How to stay healthy–and keep your kid healthy–when traveling, even overseas or in the developing world.

A few tips to staying healthy and keeping your children healthy when traveling abroad. Also see my blog on compiling a holistic medical kit for traveling and how to travel well with children. Don’t assume that because you are in a poor country the food will be cleaner, unfortunately, the opposite is usually true: there…
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Traveling abroad with a family: keeping safe, having fun, and doing it “green”. I have found that traveling and living in the developing world has been one of the greatest gifts of parenting for my family. While it was for the “greater good of my children,” that I first decided to pack my little girls up and spend the winter in Guatemala, I quickly realized the most immediate benefits were my own happiness.

What happens when two ordinary Canadians decide to make an extraodindary difference? Project Somos Children’s Village: A home. A family. A future. For the last few years, I have been involved with a very special project: an EcoVillage of sorts for Guatemalan children. My family and I have visited five times: their story and their project have inspired me and hundreds of others to make a difference. Thanks to EcoParent for originally publishing this article.

I want my kids to know how good they’ve got it. Don’t we all?

Like most Middle-Class parents in North America, I parent with a lot more: I obsess about their educational experiences, rush off to the doctor at the first sign of a rash, and worry about which summer camp will be the most enriching.

I am back in Guatemala with my children for the third time. Thus, I have decided to republish and add to some of the previous blogs on my experiences.

It all began in the fall of 2011 when I decided to take my young children (then 1 1/2 years and 5 years) and go to Guatemala for almost four months. Sin espouso. And, no, I didn’t speak Spanish.

Last year when I went to Guatemala with my baby and young daughter, I was horrified. Yes, at the spiders and scorpions and Giardia, but even more at the daily dilemma around diapering babies.

I am back in Guatemala for the second year with my children. Last year we came for almost 4 months and my eldest daughter attended a special, multi-cultural, Waldorf school in a small Mayan village. From chicken pox to chickens, it was a life-altering experience that I wrote about in a series of articles on this site. I also published an article about our trip and the school we visited in EcoParent Magazine.