Ittoop Johannes Kurian

Hi, I am ittoop. I am from Germany, and have mixed German and Indian heritage. I have lived most of my life almost equally split into numerous stints in each of these two countries. My wife is a school teacher, we I have an 18 year old daughter, who moved away from home to another country far away very recently to start college life. In work life, I am a senior executive with a global professional services company, we provide consulting services in digital, technology and operations. It is now 26 years since I joined them, after completing university in Germany and a 2 month backpack tour through India. The first 20 years I worked mostly in Germany, and in some further European countries and the USA. Now I have been on a foreign assignment in India with my family for the past 6 years. This ends early September and I am returning home to Germany. Over the last several years, I have been involved in numerous fundraising activities for social causes. The recent ones were a trek in the Himalayas for an orphanage in Delhi, and a trek in the Western Ghats in India for supporting underprivileged women in the state of Jharkhand. I have also done some long distance endurance trips in the past, like cycling 1500 km from the Black Forest in Germany to the French Mediterranean coast and back, cycling 1300 km from the Black Forest to the French Atlantic coast, cycling from Santander to Cap Finisterre, and a few dozen years back driving in a small car from Germany all the way to India with my parents and siblings. In recent years, being less fit and having a family, I had reduced the effort to backpacking trips, many of them in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and India. For many years now, my wife Heike, daughter Sangita and I have been supporting around 10 godchildren in India, Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines.