I was lucky to be invited by Engineers without Borders (EWB) to the 2018 Humanitarian Engineering conference the week before my departure to Vanuatu to join the Department of Water Resources (DoWR) in Luganville. This was especially good timing, given that the Director of the DoWR, Erickson Sammy, was a keynote speaker on the day. There was also a large focus on projects in Vanuatu, which gave me an exciting taste of what lay ahead of me.