My name’s Andy Kitching and I’m a programme manager at Lewisham Council. A programme manager is somebody that brings together everybody involved in big projects and lots of different projects that fit together, and those projects could be anything from building a new swimming pool or a school to putting a new IT system into a company, to anything really.

I was actually a linguist and I studied Spanish and Italian at university. I think I’d always, kind of imagined that I would go into a profession like translating or interpreting and sort of travel the world that way, you know. After university I went to South America, and I volunteered in Ecuador for three months. I taught English there and also worked on some social, some very small social regeneration projects, in the village that I lived in, it was diverting a road and building a playground, which gave me an initial taste for what I eventually went into.

Probably one of my heroes is the milkman that I lived with in Ecuador. He was the father of quite a large family, a family of three little kids, his wife and several hundred guinea pigs. He’d get up at two o’clock in the morning, having gone to bed a few hours before. He’d know everybody by name that he was taking the milk from and giving the milk to. You know I think despite living in very difficult conditions and in quite a poor place, even within Ecuador, he managed to enjoy his everyday life and I definitely took something from that.

I think there are a lot of jobs out there, where you can sit in an office and end up with a report on a shelf. So for me, being able to walk around and seeing a school that I helped to build or hopefully in the future a new town centre or an Olympic village or what ever it may be, I find very satisfying.