Adrien in Bhutan

Adrien is now an EHLsmile board member, but he started his volunteering mission in Bhutan, followed by Thailand, India and Nepal.

Originally from Switzerland, I graduated from EHL in 2011 before working in hotel development and sustainable tourism. A major challenge was always how to find local qualified staff and I started focusing in human resources development.

I started working in hospitality consulting right after EHL. But after three years working in Switzerland, I wanted to leave desk work and go abroad. Clara Blanc proposed me to open a hotel-school in Bhutan.

I went to Bhutan to open the third hospitality training institute between 2014-2016. After that, I supported the opening of the EHLsmile schools in Thailand (2016), in India (2017) and in Nepal (2018).

I worked on few mandates in Laos and Vietnam with Clara Blanc, the founder of EHLsmile. She was very inspiring and transmitted her passion for hospitality training, highlighting that it was a very efficient way to empower vulnerable youth and offer them accessible work opportunities.

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It is hard to describe a day volunteering, because there was no typical day. But I would say that I started having breakfast in the training restaurant supervising the students, then checked the daily program of the classes with the instructors before traveling to the capital city Thimphu to meet tour operators or different partners (Ministry of Labour, Ministry of Tourism, NGOs…). After lunch I was visiting students on internship and then returning to the hotel in the evening to have dinner with guests and supervise the restaurant operations.

The opening day of the school and the first week when we welcomed guests was the most memorable moment. After a lot of efforts to renovate the hotel, buy the equipment, recruit instructors and students, it was becoming a reality. Also, the graduation of the first batch.

One particular story I remember is that we had nice dormitories for about 30 students. One day a girl got sick and she made bad dreams. The next day some students started saying the place was haunted. We laughed and did not pay attention. But the week after students started leaving the dormitories and the school to go back home. Half of them left and we had not enough trainees to run the operations. So, we understood it was quite serious for them and we took it seriously. We asked monks to come and perform rituals (picture below) to purify the school. After one week all students came back.

Another one is that we had a checklist of things to do to register the school and start. The Ministry of Labour was about to visit for the audit but we missed one point: a sign board to show where the school is. So we worked on this the whole night with a carpenter to be ready the next day. We were about to plant it but the owner told us: “I consulted the auricle and it is not a good day to plant it. People coming for the audit will understand.” I was depressed and thought that we would never get the registration but our auditors said: “Of course, if it is not a good day, you should not do it. This is fine.”

What I learned from volunteering is to adapt to the context and the situation. This was useful for the rest of my personal and professional life. My favorite moments were definitely spending time training the students in the different departments.

It is a real life experience. I don’t think I could have experienced the same in any other job in Switzerland. Many people want to do volunteering or community service, but they don’t necessarily have the right skills or do not find the right project to support. But in the case of EHLsmile, any EHL graduate has competencies that are really needed at the other side of the world. When I meet students of schools we opened few years ago, many have a family, children and a job that allows them to support their family. So, the time spent in these outreach is definitely not wasted.