Welcome to the unique discoveries & unexpected lessons of living abroad in my #BlackExpatLife

Living life in multiple timezones and cultures

Hi! My name is Rachelle Harris and I've recently moved to Southeast Asia. I am a native New Yorker with Haitian roots and have spent most of my marketing career building, reinvigorating and promoting brands in NYC. I'm also an amazingly supportive wife and proud mother to two very energetic kiddos under 8.

Prior to Sept 2021, the most we had traveled as a family was a 4 hour flight. However, since the pandemic hit, our last 2 years we mostly just traveled to the edges of our town. Individually we traveled for work and pleasure, but as a family unit we simply hadn't gone very far in the early baby years.

That is until an opportunity came along to push our lives into overdrive, turn everything we thought we knew upside down and move to the other side of the planet. And we took it.

We are now living our lives in the middle of a pandemic in a different hemisphere, with new cultural norms to learn, wonderful new people to meet and amazing places to see. But we are not just learning about new places but also about ourselves as we understand who we are once we step outside of the familiar.

So what can you expect with this blog? Witty family anecdotes, interesting travel info, a dash of self-reflection, stories about the interesting people we meet, observations on cultural differences and lots of appreciation for having access to another way of life.

What does it mean to be a BlackExpat?

We are just beginning to find out how our life is different as a Black Expat.

As Americans in our 40s with very strong ties to family, friends, community and work, we thought that we had a pretty good understanding of ourselves. But life abroad has certainly started to throw us some curve balls.

Let me know if you have questions, recommendations or suggestions. I'm new to the expat game but not the game of LIFE.

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