FOUR months after selling my soul as a shop assistant, waitress and harpist, I felt I had earned my right to put some distance between myself and the A-level years. Within a month of leaving school, all my friends who had lived within a five-mile radius of our local pub were dotted around the globe. I headed for Kenya, where I taught English, French, physical education and anything else the other teachers did not feel like doing.

Four of us lived in a tiny house near the school, which was just outside Kitale, western Kenya. We cooked our meals on a one-ring gas stove, marked homework by the light of a head torch and learnt how to make a daily can of water go a long way, usually by economising on cleanliness.

The teaching itself, although scary to begin with, was exhilarating — the children naughty but captivating. They found us equally entertaining, taking every opportunity to braid our hair and laugh at our attempts to speak Kiswahili. Physical education lessons were held on a field of crops inhabited by goats, on a 2:1 gradient.

On Sundays the boys would bring drums to the chapel service and beat sticks on the desks in time to the singing; very different from our half-hearted efforts in assembly.

Days were filled with planning and giving lessons, drinking hot, sweet chai in the staffroom (a glorified shed), marking work, running sports tournaments and after-school clubs, painting dormitories and playing with the children.

At lunchtimes they would teach us songs as we ate steaming ugali — maize meal mixed with water and served in a solid, quivering slab — with cabbage. On Shrove Tuesday we cooked pancakes for the girls as they danced to the strains of Madonna on our MP3 players.

After three months I had got to know a place and people in a way that most travellers never do. Being in a remote place does not necessarily mean that you will be abandoned and alone: the experience can be as sociable as you wish.

Africa Venture, with which I went to Kenya, ensures that the schools where gap-year students teach are fairly close together. We met for budget dinners every week and travelled together in the area at weekends.

I also travelled in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania with friends I made after I finished teaching. Watching hippos in Lake Baringo, Kenya, from a tiny boat at sunrise, drinking konyagi (a gin-like beverage) with the locals in Tanzania, swimming with dolphins off Zanzibar and whitewater rafting with a dislocated elbow in Jinja, Uganda, will stay with me forever.

People say that travelling is rewarding and teaching will be as much of a learning experience for you as for your pupils. They are, of course, right.

You will also recall with fondness the man who tried to charge you £50 for a pencil or the woman who stole your clothes so that she could charge you 20p for washing them. But above all, you come to realise that the saying is true: it is within yourself that the most air miles are covered.

JULIA SHIPWAY

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