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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit debrakouda.substack.com