In September 1983 I started as a first-year biology student at the internationally renowned Wageningen University, and a new world opened up to me. Immediately, the international character of the University appealed to me, and it became obvious that I wanted to do something with biology in developing countries. Then the day came when I attended a lecture on the terrible side effects of aerial spraying with insecticides against tsetse flies in Africa - and was hooked immediately. Insects and the diseases they transmit to humans and animals, as well as searching green alternatives for their control, grasped my interest. Soon afterwards, before reaching the age of twenty, I got a life-changing opportunity presented to me. I was offered a chance to work in a Maasai community on the Kenya-Tanzania border for a year. To develop low-cost odour-baited traps for the control of tsetse flies. To be in Kenya's Rift Valley weeks after I saw the blockbuster 'Out of Africa' was sheer magic. That year, in a lone field station, with a Landrover surrounded by ten thousand square kilometres without another car did it for me. I fell passionately in love with Africa, its people, and its nature. Looking back now, with eleven years of working and living in East and southern Africa, the dream came true.

After returning from Kenya in the summer of 1987, I focused the remainder of my studies on all that was needed to prepare myself for a new adventure in Africa. In 1989 I worked for the first time with malaria mosquitoes and studied their flight behaviour in a plume of human odour inside a small windtunnel. Working in the dark in the basement of the department, with insects that feed on your blood, and are responsible for more than a million deaths per year, had something special to it. I worked day and night on my MSc thesis, hooked again to this fascinating study, and was thrilled to graduate cum laude in September 1989. Weeks afterwards (to avoid the draw by the army) I was on the plane to Zambia, where in its western province I again started to work on the control of tsetse flies. This time in an operational setting, where I took my first lessons in rolling out elimination campaigns that later proved so valuable when setting up Soper Strategies.

In Zambia, I lived in a small village (Kaanja) on the banks on the Zambezi river. Undoubtedly some of the best years of my life. After my experience in Kenya with the Maasai, this time I was amidst the Silozi tribe; fascinating and lovely people. But times were also tough. During the first Iraq war, we were without diesel that seriously interrupted our operations. We smuggled luxury food items (that included peanut butter in that setting) across the border from Namibia. Even toilet paper was hard to get by.

After three years, in 1992, I returned to Holland, after I was offered a PhD position to work once more on African malaria mosquitoes. I teamed up with a fantastic man, Ruurd de Jong, and together we set out to discover the smells that attract these mosquitoes to humans at night. A year of my studies was undertaken at the National Institute for Medical Research and the Ifakara centre in Tanzania. Marvellous times, together with my old friend Leonard Mboera. Inga (then my girlfriend, now my wife) worked for UNESCO in Costa Rica at that time, and when she visited me in Tanzania in 1995 contracted very serious malaria – in fact, she almost died in Zanzibar. Malaria – killer disease. It floored me nine times in the eleven years we would live in Africa.

I graduated on 23 February 1996 (it was the 100th PhD of Entomology in Wageningen) and we got married later that day. Weeks later we were on the plane to Tanzania, after receiving a grant to work on malaria mosquitoes in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and South Africa for a year. In an old Landrover Inga and myself undertook the long safari from Tanzania to South Africa. There we worked for three months on mosquitoes in the Kruger National Park. An experience of a lifetime. It is quite something to empty a mosquito trap with roaring lions thirty yards away…