window with my finally empty coffee mug, looking outside and back over the last years, I think that many things had to happen exactly the way they did, so that I can be at this very point right now. Because change is the only constant.