Between Here and Benin

Transformative Travel Can Be Designed. Here Is How PDF → https://thekoudacompany.com/store/p/transformative-travel-can-be-designed-here-is-how About two weeks ago, I started getting the newspaper delivered...not for the news, but for the crossword. And it got me thinking about how rarely we put ourselves in front of ideas that challenge us, and what happens when we do. In this episode, I'm using t...

Issue No. 15 | Building Hello West Africa A trip in the Wayback Machine to understand why I'm building Hello West Africa Links mentioned in this episode: Goals for Peace → LINK Transformative Travel Can Be Designed, PDF → LINK Someone reached out this week after reading one of my LinkedIn posts and told me he could finally put a name to the experiences that had been shaping him. His words brought...

This week's episode is a shorter one — because I pulled a muscle in my back. The same muscle I first pulled in the summer of 1999, mopping floors at the local vet clinic while "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls played on the radio. But a shorter episode doesn't mean nothing to say. This week I share: The early mornings and late nights in Benin What it was like waking up before sunrise in the scholfis — o...

Show Notes — Issue No. 13 | Building Hello West Africa From a panther enclosure in Florida to believing in myself again In this episode of Between Here and Benin, I take you back to a zoological conservation center in northern Florida, where I was 24, raking leaves and picking up sticks in a Florida panther enclosure — and stumbled onto Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on the truck radio. That job, and wha...

The Transformative Travel Guide People Kept Asking Me For In this episode of Between Here and Benin, I share the story behind a guide I finally made after being asked the same question twice, and finding myself with nothing good to send. Transformative travel is gaining traction in the industry, but the research behind it lives almost entirely in academic journals and doctoral dissertations. This...

A lot of soccer-related things have happened in the last few days. Arsenal won the English Premier League title. Paris Saint-Germain beat Arsenal for the Champions League Cup. And then, of course, coming up this summer, the FIFA World Cup comes to Canada, the US, and Mexico. You might be wondering, why is she talking about all of these soccer things? Well, I used to be one of those people who didn...

My parents have been to Benin three times. The first time was in 2008, mainly out of curiosity about where their daughter was spending twenty-seven months of her life. The second time was in 2009, for my wedding, which they learned about during that first visit when I introduced them to my future husband and my dad gave his blessing. English to French and back again, translated by... well, that is...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 groun...

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...

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 parc...

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...

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 h...

So, I had this realization the other day. I was just sitting at my desk and looked up at the bulletin board I keep above my computer, still full of notes from my doctoral days, and there it was, the ten phases of transformational learning proposed by Jack Mezirow in his Transformative Learning Theory glaring right at me. And then I had a lightbulb 💡 moment. Wow, I’m right in the middle of the las...

Ahh presentations… I absolutely love giving presentations. Everything that is involved in the process of creating an engaging, interesting, and informative presentation. When did this fascination with presentations begin? I know that I have always enjoyed being in front of a group of people, singing or acting. Okay, I haven’t done that much acting, but a much younger me spent many nights belting o...

Hello Dr. Debra Kouda 👋🎉 After 4 years, I finally made it through the process of earning a Doctorate of Education in Leadership and Innovation from Arizona State University! Hooray! You better believe that when my dissertation was uploaded into ProQuest to be published I felt like this! One of the major highlights of my research dissertation, Transformative Learning through Virtual Tourism: Expl...

Hello, and I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend! Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because I feel like I am an executive chef in my private kitchen. The hustle and bustle of timing everything just right to be ready for the determined mealtime is my jam. This year, my Mom and I decided to do a bit of prep work the day before Thanksgiving, and let me tell you, that is...

Hello again! I hope this message finds you well and as excited as I am! If you read my last email, you know that big changes are underway—and today, I’m here to talk about the biggest one: ✨ Collab des Collines is officially launching this Black Friday! ✨ Imagine traveling to a country you’ve never visited, immersing yourself in its vibrant culture, learning from locals, and discovering traditio...

Imagine this scenario: You woke up at the usual early morning time to head to your busy, highly political job in Washington DC. Per weekday habits, you get all of your things together and walk to the metro on the Red Line, looking around and observing the world around you as it is before the times of iPhones and Blackberries. Your ticket gets sucked through the ticket taker and you make sure to gr...

You know what will always be amazing to me? Receiving donations to help a cause that you have put together 🙂 A close second is seeing a moose 🫎 or the Northern Lights - never gets old! This past week we received donations to help Jean and his family. If you missed that story, you can read about it here . And so, we have started the work on our end. You would think that after all this time we wou...

Long time It has been way too long since I have posted to this newsletter. I am sure that you are all on pins and needles about what is going on in our lives! I’ll just hit some highlights which I will dive into further in the upcoming weeks. Kouda's News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. * I am a doctoral cand...