Between Here and Benin

I was standing in the middle of a concrete bunker in Southern Oregon when I first heard it.

For those of you who are unaware, I headed to Oregon State University in the fall of 1999 as a pre-vet major. I was going to be a veterinarian. However, during the summer between my junior and senior year, that all changed.

I was interning at Wildlife Safari, a drive-through zoo similar to the San Diego Zoo, set up in the rolling hills of southern Oregon, where the animals have space to roam and the fences are hard to see. There were about eight of us interns, and we rotated taking care of the different animals. One of my favorite parts of the job was bringing the animals in at night, maybe because that is when I had the opportunity to see them up close. The small pride of lions was one of my favorites to bring in at night (but feeding the black bears was a close second!).

We brought the animals into smaller enclosures at night, and the lions’ area was basically a concrete bunker with chain-link gates and fences that blended into the scenery. To get them inside (because calling here kitty, kitty, kitty just didn’t work!) we would put the lions’ dinner (fresh meat!) in their indoor enclosure, open a guillotine gate, and they would come in, most of the time pretty easily. Each lion had their own separate space, and sometimes getting them in one by one was a bit tricky, but very much like a game. They went for their food immediately, no hesitation, no ceremony. Sometimes pretty vocal. Just lions being lions. We would stay in the bunker and make sure that they all ate.

One night, after the food was wiped clean, I was standing in the hallway of the bunker when the large male started to roar.

I don’t remember his name, but I remember exactly what it felt like. The females joined in. The other male joined in. And there I was, standing in the middle of that cement bunker, completely surrounded by lions and by their sound, and I could feel the vibrations all the way in my soul. I closed my eyes, and I could almost see myself on the plains of Africa.

It was one of the most incredible things I have ever felt in my entire life.

I watched the movie We Bought a Zoo this past week (Matt Damon, if you are curious), and it took me right back to that moment. And then, because my mind works the way it does, it took me to Benin.

Are you surprised?

The Drums

There is a sound in Benin that does the same thing to me.

I can’t remember the first drum circle that I went to. I certainly remember the one where I realized that my husband could dance! My parents were visiting Benin for the first time in June of 2007. As a gift to the village soccer team, my parents, along with donations from their friends in Fairbanks, brought new cleats and soccer balls for all the players. It was an incredible gift to the community. As a thank you, the team hosted a drum circle in honor of my parents. The bottle of sodabi (the local liquor made from distilling palm wine, think moonshine) was passed around, and I was more than surprised when my parents each partook in a glass! They told me that their room wasn’t far away, so why not? When in a small village in Benin! The drums started, and people started dancing, and then, to my surprise, my husband-to-be stood up and started dancing. I was shocked. He was so good! Although I really shouldn’t have been…it was what he grew up doing.

There is something about the drumming, singing, and dancing combined during a drum circle that takes me back to that same moment I had when the lions were roaring. You can feel the rhythms and the beats rumble in your soul. It takes you back to something early and essential, to the core of who we are as human beings.

I certainly don’t have the right words to do this experience justice. It’s just one of those things you have to feel all on your own.

And you will be able to.

The last night of every Hello West Africa flagship tour, we will take guests to a drum circle. I can’t wait to see people’s reactions. To hear what they reflect on afterward. I am so curious about what that moment will open up in people who have never experienced anything like it.

A Week of Incredible Conversations

If you missed last week’s newsletter, don’t worry, you didn’t miss one! I took a break. It was an emotionally difficult week for me (don’t worry, my family and everyone are just fine). I realized I needed to give my mind and body a break from the day-to-day hustle. And coming back this week, I feel 100% better. It is okay to slow down, and I’m so glad that I did.

Here is what I learned…things for Hello West Africa didn’t stop. Because of the relationships I have been building, things kept moving forward even when I wasn’t actively pushing. That was an incredible lesson, especially so early in this game of creating and operating a small business.

Although I didn’t write a newsletter or post much on social media, I did show up for the calls I'd previously scheduled. And those calls were extraordinary.

Dr. Suzy Ross

Dr. Suzy Ross is among the first to study transformative learning and travel. I heard of her work while finishing up my dissertation, but for some reason, I didn’t come across her research when I was working on my own literature review (my keywords didn’t match any of hers, I guess). If you’ve written a literature review, there is a point at which you have to stop looking. Trust me, rabbit trails are so easy to go down! We spent an hour nerding out about transformative learning and what happens specifically during that reintegration piece, what occurs when travelers return home and try to find their footing again in their regular lives.

We also brainstormed some ideas that got me excited. One of them was reaching out to the Peace Corps. My Peace Corps experience was excellent from the beginning. The preparation was strong. The in-country support was strong. Where it dipped, for me and for many others, was the reintegration when we came home. Maybe the Peace Corps would be interested in making that full circle: preparation, reflection, the experience itself, and then genuine support for reintegration back into life. That is a conversation worth having. (If anyone from the Peace Corps happens to be reading this, look out for an email from me in the next couple of weeks, or just reach out! I would love to chat!)

Rebecca Maffeis and the Group

The second call was a morning group call with Rebecca Maffeis and four other women. One who runs the Nautica Collective. One who founded the Travel Coaching Network. One is a creative consultant who provides social media and communications support. And one is a travel agent whose energy was so incredible you could feel it through the screen.

Out of that call, real things happened. I have a podcast episode being recorded on June 17th with Sahara, the founder of the Travel Coaching Network. My first podcast! I am so excited about that. And I am continuing a conversation regarding community and transformative learning with Lucy from Nautica Collective.

What I keep noticing about these calls is that I am just myself. I am not trying to impress anyone. I am genuinely curious about transformative learning and how it connects to travel, and that seems to resonate with people. Further signs that I’m going in the right direction.

Jake Haupert

My third call was with Jake Haupert, co-founder of the Transformative Tourism Council and now an official advisor for Hello West Africa. We had met briefly in Seattle back in March, but this was our first proper Zoom call, a chance to get to know one another better and talk through the vision of Hello West Africa, and of course, transformative tourism.

We talked about Hello West Africa and where I see it in five years. We talked about the Transformative Tourism Council’s certificate program with the University of South Carolina. And then Jake described what it was like to teach in an online, asynchronous program, and so many of the things he mentioned are all too familiar to me.

Of course, I have thoughts about online learning and how it could be structured to create a transformative learning experience. I have a master’s and a doctorate, both received fully online. I think online learning is an incredible way to learn, but the way it is currently done is almost an afterthought. Creating a truly incredible online course is actually harder than in-person instruction, because you have to manufacture the feeling that in-person instruction creates naturally. That takes more energy, more intention, and more design. Not less. But I suppose I should save this rant for the Learning Lens!

I will be meeting Jake later this week in Bellingham to continue our conversation. I can’t wait!

What’s Coming Next

I want to get all of the Hello West Africa advisors together on a Zoom call, everyone in the same virtual room, meeting each other, sharing ideas, and getting a clear picture of where the business is and where it is going. That is on this week's to-do list.

The Learning Lens goes out this Thursday. A reader sent me a Substack note asking me to recommend a book on transformative learning theory. The best answer I could think of was Joe Pine’s The Transformation Economy, released earlier this year. Outside of that, the knowledge lives mostly in research articles and academic journals, which is part of why I write The Learning Lens in the first place. I am putting together something that combines my story with the theory, with resources people can take away. Stay tuned for more on that!

Three goals to take me through the rest of May and into June:

→ Finishing up the homeschool year with my boys. → Continuing to teach about transformative learning and travel. → Raising the $300,000 in seed capital for Hello West Africa.

On that last one, I am fully confident that the $300k will be raised. Whether it is six people each putting in $50,000, or one person who believes in what we are building for the country, the community, and the people who will travel with us. Or maybe it is more of a community approach, I’ve thought about that too, maybe something here on Substack. I thought of the community aspect because of Benin and its culture of community. Many thoughts and many possibilities. I am keeping the door open for all of them!

What I’m Learning

Taking a break is not falling behind. It is listening.

I have spent a lot of time over the years trying to push through when my body and mind were telling me to stop. Last week, I didn’t push through, and things kept moving. Relationships kept growing, and opportunities arrived.

I am starting to believe that reflection, real unhurried reflection, is not a pause in the work. It is the work.

In My Free Time

We had friends over and went to dinner at a local Thai restaurant in our little town. The little town we live in has Dutch heritage, and the restaurant is located in a building that recreates the feel of sitting along a canal street in the Netherlands, including a little stream with koi fish (those I’m not sure you would find in a canal in the Netherlands, but they are a nice touch!). A wonderful place to have a meal.

I have been working on my Notion setup, which has gone through many iterations since I started using it for my doctorate. It is the hub where I keep everything running, and I am finally getting it to a place that actually works for me and the growing business. All my thoughts and to-dos have to live somewhere other than in my head.

