Getting urban youngsters out of their comfort zone and into nature is this man’s work
- The owner of A Team EdVentures in Hong Kong, Anthony Somerset helps accustom highly urbanised young people to the great outdoors
- Empathetic listening is an important element, he says
“This is harder than building robots,” says a lanky young man in a black T-shirt with a logo that identifies him as a member of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology robotics team.
The 18-year-old had spent the night camping out in Sai Wan in Hong Kong’s Sai Kung country park. Today he was exhausted after having carried a “casualty” – a dummy in a dry suit – through the pools and waterfalls of Sheung Luk Stream with a group of his classmates, part of an outdoor education and leadership training weekend organised by A Team EdVentures.
Camping, not carrying the dummy, was actually the hardest part of the whole ordeal for the robot-builder. “Mosquitoes got in,” he says, pointing at red marks on his leg. “It was very uncomfortable.”
Making highly urbanised, bright young people feel uncomfortable outdoors is what 58-year-old Anthony Somerset has done for the last three years, having taken over A Team EdVentures in 2015 after closing the door on a law career two years earlier.
His accent may be public school English, and he may speak Cantonese, but Somerset is a New Zealander who was raised in Kenya. “I speak Swahili, and yes, it was like that, servants and a big house,” he says. His father was an academic at Nairobi University, and now aged 87, is still teaching.
