Richard Worsley was born on October 11, 1972, in York, UK. He was the third of four children, educated at Bramcote School in Scarborough and then Uppingham School in Leicestershire.

At 19, he went to work as a volunteer for six months with the Karen people. He lived with them in their bamboo and teak houses. He then went on to Sandhurst, before joining his regiment, the Light Dragoons, based in Germany. He served in Bosnia in 1995.

Richard was killed in a car accident in Germany on November 25 1996, aged 24. Three months later, the Karen people dedicated a water system to him in a remote village. The village is called Huay Kong Po, and has a population of 200 people. It is situated 15 km from the Burma border in the Mae La Noi district.

Penelope, Richard's mother, visited the village in November 1999, and discovered the warmth and gratitude of the people for the involvement of young volunteers. There has been little, if any, sign of malaria since the water system has been installed.

The following words were written by Jim Soutar, the Director of the Ruamkanpattana Foundation in Thailand, as soon as he heard of Richard's death.

"If I could sum up Richard's year among the hilltribes of north west Thailand, I would have to be as totally frank as Richard himself always was. He came to us straight from his final year at public school. He was the archetypal upper-class English public schoolboy: brash, self-confident, experienced in the reality of human dynamics; self-assured, vulnerable, loving, caring, decent. He was ever most frighteningly and effervescently ebullient, to the extent that we, in the Foundation, were continually in a situation of wondering what he would do next. But he never did wrong. He had this innate 'correctness', this desire to help those less fortunate than himself, an ability to transpose his own family background and his school experience into a self-defined and selfcreated methodology, fine-tuned to assist the hilltribes of the mountain forests into which he had chosen to be transported. He was magnificently, and at times infuriatingly, irrepressible. He accepted any challenge, even to the point of bravado, but always with his own so definable panache.

What we in the Foundation particularly liked about our good friend Richard was his totally dedicated commitment to whatever he was doing at the time. If we were digging trenches through steep forest slopes to take water pipes to a remote and impoverished village, Richard was forever there at the front of the line of villagers, laughing, joking, drinking the local 'moonshine whisky' - in brief, being totally at one with the hilltribe villagers and their virtually primordial existence; and always, always showing, sometimes ostentatiously, but most often more discreetly, his own and already very much defined personal code of leadership. In administrative matters he could be absolutely frustrating. He would say to us, "Let's do it, and someone else can write about it afterwards!". But who had the unenviable task of writing it up afterwards? Richard himself. His reports were succinct, indeed terse, but they were always totally accurate.

The Karen had never met anyone like Richard Worsley; neither had we, in the more sophisticated environs of Bangkok. He was, above all, his own man. He loved life, and he transmitted his great love of life to all those with whom he interfaced. He was eccentric, sometimes infuriating, but he was loved more deeply by the Karen than many, many other foreigners that they had met and lived with. He had a way with people, a way which made them feel that he was a natural leader - if only he would accept the challenge and burden of leadership.

We loved Richard. At times, if he wanted to be, he could be maddeningly frustrating; but he was always of such a deeply sincere honesty and decency, coupled with his incredibly refreshing and constant sense of humour, that it was natural for all of us in the Foundation to just love him. And now Richard has gone before us, that will not change. His zest for life, his deep-felt humanitarianism, and his acute personal dynamism are here with us now, and will remain with us, as long as those of us who remember Richard Worsley are still alive under the panoply of the stars. The Karen hilltribes, in their cultural folk-lore, believe that true friends and true leaders, the two being so often synonymous to the Karen, will become stars in the heavens when they die. We, the staff of the Ruamkanpattana Foundation, will examine the stars in the coming winter sky. In the mountains of northern Thailand, the night sky is vast. We will find our friend Richard there, and we will be glad that our friend is there to guide us. The Karen believe that a good man does not die. His goodness remains with and in all of us, and he checks from the sky that we are following his example.

Richard Worsley gave us that example. We deeply mourn his passing from among us, but his example remains to guide us.

From the starry sky, Richard, may you achieve those goals of love and honour that your short life denied you to achieve on this sublunary abode".

Extract from a letter dated 27 November 1996