I began to get to know Daniel best during his preparation for life after RCNUWC.

With his close friends Nareg and Airiin, he had come up with the idea of AIME, a project to raise awareness about HIV / AIDS which would have involved them travelling by road across a number of countries in the near and Middle East and on into Asia. It was an ambitious plan, and one that did not reach full fruition.

It was during the planning stages that Daniel approached me for advice. His ideas were entirely altruistic, compassionate, selfless. This, of course, made them all the more challenging to bring to completion in this reward-driven world we live in.

When it became more evident that AIME was going to struggle to get off the ground, and when Airiin had accepted a post as a volunteer in India, Daniel and Nareg spoke to me about doing something to help Gutteye School (since renamed Raselas Diversity School) in Addis Ababa, a school with whom RCNUWC has forged a developing partnership.

Thus it was that the two of them left for Addis Ababa, where they witnessed the callous destruction of Gutteye School by private enterprise aided almost certainly by bureacratic corruption.

Undaunted, they put together a film about Gutteye and its plight, its transfer and rebirth as Raselas in temporary former office accommodation. Daniel worked hard to construct a website for the school, which you can view by following the link to the right. He had to battle against unstable connections, had to find an organistaion willing to donate space on its server to host the site, find ways to make the site more reliable and fully functional. All this against the background of the devastation to the original school that had so recently occured. But he did it.

To me, Daniel exemplified so many of the good aspects of today's committed young people: passionate, inquisitive, determined, intelligent, thoughtful, selfless.

His early death is a tragic loss both to his family and his friends and to the unfulfilled possibilities his life contained.

"Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world." - Pascal, Pensees (1670)