My name is Cath, I'm 77 and I live in Leeds. I’ve got two children and three grandchildren, and one of the things that interests me about later life is the possibility of doing new things.

When I was 63, I went to work in Ethiopia with a forum of organisations that were tackling HIV and AIDS to prevent transmission and also to mitigate the impact. I'd worked in Africa when I was young and I'd always wanted to go back, but having children - not really a practical possibility. When my children were adults, I thought this is a chance for me to try again and do something that had always been in my heart.

I had made a quick visit to West Africa, where I'd worked before, when I was 61, because I wanted to see whether or not I could still hack it. I was aware that being in Africa in your 20s is one thing, going in your 60s may be rather different. But I was really happy with the time that I had back in Ghana and also in Liberia, and I knew that I would be alright wherever I was really. And I also thought you can bear anything for a year, even if it's uncomfortable!

So I went and it was demanding - tested me in all sorts of ways. But it was a really, really good experience and I learned so much. And it reminded me of how much I learnt when I worked in Ghana in the 1960s, when I was a development worker for young Christian students. Ghana had such an impact on me. The people I worked with, the students I worked with, just opened my eyes to new ways of seeing things and to new values - the value of hospitality, no matter how little people had they shared it with you. Just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people and this very open kind of culture.

So I learned to value new experiences and new things, and that has followed me - or I have followed that - through my life really. Nearly all the jobs I've had have been about developing new projects with local communities. One of the first that I did when I was back in the United Kingdom was setting up this Pimlico Neighbourhood Aid Centre.

It was an idea that developed from lots of local people saying what they thought needed doing in the local area. So it wasn't one person’s idea, it was a kind of communal idea that got developed. And we got a short-term shop, a shop that was going to be demolished, and we turned it into this shopfront, we furnished it with stuff that people were throwing out.

We got some money from somewhere to employ two part-time workers, both local women, and we got started. And it was amazing because people came in with all sorts of ideas about what they wanted to do. So we had a second-hand furniture store, we had advice about welfare benefits and all the other kinds of things, legal advice - we got local solicitors to come in and do stuff.

We used to get into trouble because clearly we were quite challenging, shall we say, of the way the world was organised. One of the things that happened was that we were required by the Council to sign an undertaking - I think it was to move out when required to. But John, who was a Scotsman in his late 70s, said “I will sign this undertaking, because if they are going to come after anybody, better that they come after me because I'm single, I don't have any assets to lose, and this will save the rest of you from being under any kind of threat.”

So this really made me think about the freedom that we can have in later life, to do things and perhaps to take risks that we can't take when we've got children and partners and so on. So there were a lot of old people involved there who really opened my eyes to some of the possibilities for later life.