My epiphany happened in Guatemala. I was looking to do some volunteer work and considered taking a job planting trees. But then I thought if I was serious about this I could go to London, get an IT contract and pay them to get 200 people to plant trees.
I would really love to be able to go back to Sudan in a few years time with open source solutions that could really help make a difference.
When you work in IT in the developed world there is a baseline of infrastructure that is given. What we think of as simple things like a reliable power supply cannot be taken for granted.
In the IT world they talk about having domain knowledge of the sector you are selling into, like banking. For me it was all about getting domain knowledge.