One of the things I enjoyed most about our recent volunteer building project in the Eastern Cape was the opportunities for me to learn more about myself, to learn more about collaboration and co-creation, and to push my mental, emotional and physical agility a little further. Africa is a strange and complex and beautiful place and life in Africa is certainly very, very different to the average lifestyle in the Western developed world. And while I can’t say that we had a truly authentic African experience (ours was much, much more comfortable!), as we moved closer to experiencing the African lifestyle, and further from our own comfort zones and what’s familiar to us, each of us in the team had the opportunity to discover how we deal with difference, physical discomfort, inconvenience and situations where life isn’t going as we think it should and people aren’t behaving as we think they should.