Question: what inspired you to first start your work?

Ken Gibbs answered on 10 Mar 2012:

Becky, it seems the server may have eaten my first answer to this very thought provoking question and, honestly, I am glad because this time, I have been able to think about it before answering.

I have always enjoyed water – playing in it, swimming in it, sailing on it and even drinking it so it was inevitable that I was going to do something with water. My mother thought so too, as she maintained I always walked through puddles rather than around them. I started by teaching maths for a couple of years but found it was too “dry”. I then helped to build a huge dam in South Africa, but while it was exciting, it didn’t provide contact with people – and concrete can be dull, so no inspiration there. We moved to the UK and after a short while were sent to Iran where I learned to speak and read some Pharsi which gave contact with people and sparked some interest. On my way home from Tehran, I dropped in to Geneva to see what the World Health Organisation (WHO) was doing in water supplies and found a group of people who were passionate about what they were doing, and was invited to join them based on the work I had done in Iran, so I thought, “Why not ?”

In WHO, my supervisor was an Indian with a totally unpronouncable name but whose understanding of people was profound – and he was a water engineer with a mission to bring safe water to as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, and he fired us up big time. I imagine if he’d been born a bit earlier he’d have been another Mahatma Ghandi. His enthusiasm was contagious and I got the disease too so, in answer to your question, it was not “what” inspired me, but “who”.