The Percy Jackson books continue to be a highlight of my week, taking turns with the boys as we read through them. Written for teenagers, yes. But I am learning more about Greek mythology than I ever did in school, and I am not even a little embarrassed about it!

Back to the Lions 🦁

I didn’t know it then, but that moment in the cement bunker was planting something. A curiosity about Africa. A hunger for sounds and places that get into you at a level that words can’t quite define.

The drum circle in a Beninese village does that. The lions did that. And I believe that when our first guests stand in that village on their last night with us, something will happen to them that they won’t fully be able to explain either.

That is what we are building with Hello West Africa.

An experience that doesn’t end when you board the plane home. One that stays with you, gets talked about, reflected on, and shared, long after the drums have gone quiet.

Until next Tuesday,

P.S. — Hello West Africa is looking for aligned investors and Founding Supporters. If you want to be part of building this before the doors open, reply to this email and let’s talk.

Show Notes — Can Transformative Travel Be Designed?The Learning Lens | Between Here and Benin

I spent an hour watching snails with my two-year-old before writing this episode.

Not because snails have anything to do with transformative tourism. But because that slow, unhurried hour gave me exactly what I needed — clarity. And it turns out that is the whole point of this episode.

In this episode, I answer the question that guided my doctoral research:

What factors or processes make transformative learning possible for a tourist in a five-week online tour?

I built that tour. I ran it. I studied what happened. And what I found came down to five things:

1. Human connection is the foundation.In a world increasingly enthralled with AI, human-centered experiences are becoming a luxury. And that luxury is critical for transformation to occur.

2. Design shapes everything.The storytelling, the pacing, the flexibility, the sensory details. Transformation happens to people who feel invited in, not passive observers. And listening to your guests and adapting in real time is not a sign of a poorly designed experience. It is the design working exactly as it should.

3. Reflection is the engine.An experience without a structured space for reflection is just an event. As one participant put it: "I realized how many assumptions I had because of the reflection questions."

4. Most tourism experiences are designed for the moment, not the process.The disorienting dilemma is Phase 1 of 10. What comes after is where most experiences go quiet.

5. Transformation requires integration support — especially after people go home.The later phases happen after travelers return home. And most operators have already moved on by then.

I also share the outcomes of all six participants in my study, and why the fact that every single one had a completely different transformative experience is not a bug. It is the whole point.

Plus: what snails taught me about reflection. And how Hello West Africa is designed around all five factors.

Want to go deeper?

I turned this research into a guide: Transformative Travel Can Be Designed. Here Is How. Seventeen pages, plain language, a framework you can actually use.

Get it here: THE GUIDE

The Ten Phases of Transformative Learning are listed in full at the end of this episode's newsletter. You can find them at the link below.

Between Here and Benin is written and hosted by Dr. Debra Kouda, co-founder and CEO of Hello West Africa. The Learning Lens publishes every other Thursday. Building in Public publishes every Tuesday.

Hello West Africa is currently seeking aligned founding partners and investors. Reply or reach out directly if you want to be part of building this.

It was almost Christmas 2018, and we were nearing the end of a three-month trip to Benin

My mother-in-law (Ina), grandmother-in-law (whom we call la grandmere), and I had spent the afternoon shelling peanuts under a tree, sitting together for three or four hours, working through a pile of them, getting them ready to roast so we could bring them home. It was the kind of slow, quiet work that doesn’t need much conversation. Just hands and shade and the sound of peanut shells cracking.

At some point in the afternoon, Ina and la grandmere lay out a mat on the ground underneath the guava tree to rest. It really is the best thing to do on a warm afternoon. La grandmere looked up at me coming out of the house and patted the spot next to her.

She wanted me to come lie down beside her.

So I did…and I almost cried. I felt like she had finally accepted me.

It sounds simple. But if you understand anything about what it means to be a white woman in Benin, to be the outsider who will always be recognizable as someone not originally from there, you understand why that moment meant everything.

On Being an Insider and an Outsider

When I wrote my doctoral dissertation, I had to include a statement of positionality, a reflection on how my identity and my position within the field might influence my research. I wrote that I am a returned Peace Corps volunteer who has been associated with Benin for almost two decades, that I became a naturalized Beninese citizen four years ago, and that I am very comfortable in and around Beninese culture and community.

And then I wrote something harder: that I will always be a combination of an insider and an outsider. That my white skin means I am easily identifiable as someone not originally from the area, no matter how many years I have lived there, no matter how fluent my French, no matter how well I know the weekly market and the soccer fields, or how I have tried to learn how to cook la pâte.

This is the reality of going to Benin as someone who looks like me. And I think it is important to talk about, not to make it bigger than it is, but because it will come up if you visit us, and I would rather you know what to expect.

In the villages, especially as you travel north and away from the cities, you become very visible very quickly. Children will call out to you. In the Idaasha region, where I served in the Peace Corps, there is a chant that kids have sung for generations…Oyinbo...Oyinbo…(white person, white person). It originated with missionaries who used to hand out candy, and the children would call out to get the white person's attention.

When I first arrived, I had a choice about how to receive it. I watched other people get upset, and I understood why. It is jarring, especially when it continues over and over and over again. But I also understood that these children were not being cruel. My husband let me know that they were passing on something that had been passed to them, in a place where someone who looked like me was truly unusual. So I learned to roll with it. To join in the banter. To let it be what it was.

What I was not prepared for was how much I would eventually forget about my skin color, and how quickly I would be reminded of it again.

I remember at some point during the Peace Corps, when I hadn’t traveled to the big city in a while, I stopped thinking about it. It just wasn’t something that came up in my daily life in the village anymore. And then I would go to the market in a bigger town and see another white person and stare. I genuinely stared. Wondering who they were, where they were from, what they were doing there. Which is, of course, exactly what everyone else was thinking when they looked at me.

I started calling it the “oh my God, it’s a white person” syndrome. Because, well, I had to call it something!

The Plumber

The other moment I want to tell you about happened a few years later, when D’Aquin and I were in Benin during the pandemic and having some plumbing work done at the house.

We had killed a giant rooster that had been terrorizing the neighborhood, the most enormous rooster you can imagine, loud beyond reason, and we cooked it up with the neighbors so everyone could celebrate the quiet of not hearing the rooster anymore. We all sat together in the gazebo, eating.

The plumber walked in, looked around, and said something that loosely translated to: “Who’s this white woman sitting here?”

My mother-in-law and the neighbor woman didn’t miss a beat.

“There’s no white woman here,” they said. “This is Mama Aden.”

Mama Aden. Mother of Aden. My firstborn son. In Benin, parents are often known by the name of their first child, it is how you become part of a community, part of a lineage. And in that moment, without hesitation, the women who knew me best told the plumber exactly who I was.

Not the white woman. Mama Aden.

The plumber looked surprised. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

That was enough.

Why This Matters for Hello West Africa

I want guests who come on a Hello West Africa tour to experience what it feels like to stand out. To be the person who doesn’t quite fit in because of how they look. To feel, even briefly, what it is like to be identifiable as an outsider in a community that is not one's own.

Not because it is uncomfortable, though it can be. But because of what happens on the other side of that discomfort.

In Mezirow’s terms, that feeling is a disorienting dilemma. And it is one of the most powerful things travel can offer. The moment you realize that you are now the minority. That people are looking at you the way you have looked at others your whole life. That you do not blend in, and you cannot make yourself blend in.

And then, if you stay, if you keep going, something shifts. People learn your name. They learn your children’s names. They invite you to sit beside them under a tree. They tell the plumber who you really are.

That is the journey I want to design for people. Not the ultra-comfortable version, the real one.

What Really Happened Last Week

I made my first Instagram post. Woohoo!

It happened because of a conversation I had on Wednesday with a former content marketer who is now venturing out on her own. We talked through some of the things that had been frustrating me about Instagram, and after our Zoom call, I just did it. No perfect hook. No agonizing over the caption. I just posted.

And then I took a deep breath. That wasn’t so bad.

Thursday morning I was on the 5 AM call (with a 4:30 AM wake-up call, although it did come with a fresh cup of coffee thanks to my husband!), with Rebecca Maffeis and the group she had assembled to talk about transformative tourism. No kids woke up until 5:30, which felt like a small miracle. The conversation was extraordinary. There was a woman running Beyond Dracula tours in Romania. A woman from Greece. A man from England who is starting up tours in China around tea, and is also a travel writer. We ended up talking for an hour and forty-five minutes, and I think we could have gone longer.

What struck me most was this: the research and the concept of transformative tourism is still so new that the conversations themselves are the work. That is where I want to be.

I posted consistently on LinkedIn and made some unexpected connections with people I hadn’t anticipated finding there. That keeps happening, and I keep being grateful for it.

What’s Coming Next

Next week is full, or at least full in prepping for a busy week of calls the week after.

I have a Zoom call with Dr. Suzy Ross, one of the first people to write about transformative tourism, who approaches it from a different theoretical lens than I do. We are going to nerd out for an hour talking about transformation and tourism, LOL.

