A brief history.......of me!

When I first moved to Poland in 2012, I was prepared for my teaching career, but my employment before that had been varied. So I thought I'd tell you briefly about two other occupations I had before coming to Poland.

Travel

I worked in the travel business, on and off, for over 10 years. The company I worked for was a 'fully-escorted tour operator'. This basically means that they offered holidays all around the world, with a guide and everything was planned for your convenience. This type of holiday particularly suits older travellers and people who don't want to worry about the language barrier and having to organise accommodation and 'excursions' themselves.

I worked in the marketing department and was responsible for a team who helped produce the holiday brochures, which were mailed to potential customers.

One big perk of working for a holiday company is that you can travel very cheaply. So I was able to visit many European countries, such as France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Croatia plus Thailand and Canada.

It was a great job, which improved my geography skills and allowed me to visit many places.

Animals

My other career was a little more unusual. I worked for 5 years for a charity called the RSPCA, (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).

It operates in England and Wales (plus in other countries around the world) and its aim is to promote animal welfare. So its mission is to prevent animal cruelty and promote kindness to animals and to stop their suffering.

I worked as one of their inspectors. This involved investigating allegations of animal cruelty. Most of the time the owners of the animals weren't deliberately being cruel, but had just found themselves in a difficult situation or didn't have the correct knowledge to look after their animal properly. We would work with that person to get the animal the treatment it needed or to improve the living environment of that animal.

In extreme cases, we would prosecute animal owners who refused to follow our advice and help and as a result, the animal had suffered (physically or mentally) unnecessarily. The laws in England are quite strict regarding animals, so owners can be sent to prison, fined large amounts of money or be banned from keeping animals.

I generally dealt with domestic animals, such as dogs and cats, but sometimes farm animals and horses too.

The second part of the job was rescuing wild animals, such as foxes, badgers, deer and birds such as swans and birds of prey. Generally these animals had been injured by cars or had got themselves stuck and needed help to escape.

I have to say it was a very challenging job both physically and mentally. I was constantly surprised by people's actions, but in general, it was a very rewarding job.

Until next time......

#nativespeaker, #brzegdolyszkoły, #lekcjaangielskiego