Twenty-five years ago, I embarked on an intense journey in Pakistan. I had just finished school in Britain, and decided to take a gap year before university, volunteering on an aid project. So I travelled to a remote corner of the Sindh desert, where I worked with a church-linked medical group, before spending time in the north-west of Pakistan, working with children.

It was – unsurprisingly – a transforming experience, which taught me much about the fragility and value of life. But when I look back now, one thing that strikes me is just how little training I had before my trip. To be sure, before arriving in the Sindh I was told about the local customs, and how to keep healthy in a hot climate. I also studied Urdu, which, as it happened, was surprisingly easy to do in England at the time, because the British government was introducing its teachers and police force to the language to cope with immigrants.

But back in 1985 student volunteers were expected simply to cope with whatever awaited them. That partly reflected a hardy, frugal, no-nonsense attitude in this particular charity; but it was taken for granted then that “charity” was essentially about rich westerners providing benefits to poor people. Thus, there was relatively little reflection about the power relations involved in the idea that a naive 18-year-old, such as myself, assumed she could help people in an alien land.