To most outsiders the affluent Cayman Islands are a haven for tourists on the one hand and foreign money on the other. The residents enjoy one of the highest standards of living anywhere in the world.
Despite the relative prosperity and idyllic surroundings there’s no shortage of work for Dympna Carten who island hops between the main island Grand Cayman and the two small sister islands, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman.
Dympna, from County Londonderry, has been working as a community psychiatric nurse in the Cayman Islands for the past ten years. She says: ”I think I have probably one of the greatest jobs in the world because I get to meet a wealth of different people…from patients to their relatives to their next door neighbours…to other professionals…from anybody and everybody. And they are people with wonderful stories…no two days are ever the same, but aside from that I’m doing it in a beautiful setting.”
The three part series began with a profile of Stephen Donaghy. Stephen stands out a mile on the streets of Manzini, Swaziland. Little wonder for the tall, white, red haired Irishman towers above most of his African colleagues and sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb.
Stephen had been in Manzini for five months when BBC Northern Ireland first filmed him. He's given up a comfortable life and job as a management consultant based in Portstewart to do something completely different with his life for the next two years.
He says: “At the age of 40, 41 I was starting to go is this what my life has come to? There’s got to be more to life than this. I was having a very good, comfortable life at home, I was playing golf, I was running my own business, I’d a set of good friends. It’s a middle class nice life, but it wasn’t very satisfying in the end.”
Stephen’s new job couldn’t be further removed from his former life. He’s now working for a civil rights organisation in Swaziland – the smallest country in Africa and the continent’s last absolute monarchy.
Swaziland is scourged by aids and poverty but its rich polygamous king is reluctant to embrace democracy. Press freedom and normal political opposition are quashed and the concept of civil rights is a foreign one.
Stephen’s boss Musa Llope who runs Swaziland’s Civil Rights Coalition is all too aware of the personal risks there are for his new recruit.
“There are huge risks, remember we are living in a dictatorship. Stephen lives on a temporal permit, it can be withdrawn at any time if the powers that be become threatened about his presence so he’s got to work in the background.”
The second programme in the series featured Joe Campbell from Holywood in County Down. s he headed towards 60 Joe and his wife Janet could have opted for a quiet retirement but eschewed the pipe and slippers for a four year stint in the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal.
Joe worked for the Mediation Network in Belfast for many years - quiet work taking place in the background of parade and peace line disputes. Now he’s using his peace-building skills in post civil war Nepal to good effect.
He says: “Whenever you meet politicians or just politically aware citizens in Nepal they’re often trying to get you to give an opinion that you are on one side or the other and I just remember the old maxim from home whatever you say, say nothing and that kind of guides me. There is one thing we can give the people from home though and that is a bit of hope.”
The country only emerged in 2006 into an uneasy peace after ten years of bitter conflict by Maoist guerillas fighting to topple the country’s Hindu king. Joe’s work for the humanitarian United Mission to Nepal takes him into difficult terrain around Nepal as he tried to sow the seeds for reconciliation drawing always on the experience of home.
BBC Northern Ireland filmed as street protests thwarted Joe’s itinerary in a sectarian hotspot on the Indian border where Muslim Hindu tensions run high.
Keeping healthy and safe are the biggest challenges for Joe and Janet in a country where travel is precarious and third world conditions make for a difficult domestic life. But despite the hardship of life in a third world country Joe is hopeful that he can make a difference:
He says: “I think at the end of our four years, if we have helped the situation, even moved forward an inch or two or even to stop going back it will have been time well spent.”
Producer of the first two programmes Marie Irvine says: "It's a gutsy thing they're doing. I don't know whether many of us would have the courage to make such a radical change to our lives and leave the comfort of home to travel to a third world country to try and make a difference to other people's lives.
"We all know of people who've left Northern Ireland to work or volunteer abroad and perhaps we admire them but don't give it much thought beyond that."
Distant Horizons Wednesdays on BBC One NI at 10.40pm