I’m Kat, the face behind A Way Abroad

I’ve been living abroad since January 2013, when I moved to Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer. I never really saw myself staying abroad and making it my whole personality, but here we are, over a decade later and a lot more of the world seen.

I had my first taste of life in other countries when I was 18 and my parents forced me off to Guatemala for a gap semester. Really, I didn’t want to go. While it felt like some sort of weird punishment for something I didn’t think I did, it ended up changing the course of my entire life (something I love to remind my mom and dad of anytime they ask when I’m moving back to the US).

I had this idea in my head that the only way to live abroad was by working for the government. Call me sheltered but I really didn’t know you could just move places (visa approval pending).

Once in Ecuador, I met people who worked abroad as teachers and volunteered with Workaway. Workaway sounded cool, so I signed up for a stint in the Amazon and later on an island in Panama.

While in Panama, I learned about the San Blas Islands and that the local tour company always needed guides that speak English and Spanish.

From there I met yachties who worked half the year and traveled the other half. So I moved to France and found myself on a massive private yacht…that I hated. But, hey it was life in Southern France and Monaco and working parties for the prince himself.

Months of backpacking bought Raf (I collected a boy along the way who I later married) and me to South Korea and then Vietnam, where I taught English to kiddos that absorbed the language like the little sponges they were.

A year into living in Vietnam, an ankle injury stopped me cold. I had to quit my job and get surgery and months of rehab. I excelled moving constantly, always on my feet, bum ankle and all.

To literally be told to sit still felt like my worst nightmare. Raf suggested I start a website. I didn’t understand any of the words he used but he was convincing and as a web designer, he didn’t really wait for my approval before passing me my login information.

In hindsight, I might have been slightly annoying those few incapacitated months.

And so began A Way Abroad, although originally it was named Girls Gone Working (I was feeling spicy, OK?).

What was meant to be something to keep me entertained became a passion. I was eager to not just share my path abroad but that of other women to show that there really are so many ways to get abroad.

Since then, I swapped to fully remote work, teaching English online and dabbling in all sorts of jobs until landing a role as a digital marketing manager for an agency that lets me work from anywhere.

I’ve taken that job, A Way Abroad, and now my newest site, Mamma Mia Indeed, all around with me, with most of my time spent backpacking the Balkans and now in Italy, where I’m based with my husband, dog (from Vietnam), and cat (from Montenegro).

The website is still going strong but Substack here is to give me a little chance to write more without having to worry about pleasing Google and to connect with the community in a way that I feel traditional social media has lost. Plus, I’ll aim to give more personalized and bite size tips that tend to get overlooked.

Let’s see where this takes, shall we?

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