I also have my first Zoom call with Jake Haupert, co-founder of the Transformative Tourism Council and Explorers X, who is now officially an advisor for Hello West Africa. Looking forward to catching up after meeting him in Seattle this past March.

And another call with Rebecca Maffeis and her group, this one at 8 AM, which means the kids will definitely be awake. We’ll see how that goes. But I know the conversation will be incredible!

In addition to all of that, I met someone from a local Bellingham newspaper, The Cascadia, at the Home and Garden Show, and she was interested in my story, so I’m going to reach out to her this week. And I spoke with some people in the solar business there as well, relevant because we plan to install solar panels at the property in Benin, and I want to be a little more informed about the solar panel market.

Also, this Thursday I have the 4th post of the Learning Lens, and I'm starting to draft it today.

A Quick Update on What We Are Building

We are currently raising $300,000 in seed funding to get Hello West Africa up and running.

Here is what that investment will make possible:

THE LIST

☐ Guest bungalows + renovations ☐ Solar & infrastructure ☐ Vehicle + local transport ☐ Container from US with supplies ☐ Operations & admin ☐ Founder salaries (Year 1)

Someone I grew up with connected with me on Instagram and has been helping with the container logistics. She has done a lot of international shipping and has given me incredible insights. I guess that is the other reason I should keep up on Instagram, you never know who is going to reach out!

If you are interested in being part of this, reply to this email. Let’s talk.

What I’m Learning

Talking through things with people who know things you don’t is irreplaceable.

The 5 AM call reminded me that there are people all over the world working on the same questions I am working on, how to design travel experiences that actually transform people, not just impress them. That I am not alone in this. And that my particular lens, the academic research combined with seventeen years of lived experience in Benin, is something I can contribute to that conversation. I’m thinking about the best way I can help tour operators move into this transformational economy a bit more easily.

I am also learning that showing up is most of it. The Instagram post. The 5 AM alarm. The email to the newspaper contact. Most of it is just doing the thing you said you would do.

In My Free Time

D’Aquin played soccer with the boys this week, which is always a joy to watch. He is an extraordinary player, and that is actually part of how we met. He asked me to come watch him play. But that is a story for another issue.

We visited friends and spent time at their house. A normal week in our world, which is its own kind of wonderful.

I am reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians with my middle son Benjamin, we are on book four and they are incredible. I think they would have been more interesting in high school than The Odyssey and The Iliad (no offense Homer!).

And with my oldest Aden, I am reading the first book in The Mysterious Benedict Society series, which I highly recommend for older kids and adults alike.

I also encourage you to put on an evening jazz playlist while cooking dinner. It somehow elevates the experience without leaving your kitchen!

Alrighty, I have kids calling my name. Time to sign off on this issue!

Until next Tuesday,

P.S. — Hello West Africa is looking for aligned investors and Founding Supporters. If you want to be part of building this before the doors open, reply to this email and let’s talk.

It has been one year since I defended my dissertation and earned my doctorate.

One year. It went by fast, and also, somehow, it took the whole year.

That might sound contradictory. But if you have been reading The Learning Lens from the beginning, you might already understand what I mean. Because what I have spent this past year doing, without always naming it as such, is working through Phases 9 and 10 of Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory. Taking what I learned during four years of doctoral work and figuring out how to integrate it into my actual life, into my voice, into Hello West Africa.

It took me most of this year to feel genuinely confident talking about transformative learning in tourism as someone coming from outside the travel and tourism industry. I am excited to be here. I am proud of what the research produced, and I am honest enough to say that it is still a process, and probably always will be.

But I keep wondering: what if there had been more support for those final phases earlier? Right after I graduated, when the silence set in and the identity of “Dr. Kouda” still felt new and uncertain, what if someone had been there to help me work through the integration? Would I have found my voice sooner?

I don’t know. But it’s the question that keeps shaping how I’m designing Hello West Africa. Because I don’t want the people who travel with us to come home and spend a year quietly wondering the same thing.

Which brings me to something I have been promising since Issue No. 1.

The 10 Phases of Meaning that are the backbone of Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory. I’m explaining what these are because transformation is not just a marketing phrase, it is a process.

Why the Phases Matter

My doctoral research was guided by one central question: What factors or processes make transformational learning possible for a tourist in a five-week online tour?

Everything I am about to share comes from trying to answer that question.

I have talked a lot about Phases 1, 9, and 10 in these issues. The disorienting dilemma that sparks everything. The reintegration that most experiences fail to support. But there are eight phases in between, and they matter too. You cannot skip them. You cannot rush them. And understanding what they are makes it much easier to recognize where you are when you are in the middle of one.

So here they are, in plain language, with examples from real life, because that is the only way theory actually sticks.

Phase 1: Disorienting Dilemma

An experience that causes confusion or discomfort, leading you to question your assumptions.

This is the spark. The crack in the lens. It is the moment on the plane back from Benin when I watched a man make a scene over a seat assignment and felt, for the first time, ashamed to be American. It is reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma while sitting 100 feet from a cornfield in West Africa. It is arriving in Heathrow at 21 years old and being genuinely amazed that people were just living there, going about their days, the same as anywhere else.

It is necessary. Without it, nothing else begins.

Phase 2: Self-Examination

Reflecting on feelings of anxiety or guilt as a result of the dilemma.

This is the uncomfortable phase that follows the spark. You don’t just notice that something is different, you start to feel it. The shame. The discomfort. The guilt of realizing you held an assumption you didn’t know you had. This phase is where many people want to stop because it doesn’t feel good. But it is essential. You cannot question what you haven’t first felt.

Phase 3: Critical Assessment of Assumptions

Realizing that some of your beliefs or assumptions might be flawed or limiting.

This is where you start to ask the harder questions. Not just “I felt something” but “why did I think that in the first place?” Where did this assumption come from? My upbringing? My culture? Something I absorbed without ever being told? This is the phase where the invisible lenses start to become visible.

Phase 4: Recognition of Shared Experience or Discontent

Understanding that others have faced similar challenges or questioned the same assumptions.

This is one of the most quietly powerful phases, and one of the most underrated. The moment you realize you are not alone in your questioning. That other people have stood in this same uncomfortable place and felt the same disorientation. Community matters here. Conversation matters. It is very hard to get through this phase in isolation.

Phase 5: Exploration of New Roles, Relationships, and Actions

Considering new perspectives, behaviors, or ways of thinking.

This is the phase where you start to try things on. Not committing yet, just exploring. What would it look like to see this differently? What would it mean to act from this new understanding? It is tentative, experimental, and essential.

Phase 6: Planning for Change

Developing a course of action.

The exploration starts to solidify into something more concrete. You begin to see not just that things could be different, but how they could be different. What specifically would you do? What would you change? This phase requires honesty about what is actually possible and what you are actually willing to do.

Phase 7: Acquiring Knowledge and Skills

Learning what is needed to implement the new plan or perspective.

You know what you want to do differently. Now you have to figure out how. This is the phase where you seek out information, resources, people, and experiences that can help you actually make the change. It is active and requires effort. Transformation does not happen passively.

Phase 8: Testing New Roles

Trying out new behaviors or ways of thinking in real-life situations.

This is where the theory meets the road. You have planned, you have learned, and now you actually try it. It will not be perfect. It is not supposed to be. The testing is the point. And each time you try, you learn something about whether the new perspective actually fits your life.

Phase 9: Building Competence and Self-Confidence

Gaining confidence as new behaviors or thoughts become more familiar.

This is the phase I have been living in this past year. The new identity, Dr. Kouda, researcher, transformative tourism advocate, founder of Hello West Africa, becoming more familiar with each week that I show up and speak from it. It takes time. It takes repetition. And it takes support, which is the piece I wish I had more of in the beginning.

Phase 10: Reintegration

Adapting the new perspective into your life, making it part of how you think or act regularly.

This is the destination. Not a dramatic arrival, but a quiet settling. The changed perspective is no longer a new thing you are trying on, it is just how you see. The baby sleeping next to you instead of in the crib. The farmers’ market instead of the processed food aisle. The tourism company you have been building for seventeen years because Benin changed how you understand what it means to belong somewhere.

This is where transformation lives. In the ordinary. After the experience ends.

Why Hello West Africa Is Designed Around All Ten

Most travel experiences are designed around Phase 1, the disorienting dilemma, the extraordinary moment, the thing that cracks something open.

Hello West Africa is designed around all ten.

The tour begins two to three months before you arrive, with activities designed to help you build your frames of reference. You arrive already curious, already open, already beginning Phase 1 before you even board the plane.

During the tour, we create space for Phases 2 through 8, the reflection, the questioning, the community, the exploration, and the planning. We do not leave this to chance, it is designed for.

And after you leave Benin, we will stay with you. Because Phases 9 and 10 are where everything either lands or fades, and we want it to land.

I know what it feels like when it doesn’t. I spent a year finding out.

