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.

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