Alastair Henry

I emigrated to Canada from England when I was 19 to follow my girlfriend who had emigrated with her family four months earlier. We married, had three children, and got divorced 20 years later.

I became a successful yuppie and retired at 57 from the corporate world and bought an idyllic retirement retreat in the country – 50 acres, 5 ponds, 18 acres of hardwood bush, and a river ran through the property.

Two years later and disillusioned with the passivity of retirement, I relocated to Lutsel K’e, a small (300 Chipewyans) remote fly-in community on the east arm of Great Slave Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories in search of adventure and personal fulfillment. I went in as a seasoned businessman to manage their development corporations and came out two years later more of a social worker, intent on sharing my skills to help improve the lives of my fellow man. Cultural differences and a challenging environment ignited in me fresh perspectives, inspired a new way of being, fueled my soul searching, and changed the direction of my life going forward. I wrote about it in my autobiography: “Awakening in the Northwest Territories”

Six months later I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh on a two-year contract as an international development advisor to an NGO working with the abjectly poor