What I am also working on is a framework that could help others apply this thinking to their own travel or tourism experiences. Not just Hello West Africa guests, but anyone designing an experience and wanting to make it genuinely transformative. The goal is to take the research and make it practical. Accessible. Something a tour operator, an educator, or a travel designer could actually use. It is not ready yet, but it is coming.

And here is something that makes Hello West Africa different from most tourism companies: the work does not stop when the tour ends. Because I come to this with a research background, I will continue to draw on the literature, study what is happening with our guests, and apply new findings to make each experience better than the last. This is what action research looks like in practice, the same methodology I used in my doctoral work, now applied to real tours with real travelers in real communities. Every tour we run will teach us something, and we will use that to do better.

The online tour I designed for my dissertation was the beginning. The in-person tours in Benin are the next chapter, with the research continually running in the background.

One Thing to Sit With

Look at those ten phases again. Think about something you are in the middle of right now, a change, a transition, a new identity you are still growing into.

Which phase are you in?

Hit reply and let me know.

Also, I’m curious, are you starting to look at the words “transformative travel” a bit differently now?

Until next Thursday,

P.S. — One year since the defense. I still have the notes I wrote during the process pinned above my desk. Some days, I look at them and think, I cannot believe I did that. Most days I think, of course I did.

Thanks for reading Between Here and Benin! This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Learning Lens is a series within Between Here and Benin, published every other Thursday. It's where I think out loud about transformative learning theory — what it is, why it matters, and how it shapes everything I'm building with Hello West Africa. No PhD required. Just curiosity.

This week, I came across a post from a travel professional I follow on LinkedIn. He was pushing back on the word “transformative” in travel, and I appreciated the perspective.

His argument went something like this: most people don’t want a trip that changes their life. They want a break. Time with their family. Something different. And the change that does happen is subtle; it comes from seeing the world from a new angle, from demystifying what felt strange, from realizing there is more that unites us than divides us across the globe.

He described a family he had taken on a two-month trip through Ecuador, the Galápagos, and Colombia. Volcanoes, the Amazon, and some of the most spectacular places on the planet. They came home with inside jokes, stories to recount, two months of family time, and horizons that had forever shifted.

A trip of a lifetime, he said. But transformational? Life-changing? That’s a bit hyperbolic. Their kids went back to school. They went back to work.

He ended with this: “I can’t change lives, but I can certainly enrich them.”

I read it twice. And I thought, he’s right about how subtle the shift can be. But I think he stopped one step short.

How I Got Here

I want to talk a little about how I discovered transformative learning theory and why I started looking into it in the first place.

I wanted to provide people with an experience similar to what I had during my Peace Corps service, where I returned home with a changed perspective. I knew something had shifted in me. I just didn’t have the language for it yet. I had the opportunity to start exploring what this was when I began working on my dissertation proposal for my doctorate.

Learning is often thought of as taking place in a classroom. You can ask your kids, “Hey, what did you learn today?” and they’ll tell you about fractions or the American Revolution. But I have come to believe that learning happens in many more places than just the four walls of a classroom or a specific formal educational experience.

I started diving into the relationship between learning and travel. What I found was that much research on tourism highlights it as an incredible learning experience, often described as informal because it occurs outside the traditional educational environment. However, much of the research primarily focuses on customer satisfaction, financial aspects, and the educational components of tourism. Researchers have encouraged others to look beyond educational tourism specifically and explore how and why tourism facilitates learning more broadly.

That’s when I came across Jack Mezirow and his transformative learning theory.

For a grounding definition, Van Winkle and Legge describe learning during tourism this way:

Learning during tourism is an engaging process of exploring oneself, relationships, other people, cultures, and places. Reflection on the self, relationships, past experiences, and differences between one’s own experience and the experiences of others forms the basis of a learning experience that allows people to confirm or disconfirm preexisting knowledge by freely engaging in activities with people in spaces outside their usual environment.

Read that slowly. That is travel. That is what travel can do…when it’s designed correctly.

What Transformative Actually Means

Here is the definition I keep coming back to, from Jack Mezirow:

Transformative learning refers to the process by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference (meaning perspectives, habits of mind, mind-sets) to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action.

Let me repeat the key part: our taken-for-granted frames of reference.

Not our entire worldview. Not our personality. Not our life’s direction. Our frames of reference, the invisible lenses we use to make sense of everything around us, are becoming more open, more reflective, more capable of change.

So what exactly is a frame of reference? Mezirow breaks it into two things: habits of mind and points of view.

A habit of mind is a set of assumptions that acts as a filter, the proverbial glasses you wear to interpret everything that happens to you. These form early, shaped by culture, family, language, religion, and experience. They show up in how you think about social norms, in your moral instincts, in your sense of self, and in your emotional response patterns. Most of the time, you don’t even know they’re there. They’re just how the world looks.

A point of view is how that habit of mind gets expressed in a specific situation. And here’s the interesting part: unlike a habit of mind, you can actually try on someone else’s point of view to see how it fits. That’s the entry point. That’s where travel starts to do its work.

So when I talk about frames of reference shifting, that’s what I mean. Not your whole personality. Not your entire belief system. One habit of mind, examined. One point of view, tried on. One assumption, quietly questioned.

That family came home with horizons that had forever shifted. That travel professional’s own words.

Horizons that have forever shifted are frames of reference that have changed.

That IS transformative learning. Not hyperbole. Not fireworks. Subtle, quiet, exactly as he described, and still a transformation.

The distinction matters because if we decide that transformation requires something dramatic, we miss all the ways it is actually happening. We dismiss it. We stop supporting it. And that is where things fall apart.

Because here is what the research shows: the process of transformation does not just occur during the trip. It is what happens after. And without support, it fades. You go back across the bridge you thought you were ready to cross. Much safer back on the other side.

Transformation Is Just Learning

I want to say something that might sound simple, but gets lost in all the breathless language around transformative travel:

Transformation is learning.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

We tend to compare transformation to a butterfly and its metamorphosis, the coming out of the cocoon as something entirely new. It’s a beautiful image. But here’s the thing about the butterfly: it’s just doing what comes naturally. It has no choice in the matter. It doesn’t have to decide to become something new. It doesn’t have to reflect on what it’s leaving behind.

Human transformation is different. It is a specific kind of learning, the kind that involves taking your taken-for-granted frames of reference, your habits of mind, your assumptions about how the world works, and revising them in light of something new.

But it is learning. Not magic. Not a mystical event that happens to you on a mountaintop or a beach in West Africa.

And like all learning, it takes time. It happens in ordinary moments. It shows up in the small decisions you make after you get home, not in the grand feelings you have while you’re away.

The Cornfield

Let me give you a real example.

I was in my second year of Peace Corps service in Benin, sitting outside reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It’s a book about food, specifically about how corn has infiltrated nearly every product we consume in the United States, and how disconnected most Americans are from where their food actually comes from.

I was reading this book, sitting not 100 feet from a cornfield.

The corn had been planted by people in the village of Camate. It would be harvested, ground into flour, and made into la pâte, a staple food that fed families in the community where I was living. I could see it from where I was sitting.

That was a disorienting dilemma. The first phase of Mezirow’s ten phases, the spark, the crack in the lens. In that moment, everything I had assumed about food, about where it comes from, about the gap between American grocery stores and the actual ground, became suddenly, uncomfortably visible.

But the transformation didn’t happen in that moment.

It happened when I came home.

Back in the United States, standing in a supermarket aisle, I started reading labels. I started avoiding processed foods. I sought out farmers’ markets. I made different choices, small ones, consistently, because something had shifted in how I understood the relationship between food and the people who grow it.

The disorienting dilemma happened in Benin. The transformation happened in an American grocery store, months later, quietly, far away from the village cornfields.

That is what transformed frames of reference look like in real life. Subtle. Ordinary. And completely real.

The Baby

A second example comes from my time in Benin, where children are everywhere.

Babies are often carried on their mothers’ backs during funerals, weddings, and important family events, from morning until night. Even in noisy environments, the babies sleep, close and warm and held. Not only that, but they also sleep with their mother. Not in a crib next to the bed, or in a separate bedroom down the hall. Nestled right in next to the food source and her beating heart.

This was a disorienting dilemma for me. I had always believed that babies should sleep in a separate room, in a crib. Observing this practice every day made me question my assumptions and frames of reference, quietly, without drama, just a slow accumulating question I didn’t quite know what to do with.

So I filed it away. Came home. Moved on.

And then in 2014, five years after my Peace Corps service ended, I had my first child.

I tried the crib. I did what I had always assumed you were supposed to do. And neither of us slept.

And then I remembered Benin. I tried something different.

I put my little guy next to me in bed.

He slept. I slept. No need to get out of bed to nurse him back to sleep. Just a little blip in my dreams.

Five years. That’s how long it took for a disorienting dilemma experienced in Benin to complete its journey and arrive as a changed behavior in my real life. That’s not a trip of a lifetime moment. That’s transformation. Quiet, delayed, ordinary, and real.

