Trócaire rang me and asked If I could travel to Ethiopia to find out about all the good work they do and to find out where does the money in your Trócaire box go.
The charity raises around €8m through the ubiquitous cardboard money box, which is iconic and used to be on every kitchen table across the land. In recent years we have become a little tired of giving but last year when we put a few cents in the Trócaire box 3.4 million people genuinely benefited across the developing world.
Before travelling to Ethiopia, Trócaire sent me to the Tropical Medical Bureau to get vaccinated against cholera and rabies - diseases we don't have to worry about in the west. We flew to the capital Addis Abba which only took about seven hours but a different world. Very often in developed countries, we forget how lucky we are living in a world where there is enough food and money for everyone. Where there is no real poverty. We pay out €188 a week if you have no job and attempt to shelter everyone.
In Ethiopia the mayor might get €188 a month and the average wage is between €1 and €2 a day. If the crop fails, the father of the house gets fed first and the children last.
We took an internal flight to Mekelle in northern Ethiopia and then onto Sebeya to meet Mahlet, the girl on this year's Trócaire box. In the photo on the box she doesn't smile but when you meet her she gives off a massive grin. The 13-year-old is top of her class in school and wants to be a doctor but she's also malnourished and should be taller for her age.
Trócaire is helping Mahlet through school - at the moment she only goes for a half day and then helps her sister with her child or helps her father on the land with the cattle. The charity is also assisting the family by building an irrigation system making it easier to farm with less and less rain.
During filming and recording with our digital producer Luke Benson, we travelled across this vast land meeting organisations working directly with Trocaire. What I took from the trip was the kindness of people, the friendliness and the warmth from locals.
Even though people had very little, just the clothes on their backs and their simple farming tools, they would give you everything they had. A female farmer was so grateful that Irish people had helped her farm with a fresh water irrigation system for her land. She insisted we took her best carrots which she picked out of the ground for us to try, they were so fresh with a lovely carrot sweet flavour - simply incredible.
Over in another field after being shown a coffee tree I met a 105-year-old man who has seen famine and suffering and not just in 1984/5 that led to Bob Geldof's Band Aid and Live Aid. The farmer's delighted his grandchildren now have a future because of the irrigation system and peace. Many families perished in the area looking for food and dying on the way. Up to a million starved to death because food supply routes were cut off by the then government - making it impossible to get food - a man-made famine.
On one of our trips, we met a farmer ploughing his field with two bulls and an old plough but the bulls got spooked by my red Newstalk microphone and ran into a ditch upside down. Luckily both bulls were fine but the plough broke. It turned out it was a special hand-crafted piece of wood taking the farmer over a day to fix. I did feel incredibly guilty because it was my fault. I said sorry to the farmer who was compensated for his troubles.
In another incident I got scared of killer bees because I wasn't wearing proper protective gear. Trócaire is now working with landless farmers. By working with bees they need very little land and can operate on hillsides which are not very fertile. If you're stung more than 10 times you could die...
My trip would not have been possible if it wasn't for the help of Martina O'Donoghue and Maebh Smith from Trócaire who organised all the logistics and travelled with me all the way.
