Bre’s Journey
Hey, my name is Bre. Like my hubby, I was born in Iowa but then moved to Norfolk, Nebraska in the first few years of my life. Unlike my hubby, when I was 6 years old, my family moved across the world to Malawi, Africa. My dad worked at an HIV clinic there while my 3 siblings and I went to an international school. I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything in the world! Although Malawi is the third poorest country in the world, we loved living there and were able to make friends with kids from all over the world. I grew up with close friends from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and South Korea.
One of the coolest opportunities my siblings and I had was to swim for the Malawi national team. With this team, and our mom as one of our coaches, we traveled to a lot of the surrounding countries for swim competitions. One of my favorite memories was riding a crammed full bus for almost 30 hours each way to Maputo, Mozambique with our team, but that’s a story for another time.
As a freshman in high school, I had the incredible opportunity to go to Rift Valley Academy in Kenya for boarding school. After that year, my family decided to move back to Norfolk, Nebraska. This was quite the culture shock for me to leave my home of 9 years, and with it a big part of my heart, in Africa. I eventually adjusted and got used to people asking me questions like, “Did you ride an elephant to school?” or “If you’re from Africa, why are you white?”
During college I had the opportunity to travel around the US quite a bit for cross country and track meets, but didn’t leave the country again until my sophomore year for a spring break service trip to Haiti. This kindled my desire to live overseas even more than before and I started to dream about what that would look like. It always included somewhere warm and sunny as I was convinced that I would not suffer through another Midwest winter. Well… spoiler alert, that didn’t end up working out for me.
A few years after college, I met my hunk of a husband in Omaha and quickly discovered that he was my perfect travel partner for life. He’s the real travel agent who does all of the research on flights and I’m just the one who finds the cute coffee shops and fun places to eat. For more on our love story, see our next blog post. Bye for now! ;)