And that travel professional was right: it didn’t change my life. It changed one small thing about how I lived it. But that small thing? That’s a frame of reference that shifted. That’s transformative learning. Even five years later. Even quietly. Even without anyone calling it that at the time.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Both of those examples have something in common: the transformation happened after. Not during the experience. After.

Mezirow’s research is clear on this. The later phases of transformative learning, the ones that determine whether a shift actually lasts, happen when you return to your regular life and try to integrate what you encountered. That family in Ecuador came home with their horizons shifted. What happens next? Do those shifted horizons show up in how they make decisions, how they talk to their kids, and what they prioritize? Or do they slowly fade back into the comfortable familiar?

That depends on whether the shift is supported.

One of the most important tools throughout the entire process is reflection. Journaling, whether in video, voice, or writing, is one of the most critical elements in this process. So are conversations with others: fellow travelers who shared the experience, people who ask the right questions when you get home, a community you can return to when you encounter a barrier or an assumption you don’t know how to work through on your own. It keeps the disorienting dilemma alive long enough for the transformation to complete itself. It creates the space for the shift to land.

What This Means for Hello West Africa

When I say Hello West Africa is designed around transformative learning theory, this is what I mean.

I am not promising that you will have a life-changing moment while you are in Benin. You might. But that is not the point.

The point is that we are designing for what happens after.

The tour begins two to three months before you even arrive, with activities designed to prepare your frames of reference for what you will encounter. We want you to arrive already curious, already questioning, already open to the disorienting dilemma that Benin will inevitably provide.

And then we stay connected after you leave. Because that is where the subtle magic happens. Not in the moment of eating la pâte for the first time, or hearing a drum circle at night, or walking down to the Port of No Return. In those moments, you are experiencing the disorienting dilemma. The transformation comes later, in the ordinary moments of your regular life, when something you encountered in Benin suddenly makes sense of something you see at home.

We want to be there for that part too.

That travel professional said he can’t change lives, but he can enrich them. I respect that. But I think enrichment and transformation are not as far apart as they seem. When horizons shift forever, even subtly or slowly, frames of reference change.

That’s transformation. And it deserves support all the way through.

One Thing to Sit With

Think about a time when something you experienced while traveling, or during any significant life change, didn’t fully land until much later. Not the moment of the experience. The moment it changed something small in your daily life.

That quiet moment of change? That’s transformation. It was always happening. You just didn’t have a name for it yet.

Hit reply and tell me yours, I’m curious!

Until next Thursday,

P.S. — The Omnivore’s Dilemma is still one of the books I recommend most. If you haven’t read it, add it to your list. Maybe you can read it while you are visiting me in Benin, sitting next to a corn field! The disorienting dilemma hits differently that way.

Last Friday, a conversation on LinkedIn led to this question:

“Why are you doing this?”

They meant Hello West Africa. And I thought, I know this answer. I’ve said it a hundred times. But when I sat down to actually write it out, something different happened. The answer didn’t come out as a mission statement or an elevator pitch.

It came out as a list.

I want people to pull peanuts out of the ground.

I want people to feel the rush of humidity when they step off the plane.

I want people to be a part of the din on the bus ride from the airport terminal to the plane, because then you know you are on the right plane headed to Africa.

I want them to taste my mother-in-law’s incredible cooking and eat with their hands.

I want people to rest on a full bag of unshelled peanuts under the stars.

I want people to experience walking through the village and greeting everyone (which can sometimes be over twenty times!).

I want people to feel uncomfortable.

I want people to experience what it is like to not understand the language.

I want people to see children running around, healthy and clean, and yes, also dirty, because children play outside and there is lots of dirt.

I want people to drink an herbal tea made by my mother-in-law that would surely clear any cold they might have.

I want people to hear the sound of sweeping in the early morning.

I want people to buy incredible food for less than a dollar from a stand on the side of the road.

I want people to feel the rhythm of a drum circle at night.

I want people to taste the dry sweetness of cashew apple juice.

I want people to have a shot of sodabi at 9 AM.

I want people to return to where they came from and tell others all about Benin.

I want people to know where it is and show others on a map.

That’s not a hundred reasons. But I could keep going. Because there are endless experiences I would love for people to have when they are with us in Benin.

A Little Background on Hello West Africa

I realized this week, after that LinkedIn message, that I keep assuming people know what Hello West Africa is. They don’t. And that’s on me to keep explaining.

So. For anyone new here, and for anyone who could use a reminder:

Hello West Africa is a boutique cultural immersion travel company that my husband, D’Aquin, and I are building on our property in Benin, West Africa. Not a resort. Not a safari. Not a tour that shows you Africa from a comfortable distance.

Living in a village. Our village. At our home.

The flagship 12-day experience starts in Cotonou, the economic capital, where you acclimate to the heat, feel the humidity, and get your first taste of what it means to be there. From there, we drive two and a half hours north to Kabole, where our house sits and where we will spend most of our time exploring the area. Walking through the village, exploring the third largest open-air market in the country, eating meals prepared by my mother-in-law, and living alongside a community that has been our home for fifteen years.

At the end, we drive south to Ouidah, the birthplace of Vodun and the location of the Port of No Return, one of the most significant sites on the slave route. It is a heavy and important place. We save it for the end, before heading back to Cotonou and the airport.

We want to offer the only professionally guided, fully English-language immersive cultural tour of Benin. Designed for curious travelers who want to understand the world, not just see it.

That’s Hello West Africa. In a nutshell.

What Really Happened Last Week

Last Tuesday, I drove to Seattle to see Dr. Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, for whom I interned in Namibia in 2003. I wrote about that expected trip last week, but what I didn’t fully capture was what it felt like to be in that room.

It was incredible to see Laurie again. I am amazed at what she has built since 2003 — the organization has brought cheetahs back to India and now to Somaliland, continues working in Kenya and Namibia, and raises livestock-guarding dogs to give to farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by cheetah conflict. Watching her speak and interact with people reminded me of something important: she was one of the first women I ever watched trying to grow and change something. To make a real difference in this world. For people and the wildlife they cohabitate with.

That must have had more of an impact on me than I realized at the time.

I also met Jake Haupert from the Transformative Tourism Council, whom I learned about while researching transformative tourism for my doctorate. I had been wanting to meet him in person for a long time, and we finally did. His organization, Explorers X, was hosting Laurie for the event. During our conversation, Jake encouraged me to share what I was doing, which gave me the opportunity to tell the Hello West Africa story to people who didn’t know me.

And something shifted.

Someone in that room listened to the story and said: it sounds like a love story.

A love story between D’Aquin and me. A love story about a country. A love story about wanting to share that country with others.

I had never thought about it that way. But they were right. It is.

I also met Jungle Jordan, a zookeeper turned wildlife content creator, and we ended up talking about mutual acquaintances from my days working in zoos over 20 years ago. The world is small in the most wonderful ways.

But the thing that stayed with me most was this: standing in that room, telling strangers about Hello West Africa, watching people listen and then ask for more — it made the whole thing feel real in a way that newsletters and business plans and spreadsheets hadn’t quite managed to do.

It also helped me move past a moment in 2018 when I shared the idea of this tourism company with someone who laughed and said it would never work.

That moment has less power over me now. A little less, every week.

What’s Coming Next

Today I have a call with a woman who has been in the travel industry for a long time and is part of a group that leads women travel leaders. I met her at the Seattle event. I am curious to see where this conversation takes me!

I am also working on getting more organized this week, building out a system in Notion that I will actually use rather than just explore. I have a tendency to fall in love with the app and forget to use it as a tool. Working on that.

On the side, I do website design, and I’m helping a friend update his website this week. It’s a nice change of pace from business plans and pitch decks, a different kind of building, same attention to detail.

LinkedIn and Instagram posting continues. The Learning Lens goes out this Thursday.

And I am saying this out loud, publicly, so that you can hold me to it:

My goal is to host the first Hello West Africa tour by December 2026. Christmas in Benin.

For that to happen, I need to find people who believe in this dream enough to help make it real. If that is you, or if you know someone it might be, please reach out. Reply to this email, find me on LinkedIn, and find me on Instagram. Let’s talk.

What I’m Learning

Building in public is working, but not in the way I expected.

I expected the newsletter to grow my subscriber list. It is, slowly. What I did not expect was that it would make Hello West Africa feel real to me. That standing in a room in Seattle telling the story out loud would feel like a continuation of what I’ve been writing here every Tuesday. That someone would hear the story and call it a love story. That I would come home and sit down and write that list and realize: I know exactly why I am doing this. I have always known.

And it is completely normal to feel frightened and excited about it all. A little throwback to last week’s post.

In My Free Time

It was Easter this past weekend, and I love putting together scavenger hunts for my boys. This year, there were eight clues, including a trip half a block down to the mailbox and out into the yard, places they had never had to go for a clue before. Watching their brains turn as they worked through each one was one of my favorite things I have done all year. My oldest declared it the best scavenger hunt ever. That is all the feedback I need.

