Trapped in a jeep surrounded by armed and angry Maoist revolutionaries in the wilderness of Nepal was not exactly what Laura Wilson had in mind when agreeing to work on the other side of the world with the United Nations Volunteering Service.

Fearing for her life, quick thinking by Laura, who now lives in Seamill, helped extract her and her four-man team from the volatile marketplace confrontation with the rebels.

She told Hunterston Rotary Club last week: "Our vehicle had heavily blacked out windows and the 200-plus flag-waving protestors were obviously interested in who was inside, so I just rolled down my rear window and grasped the hand of a rioter, telling him I was his friend.

"The man held a large spanner in his other hand. Other rioters were trying to rock the jeep off its wheels."

When the rioting mob realised she was a white woman and presented no threat, the situation changed and the UN team were eventually allowed to proceed onwards to a mountain village high in the Himalayas where they were to help local people, deprived of the basic essentials, to fight poverty, depravation and disease.

Later Laura found out that 12 people had died in the village square that day.

She had been on her way to a village in the remote high Himalaya to photograph and write about a children’s project supported by UNV, UNICEF, WHO and NCO.

She continued: “My experiences of volunteering with the UN, helping young people in South East Asia and then the Pacific led me to believe there is a hidden superpower, that volunteering can unleash.”

In a story that directly connected Seamill beach, the Hunterston Rotary Club and improving the lives of the children of the Himalayas, Laura told Rotarians how a new perspective on life emerged during her work on the international front line with the UN.

She said: “During that frightening experience in the jeep there wasn’t a ‘life flashing before me’ moment, instead I remembered my parents taking my hand as a child and wave skipping me along the beach at Seamill! I thought that wasn’t a bad memory to go out with.”

Prior to a career in academia in Scotland and the south coast of England, Laura had agreed to volunteer with the UN as a regional information officer and then a consultant with UN volunteers in the Pacific region.

Although born and largely brought up in Renfrewshire, Laura’s family has deep Ayrshire roots - she spent much of her childhood on a farm in Dunlop. Her grandfather had a haberdashery in Ayr and her great grandfather worked a third share of a tin mine in Patna.

She said: “As a very young child, my parents often drove down to Seamill for a family splash about.”

Having had another go recently with the Hydro Dippers, Laura thinks the sea has definitely got a lot colder.

Now a semi retired fiction writer, Laura moved to live permanently in Seamill in 2020.

Over the last 10 years the Rotary Club of Hunterston has raised more than £8,000 for Rotary’s ‘End Polio Now’ campaign.

Two of its club members, Tom Clark and David Ennis took part in an Immunisation Week in India in 2010.