A New Life: A chartered accountant turns aid worker and carves out a new life for his family and the people they help. Alison Healy reports.
We all complain about the delays in our accident and emergency departments, but a 10-hour delay at St James's Hospital changed Rob Kevlihan's life.
Back then, he was preparing for a life as a chartered accountant. Today, the 32-year-old aid worker is preparing to go to live in Kazakhstan, after spending a few years in Angola working as a country director and in Sudan as financial controller and assistant country director.
It was more than 10 years ago when a footballing injury took Rob to St James's Hospital. The young commerce student began talking to a girl beside him who had just returned from Ethiopia after nursing with the aid agency GOAL. She said accountants were often in demand in these situations.
He forgot about the conversation and began forging a career with PriceWaterhouseCoopers after college.
Rob enjoyed working abroad for the company in London and Australia but he wasn't rejoicing at the thought of returning to the life of an office worker in Dublin.
As an auditor, he felt he was just picking over the entrails of other people's work. "I learned an awful lot from accountancy - skills that I think have been invaluable to me," he says.
"You go into a huge diverse range of companies and see how people do things. It's a fantastic learning experience. But the work itself was quite mundane. I didn't want to spend 30 or 40 years doing something that didn't satisfy me."
While in London, the conversation at the A&E department came back into his mind and he decided to contact GOAL.
If he was looking for a sign, he got it when he was put through to the personnel manager. It was Anne Cleary, the nurse he had spoken to years earlier.
An interview was set up and he received a job offer from GOAL on the same day as he was given a letter to renew his contract with PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
"PriceWaterhouseCoopers were very good," he says.
"They offered me a promotion and said to take a year out and and come back afterwards if I wanted to."
GOAL sent him to Khartoum in Sudan where he met his wife, aid worker Laurel Fain from San Francisco. The couple married in 2000 and now have a three-year-old daughter Hazel. She was born in California but the family returned to Angola six weeks later, where Rob was working as a field director.
"Angola worked very well because we had a fantastic childminder who carried Hazel around on her back, African style."
Because they had very short commuting time to work and few other distractions, he says the couple spent more time with their daughter than they would have had if they were in regular jobs in Dublin.
However, Angola was a challenging experience as the war had just ended. Basic provisions were not available and nappies cost $2 each.
"But it was still quite a rewarding time, living in a post-conflict period," he says.
As Laurel followed him to Angola, he left last Friday to follow her to Kazakhstan.
The couple were living in Washington, as she prepared for her posting and Rob used the time to do a PhD in international relations. He will continue his studies in Kazakhstan.
He believes that working with aid agencies has prompted the couple to think much harder about their life choices than other couples would.
"It involves many conscious choices. Who will take the prime job and who will look for work?
"If you have settled down at home, a lot of those decisions are already made for you and you drift along."
But will all the travelling get wearying when their daughter starts school and they get older?
"A part of me would enjoy coming back to Ireland someday but a lot depends on the opportunities," he says.
"Missing the family is the hardest aspect of what we do. Sudan and Angola were not places that encouraged people to visit but Kazakhstan is more accessible to Europe. But then for Laurel it's far away from California."
With so much travel, it must be difficult to know where home is.
"For the moment, home is where the dog is," he says, but admits that it would be nice to have a permanent base.
Hazel has dual nationality and at the ripe old age of three, she has already learned, and forgotten, Portuguese, from her time in Angola.
She now speaks English and Spanish and will begin learning Russian in January. Thanks to Rob's efforts, she can count to 10 in Irish as well.
He doesn't see his career path as radical. "The way I have gone is quite a reasonable path for others to follow if they have particular interests and value commitments and are prepared to take a bit of a chance," he says.
"I think the biggest unknown step was the first decision to volunteer with GOAL. After that, everything else followed.
"And it's been a very interesting life so far," he adds.