Oh, and I made an incredible spring salad!

We also dyed Easter eggs. I didn’t wake up early enough on the day we were to hard-boil the eggs, and my middle son Benjamin decided to do it himself. He looked up how, but the timing was a little off — the first twelve eggs came out softer than intended in the middle. We made a second batch and got it right. Fail and learn! The eggs turned out to be the most beautiful reds, pinks, and blues. One of my favorite activities.

The weather has turned here in Washington. Spring is actually arriving. I am working on getting back into running. I ran a half-marathon in 2019, and I’m not sure I want to train for that again, but I want to be able to run three miles easily three or four times a week. The beginning is always the hardest. I just have to keep going and remind myself that I can do it. Movement is the medicine I need right now.

The Psychology of Money is almost finished. Highly recommend, especially if you are building something and thinking carefully about what money is actually for. I picked up a few more at the library last week. I can never have enough books.

Thank you so much for being here! Every week you show up and read this, you are part of what makes Hello West Africa feel possible.

I’ll see you Thursday for the Learning Lens. And next Tuesday, for whatever happens between now and then.

Until next Tuesday,

P.S. — Hello West Africa is looking for aligned investors and Founding Supporters. If you want to be part of building this before the doors open, reply to this email and let’s talk.

It was 2003. I was 21, sitting in my uncle’s car on the way to JFK, and Norah Jones was playing.

Come away with me in the night…

I was about to board a plane to Namibia, in Southern Africa, for a three-month internship with the Cheetah Conservation Fund. I had fundraised my way there. My dad had helped me buy the ticket from a travel agency, one you actually had to walk into. I didn’t have a cell phone. The internet existed, but just barely.

I remember standing at a payphone inside JFK, calling my parents before I boarded. I was scared and excited and crying all at once, the way you cry when something is both wonderful and terrifying in equal measure. I didn’t know when I would talk to them next.

As it turned out. Once. In three months.

To this day, every time I hear Norah Jones sing that song, I am back at that payphone. Twenty-one years old, about to go somewhere that would quietly begin to change everything.

Where Hello West Africa Really Comes From

I want to tell you something about Hello West Africa that doesn’t appear in the business plan.

The design of this company, the philosophy behind it, the way it’s structured, what it prioritizes and why, didn’t come from a classroom or a textbook. It came from experiences. Specific ones. The kind that leaves a mark so quietly you don’t realize it until years later, when you look back and think: oh. That’s where that started.

It started in Namibia.

I arrived at the Cheetah Conservation Fund for the first time at night. My job as the passenger was to watch for wildlife crossing the road. At any moment, a giraffe or kudu could have appeared in the headlights. I certainly wasn’t in Kansas anymore, although in Alaska, moose could cross the road. Before going to bed, I looked up and saw the Southern Cross.

The next morning, I saw the place with wide and curious eyes. CCF’s headquarters sits on a 142,000-acre reserve adjacent to the Waterberg Plateau Park in central Namibia, a full-scale research and education facility with thatched-roof buildings that caught the morning light in a way I still remember. It is a remarkable operation, built from the ground up by Dr. Laurie Marker, whose words I only recently rediscovered:

“We always think there is someone else who will do something, that ‘they’ will take care of it. I realized early in my work that there is no ‘they,’ and so I decided that I would take action.”

I had no idea how much that sentence would eventually mean to me.

(There were also giant flat spiders on the bathroom walls. Now that’s something I had to get used to...couldn’t scream and run away every time I saw one!)

I worked with cheetahs. I went for runs after work and got warned to watch out for oryx, baboons, and warthogs on the path. I learned from people who had dedicated their lives to conservation. It was everything I had hoped for.

And yet. There was a nagging feeling I couldn’t quite name.

The Namibian staff who worked at CCF lived with their families nearby, but I was never invited over. I wanted to see what a traditional Namibian home looked like. I was curious about their lives and their culture. (One of the young Namibian interns mentioned missing sour milk once, and I found myself thinking, who would want to drink sour milk?) But there was an invisible line between the visitors’ world and theirs, and I didn’t know how to cross it. I’m not even sure, looking back, whether I could have asked.

I filed it away as a nagging feeling I couldn’t name yet. And I moved on.

Then something else happened that planted a second seed.

Two Peace Corps volunteers had recently transferred to CCF from a village posting elsewhere in Namibia. They had spent their service helping build a library for the community. They had poured time, funding, and effort into it. And then the library sat unused. The volunteers couldn’t understand why no one was coming. They felt like none of their work was appreciated. (I’m sure there were other issues. That was over 20 years ago, and memory is imperfect.)

I was 21. I didn’t say anything out loud. But a question formed quietly in the back of my mind:

Did the community even want a library in the first place?

Fast forward four years. The Peace Corps idea had been circling for a while, surfacing when I was working with cheetahs again in White Oak, Florida, and again when I moved to Seattle and was working at Starbucks. I finally submitted my application. They said: Congratulations, you’re going to Benin!

I had to find Benin on the world map.

I took French lessons. I checked the CIA World Factbook. I learned that Benin had two national parks in the north with safari-style wildlife. I thought, given my background, they would surely post me there.

Instead, I was assigned to a small village called Camate-Shakaloke, to work with an organization called CPN les Papillons, Connaître et Protéger la Nature “les Papillons.” Papillon means butterfly in French. I thought maybe I would be working with butterflies.

It was actually a small tourism and education nonprofit, a modest inn and restaurant, eco-tours through the village and up into the hills, and facilities for community meetings. My future husband, Thomas D’Aquin Kouda, had helped form it. The wildlife I encountered was chickens, goats, cows, and the occasional snake. Monkeys, rarely.

And I didn’t miss the exotic animals. Not once.

Because Africa, the real Africa, the one that doesn’t make it onto safari brochures, became about something else entirely. The people. The culture. The way communities hold each other. The extraordinary ordinary life of a place the rest of the world had decided wasn’t worth looking at carefully.

I remember one evening, sitting outside D’Aquin’s family photography studio alongside the main road going north, sharing a glass of sodabi (the local distilled palm wine, something like moonshine) with D’Aquin, his father, and a few other men. The conversation had drifted to money, specifically to the various aid organizations that came through, bringing funding, plans, and decisions made somewhere far away by people who had never lived there. One man looked up and said:

“I wish they would just give us the money. We know what to do with it. We don’t need anyone telling us what to do with it.”

I still think about that conversation.

That nagging feeling from Namibia? It finally had a name.

I didn’t want to observe from a comfortable distance. I wanted to belong, even briefly, to somewhere real.

That instinct, don’t impose, be invited. Observe, understand, then belong is the entire philosophy of Hello West Africa. It didn’t come from my dissertation. It didn’t come from a business book. It came from a payphone at JFK, a Namibian staff member who missed sour milk, a library nobody asked for, a glass of sodabi on a dirt road, and a small tourism and education nonprofit with a butterfly in their name in a village I hadn’t planned to go to.

Every experience shaped the design.

And Dr. Laurie Marker? The woman who decided there was no “they” and just did it herself?

I think about her too.

What Really Happened Last Week

I had a list. It was ambitious. Here is what the list said and what actually happened:

Finish the final version of the business plan draft — done. ✅ Sending it to my SCORE advisor this week. (And since we’re building in public, I used LivePlan to put the financials together, and it is incredible. Especially for someone who loves watching other people build beautiful Excel sheets but is considerably less confident building them herself.)

Redo the website — started. Nowhere near finished. The website is currently somewhere between “old version” and “new vision,” which is its own special kind of chaos.

LinkedIn posts — done. ✅

Instagram — done. ✅ I have started working with an Instagram coach, which is already incredibly helpful. Social media is a landscape I have observed for a long time without fully participating in. Having someone to ask questions is making a real difference.

Start the pitch deck — did not happen. It is on this week’s list.

Actually call anyone about investment — also did not happen. This is the one that requires me to go through it rather than around it. Working up to it. Publicly. Right here.

So. Partial credit. Moving on.

What I’m Learning

Two things this week.

The first: building in public is not a social media invention. Walt Disney set up a time-lapse camera while building Disneyland in the 1950s and shared the footage with people. He wanted them to watch something being created in real time. He also said something I keep coming back to:

“The park means a lot to me in that, it’s something that will never be finished. Something that I can keep developing. A thing I can keep building as long as I can get some money to build it with.”

That’s exactly what Hello West Africa is. The impulse to bring people along, to make the building itself part of the story, is not new. It’s human. I find that genuinely comforting.

The second: I always overestimate what I can accomplish in a week, usually because I forget that I am also the CEO of my family. (The title comes with no salary and considerable responsibility.) I’m working on time blocking by starting with tracking where my time actually goes, using the Toggl app. It is both illuminating and occasionally disconcerting. Laura Vanderkam would approve.

