I was born in 1984 in the Netherlands but at the tender age of 10 months I moved with my parents to Burkina Faso. I spent the next 17 years being what professionals like to call a ‘third culture kid,’ living in Nicaragua, Egypt, the Hague and Jerusalem with mom, dad and my younger brother Robert. All the while I attended international schools, where I played sports, was active in the Student Association for International Awareness and participated in Model United Nations conferences in Israel and China. Through this upbringing I was fortunate enough to see many different countries and cultures, instilling in me a great love for travel, different cultures and peoples. However, it also meant I was confronted with extreme poverty and conflict from a very young age on, something which cannot but leave a deep and lasting impact on you.

After finishing high school in Jerusalem I decided to return to the mother land to attend University College Utrecht. After recovering from a large Dutch culture shock and an even bigger hangover brought on by the Utrecht introweek, I settled in nicely to the beautiful campus and took to studying a combination of anthropology, sociology and political science. It was during my studies here that my interest in development, conflict, international relations and politics began to take a more concrete form. At UCU I also helped set up the two first editions of a new MUN conference: UNISUN.

After college I decided I needed a break from studying and ventured out into the real world…sort of. I did insofar as that I went to a far away country: Bolivia. I didn’t really though, because it also happened to be where my family was living at the time. I had an incredible year in La Paz. I volunteered for the NGO Save the Children, where I taught life skills and sexual and reproductive health to teenagers living in the city’s slums of El Alto. I also gained policy-related experience while doing an internship at the delegation of the European Commission. There I researched Bolivia’s constitutional reform process and its effect on conflict in the country and organized a Euro Week, informing the Bolivian public on the EU’s work. I also worked nights in a Dutch-Bolivian bar (yes, such a place exists) and took advantage of every spare moment to travel all around Bolivia and take a few short trips to Peru, Argentina and Chile.

After this year, I went back to the books and returned to Utrecht to study Conflict Studies and Human Rights. I did my thesis research in Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories, on the role that water plays in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role it could play as a peacebuilding tool. This MA has taken me quite a bit longer to complete than planned, owing to my involvement with SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) Leiden and my inability to say no when travel opportunities present themselves. SIFE is a student organization that I helped set up, which sets up projects that combine education and entrepreneurship to create a sustainable income for the project participants. In the three years since we started, we have grown from 8 to 23 students and set up seven projects in Bolivia and Madagascar. I have been active as secretary of the board, with the project management and as a presenter of our projects at the SIFE competitions. SIFE has even brought me back to Bolivia three times to visit our projects and to Singapore to present at the SIFE World Cup.

Given SIFE’s status as a non-profit organization that is sponsored by businesses, and its aim to combine entrepreneurship with development work, it is SIFE that initially sparked my interest in public-private partnerships. This combination is also a large aspect of what attracted me to the Global Experience Program: being able to work for a large NGO in a developing country as well as see how a large company puts corporate social responsibility into practice. I think GEP is going to be an amazing experience, both professionally and personally. I can’t wait to get started at WFP and see the organization’s inner workings. Besides that, I’m thrilled to be posted in the Gambia, and returning to Africa for the first time since I was 3!

Via this platform, I will be writing regular updates on my experiences and insights, so stay tuned! *fade out*