I also have a bulletin board now, inspired by someone on Instagram, where I can see everything and physically move things around. Visual, tangible, real. Much better than a list I can’t see.

What’s Coming Next

This week, the pitch deck gets started; no more avoiding it. The website continues. And I am going to make at least one phone call about an investment. Actually asking the question to give money. One. That’s the goal. One name, one conversation.

I have been thinking about setting up a time-lapse of my own, of the website being built, or the pitch deck taking shape. Mostly, I stare at a screen, which is less cinematic than Disney’s construction crew. But the spirit is the same.

I also plan to start sharing some of the tools and apps that are making this build easier. I love finding things that work, even if that means occasionally going down a rabbit hole for hours. (Nerdy, I know, but also so much fun. And most of the time, worth it. Usually.)

I can’t wait for the day I get to tell you the capital has been raised and we are heading back to Benin. When that happens, I’ll start sharing what’s happening on the ground at Kabole, the construction updates, the property, and the community. That’s the part of this story I can’t wait for you to see.

In My Free Time

It rained all week here in Washington. And then on Friday, it flooded. The second time this winter, the first being December. The gray is something I haven’t quite made peace with, but I appreciate the moments when the sun appears. We got out for a couple of walks. We made homemade pizza, dough and all.

The episode of The Pitt was something else. No spoilers.

On the reading list this week:

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene Queen Charlotte by Julia Quinn Tales from Another Mother Runner, edited by Dimity McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea, because I am attempting to get back into running, and reading stories of other mothers running sparks the joy in running that I know is there.

And the daily crossword. Always the daily crossword.

The boys are well. Life between here and Benin continues, even when Benin feels far away.

Until next Tuesday,

P.S. — The library nobody asked for. I think about that more than you might expect. It’s in the DNA of everything we’re building.

This time of the year in Benin, where we live, you start praying for rain. Every dark cloud you see sparks another conversation about how it’s been so long since it has rained, and that those clouds are certainly holding a wonderful secret. You see, it is nearing the end of the dry season. Water hasn’t fallen from the sky since at least November or early December before.

The dirt roads are so parched that they are cracking. Everything is dull, brown, dry, and dusty. The large cisterns have dried up, and we have to pull out the familiar yellow containers and head to the local water pumps, or, in our case, most of the time, hire someone or get the neighborhood kids to do it.

You wait…and wait…to hear those first drops of rain on the tin roofs. And then, one day, in late March or early April, the sky darkens, the air chills, and you hear it.

Pitter. Patter. Pitter. Patter.

Everyone rushes around to pick up anything that shouldn’t get wet. Windows are closed. Any type of bucket or basin you can find is brought outside to catch the rain. No more using the yellow containers! And then you run out on the front porch and breathe in the air heavy with rain, and you feel like you are in one of those CDs that get played while getting a massage, rain hitting the tin roof. A giant smile makes its way to your face, and conversations almost seem to get a bit lighter.

The brown landscape turns green in less than a week. And so begins the planting season.

Rain. So unbelievably happy to see it.

Something I’m sorry to say I’m tired of seeing right now as someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest.

A Little Background

That green, the one that arrives after the first rain, is exactly what I picture when I think about Kabole. Our property. The place where Hello West Africa is being built, piece by piece, from two continents at once.

For those who are new here, Hello West Africa is rooted in a specific place: our property in Benin, a small country nestled between Nigeria and Togo. The village of Kabole, where our house sits, is about 2.5 hours north of Cotonou, between the cities of Dassa and Glazoué. We have had this property for about 15 years, and began building our house on it around 2013. We surprised my parents with the build when we all traveled over in 2015. What a fun secret that was to reveal!

D’Aquin has been going back and forth to Benin over the last few years while I finished my doctorate and navigated various life things here in Washington State. I haven’t been back to Benin in a while. That’s a fact I sit with sometimes, the strange experience of building a company in a place you are temporarily far from. But the work has continued. We dug a well two years ago. We added a larger terrace along the side of the house last year. We’ve made it possible to add a second floor, where the Hello West Africa offices will eventually be located when we are in country.

The house currently has four large bedrooms. We want to renovate all of them to include en-suite bathrooms and add three guest bungalows on the property. Solar panels are on the list as well, since the sun is often out and electricity costs in Benin are high. Landscaping. Furnishings. All of it, piece by piece.

It is very much a construction project. D’Aquin has done an incredible job of managing various building projects in Benin from here in Washington.

This is what building Hello West Africa actually looks like.

So, here’s what has led to where we are today.

It started last September or October, when I finally believed in myself and got the ball rolling on developing the business plan. I reached out to a friend I had met during COVID in Benin, someone who was working for Peace Corps Benin (and had been a PCV there before) and was familiar with budgeting using local prices. Together, we worked out an initial financial forecast: what it would cost to run a tour, what the construction numbers looked like, and whether any of this was remotely viable. Without that conversation, I’m not sure I would have started.

From there, through a TikTok that my husband mentioned to me, I connected with a Certified Business Advisor at the Washington Small Business Development Center, and began drafting the business plan and financial forecast in earnest. Having someone else’s eyes on it, someone who asked hard questions and didn’t let me be vague about the numbers, was exactly what I needed.

Then December rolled along, and I noticed a trend on Instagram where people were doing various challenges, and I thought, well, why don’t I try to raise $300,000 in 30 days for the startup capital? I was excited about it. And then, well, it was a lot harder than I thought, and it didn’t happen. The momentum stalled, the holidays arrived, and I took a break. I won’t pretend I wasn’t feeling the weight of that. When you put something close to your heart out into the world, and it doesn’t land the way you hoped, it’s hard not to take it personally.

But here’s what happened instead.

I started talking about Benin. I put out posts in different Facebook groups and had the opportunity to speak at five or six events to real people. And something shifted. Talking about Hello West Africa out loud, watching people’s faces when I described the community and what it means to actually live in a place rather than visit it…it made the whole thing more real. The story got sharper every time I told it.

In one of those conversations, I met a returned Peace Corps volunteer who introduced me to a local RPCV group and recommended I reach out to SCORE. That’s how I found David, my SCORE advisor. We’ve met three times now. The first meeting was humbling; his feedback was hard to hear, and I had a choice about how to receive it. I chose to go back and make a better version. Draft two was significantly stronger. Last week, we moved on to draft three.

That’s where Hello West Africa stands today. Business plan in progress. Numbers are getting tighter. This newsletter has been launched. The dream is getting more real by the week.

What’s Coming Next

This week, I’m turning my attention to growing our presence on Instagram and LinkedIn and beginning to draft a pitch for potential investors. That second one is the one that makes my stomach flip a little.

I love talking about Benin and Hello West Africa. I love the conversations it starts. But asking for money, asking someone to believe in a dream enough to put real dollars behind it, is a different kind of vulnerable. I’ve done it before. I know the no’s will come, and I know that’s okay. But when something is this close to your heart, you protect it.

I’ll also be updating the Hello West Africa website. I put one together last fall, but things have changed a bit, so I want to make sure everything sounds cohesive.

So this week: Instagram, LinkedIn, the pitch deck (anyone want to be my guinea pig?), version four of the business plan, and the website.

All of it. One thing at a time.

What I’m Learning

There’s a quote I was reminded of this past week. It’s from Zootopia, of all places, Judy Hopps, during the speech at the Zootopia Police Academy graduation:

“The more we try to understand each other, the more exceptional each of us will be. But we have to try. And I implore you…try. Try to make the world a better place.”

I know. A Disney bunny. But I think about this more than I’d like to admit. (The boys and I just watched Zootopia 2, which is why it was fresh in my mind.)

Because what I’m learning…from the speaking engagements, from the SCORE meetings, from the conversations with people who lean in when I talk about Benin…is that Hello West Africa is not just a tourism company. It’s an argument. An argument that understanding each other, really understanding each other, is worth the effort. That the world gets better when curious people go somewhere unfamiliar and come back changed.

That’s not a business pitch. That’s a belief I’ve been carrying since 2007.

The other thing I’m learning is best said through the words of a children’s book by Michael Rosen:

“We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! I’m not scared…Uh oh…long wavy grass…we can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ve got to go through it!”

Asking people to subscribe to the newsletter was uncomfortable for me. I am not someone who naturally promotes herself. But when I sent those messages, and people responded, when the conversations started, I remembered why I was doing it. It’s like finishing a workout. You have to remember how it feels at the end, not in the middle. Reading Influence Is Your Superpower by Zoe Chance has also been helpful in this moment.

You can’t go around it. You’ve got to go through it.

And Now, Your Turn

When you’ve had to ask for something that really mattered to you (support, money, a chance), what helped you actually do it?

Hit reply and tell me. Or answer the poll below. I read everything.

How I spent my free time last week…

Outside of the build, life has been full in the best ways.

I finished At the Coffee Shop of Curiosities by Heather Webber, a fantastic, light read that I highly recommend. (It fits in surprisingly well with what I’m doing right now, actually.)

I took the boys to Comic Con in Seattle last week. I grew up watching Star Trek, so walking into a space where people were dressed as their favorite characters, geeking out without apology, was something I wanted my kids to experience. Because there was certainly no way when I was their age that I would have done that. My oldest looked at me at the end of the day and said, “I’m so grateful for today. It was so awesome.”

As a parent, it doesn’t get much better than that.

The weather has been brutal. I grew up in Alaska, so I can handle cold, but the wind here is something else entirely. I’ve been watching The Pitt (I was a devoted ER fan as a high schooler, when my parents let me stay up until 10 pm on Thursdays to watch it). I actually enjoy how streaming shows are releasing once a week rather than all at once. Kind of nice! The boys and I also watched Zootopia 2, which, as you now know, reminded me of Judy Hopps's words.

Until next Tuesday,

P.S. — If you’re just finding this newsletter, Issue No. 1 is where the story starts…in an overcrowded van in Benin in 2007, with a young woman who was absolutely certain she had everything figured out. She did not.

All she could see were the lights and feel the sweat dripping down her forehead as she sat on the hard floor of the more than full 18-passenger van. She had arrived in the little-known country only a few hours earlier, and all of her expectations were quickly being thrown out the window. Life was happening around her with no qualms about how it might look to an outsider. In the humid air, laughter and joy filled the space, offering such a stark contrast to her life in the US Pacific Northwest. The young woman swore she could almost feel a sense of home.

These people in this small country, which she had only learned about a few months earlier, would undoubtedly benefit from all she could teach them.

Little did she know that this country and its people would teach her and transform her life in more ways than she could imagine.

That night, she wrote in her journal.

I am not here to find a boyfriend. I am here to discover more about who I am.

She was so certain.

That young woman was me. July 2007. My first night in Benin, West Africa, as a newly arrived Peace Corps volunteer, sweaty and wide-eyed and absolutely convinced I had the whole thing figured out.

I did not have the whole thing figured out.

Within two years, I would be fluent enough in French to teach environmental education to over 1,000 students across 18 schools. I would design and execute a community sanitation project from fundraising to completion. I would lead international visitors through villages, farms, and nature sites I had come to love as my own. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, in direct defiance of the journal entry, I would fall in love with a man named Thomas D’Aquin Kouda, who was born and raised in the very community I had come to serve.

Dearest Reader, I married him. (Bridgerton fans, you know.)

Benin didn’t need me to teach it anything. It had been waiting to teach me.

That was seventeen years ago. And here is what has been true every single day since:

I have never stopped thinking about going back. Not just to visit, but to build.

The shape of it was already forming while I was still in the Peace Corps, because I thoroughly enjoyed meeting, guiding, and teaching the visitors who came through CPN les Papillons. A tourism company. Real people, curious people, people hungry for more than a resort and a highlight reel, brought into the Benin I had lived in. The Benin of community and ceremony and extraordinary ordinary life.

I turned the dream over in my hands for years. In 2018, I finally put it on paper. A real business plan. And then I made the mistake of asking the wrong person to read it.

What came back wasn’t feedback. It was a verdict. The idea was ridiculous. I shouldn’t have had it in the first place. That’s how it felt, anyway, like someone had looked at the thing I’d built carefully with both hands and just... knocked it over. And the worst part? Part of me believed them. The $300,000 in startup capital didn’t help, either. The gap between the dream and the doing felt, in that moment, like a canyon I had no bridge for.

So I put the dream away.

Except I couldn’t, not really.

Because here is the thing about a dream that belongs to you: it doesn’t care how many times you set it down. It just keeps finding its way back.

I went back to school. Got a doctorate. And my dissertation, which I told myself would be about changing Benin's entire educational system, turned out to be about transformative learning theory and online education. In fact, a five-week virtual cultural tour of Benin. The dream walked right in through the academic back door and sat down like it owned the place. Because it did.

I finished my EdD in 2025. And somewhere in the exhaustion and the pride and the strange silence after years of relentless work, something became very clear to me.

If I can do that, I can do anything.

The fear didn’t go away. But it stopped being a reason.

And then I looked at my 3 kids…watching everything, absorbing everything, learning from everything I do and everything I don’t do, and I thought: what exactly am I showing them if I stop here?

I didn’t stop.

Between Here and Benin is the story of what happens next.

D’Aquin and I are building Hello West Africa, a cultural immersion travel company rooted in the communities of Benin, where we have spent the last seventeen years building relationships, acquiring property, conducting research, and quietly, stubbornly, refusing to let the dream go.

We are not there yet. We are in the middle of it, meeting with advisors, building out the business plan with the help of a SCORE mentor, getting the numbers right, and finding the people who believe in what we’re building. It is exciting and terrifying and real in the way that only things you’ve wanted for a very long time can be real.

I’m going to write about all of it. The wins, the stuck moments, and the things I don’t know yet. The business, the country, and the theory behind why I believe that travel, the kind that asks something of you, can actually change a person.

I’m building this in public. And I’d like you to come with me.

You don’t need to know where Benin is. You just need to be curious.

Welcome to Between Here and Benin.

— Dr. Debra Kouda

New here? I’m Debra — researcher, educator, entrepreneur, and the woman in that van. My husband Thomas D’Aquin and I are co-founders of Hello West Africa, a cultural immersion travel company based in Benin, West Africa. This newsletter is where I build it out loud. I’m glad you found it.

Already a reader from Life with Debra K? You know how I write. Thank you for following me here. The story just got bigger.

Some of you were on the receiving end of email blasts that came from my Dad.

It was 2003. I was a senior at Oregon State, interning at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. The Internet wasn't what it is today, and I had the opportunity to send an email about once a week. I’d send it to my Dad, and he would forward it to the list of people who had helped me get there in the first place, as I had fundraised my way onto the African continent for the first time. It was my first digital newsletter, before I (or anyone else, really) knew what a digital newsletter was. Written from another continent, trying to keep the people I loved close, and on the journey with me. I wanted them to feel like they were there with me.

History has a way of repeating itself.

Four years ago, I started writing to you again. This time from Benin, West Africa, where our family had decided to ride out the pandemic. Substack, a new online platform for writers, had just emerged, and I wanted to try it. I wanted to establish a good writing practice. Keep in touch with people even though we were on another continent. D’Aquin and I had traveled through near-empty airports and airplanes to get there, and suddenly we were living a life without masks and climbing death tolls, in a country that most of you had to look up on a map when I first mentioned it.

So did I, by the way, when I found out that’s where I was going to spend my time as a Peace Corps volunteer back in 2007.

Benin. A small, quietly extraordinary country in the western part of Africa. I fell in love with it…the people, the culture, the way of life. And even though D’Aquin and I returned to the US in 2009, we never fully left. That’s how we were able to bring our family there during Covid. We had a home waiting for us. A community.

Benin stayed with me. It always does.

And you stayed with me, too.

I know there were gaps. Long ones. And yet, you showed up. You opened the emails when they came. In fact...I was just being me, overthinking and procrastinating putting words on the proverbial page.

We came back to the US at the beginning of 2022, into the second semester of my doctoral program, homeschooling my kids and trying to hold it all together. There were many points during those years when I questioned why I was doing it, especially when I became pregnant and gave birth to our third son at the end of 2023. But I persevered. I pivoted in my research. I produced a dissertation I am extremely proud of.

And my kids watched me go through the whole thing. That part matters most.

Thank you. Sincerely, thank you.

A short update on Mireille.

For those who have been here since last August, Mireille is D’Aquin’s sister. She has been living with double kidney failure, going for dialysis once, sometimes twice a week, in a country where that kind of sustained medical care is not simple or cheap.

When I shared her story with you, you gave. People who had never met her, never been to Benin, never heard her name before I wrote it in a newsletter…you gave. Together, from this little community, we raised nearly $4,000. The family began fundraising in Benin this past January and has now raised $25,000. Mireille is still in treatment. The road is still long. But she is here and persevering.

So. Here’s what I came to tell you.

Life with Debra K is getting a new name. And a new purpose.

Tomorrow, I’m relaunching. New name. New focus. Same honest narrator you’ve been reading for four years, but with something more specific to say and somewhere more intentional to go.

The new newsletter is called Between Here and Benin.

It’s the story of building Hello West Africa. A cultural immersion travel company that D’Aquin and I have spent seventeen years quietly constructing from the inside of two continents, two languages, two ways of being in the world. It’s a founder’s journal. A love letter to a country most people still have to look up on a map. A place where I’ll think out loud about transformative learning, about what it really means to cross cultures, about the business of building something that has never existed before.

The subscribe link is the same. You don’t need to do anything. If you’re reading (or listening) to this, you’re already invited. All you have to do is show up tomorrow.

One last time, and one more time: thank you for being here.

— Debra

P.S. — Mireille says thank you too. She doesn’t know all your names, but I do.