Listening and studying. 

I don’t know that I would even call myself a great writer. I would call myself a storyteller who finally became willing to listen.

Add that to being good at studying and recognizing patterns in people. 

I study people. I listen to the words they use and the words they avoid. I began to listen and study my own life. I listen when something keeps tugging at me. And most importantly, I listen for God.

When I wrote this book, I wasn’t sitting at my computer trying to sound profound. I (honestly God) was identifying patterns to tell the truth about what I had lived and what I now understood were programming from where we base all of our decisions from. 

When something came, I wrote it.

There were days when I wrote for nearly 15 hours because the story was pouring out faster than I could process it.

So if there is a habit behind my writing, it is getting quiet enough to hear what wants to be said, and then having the courage not to edit the life out of it.

I already started it.

BECOME.

But the irony of the name is that I don’t believe women need to become someone else.

I want to create a movement of women who remember.

Women who remember that they are whole before they achieve another thing.

Women who stop shrinking themselves to make other people comfortable.

Women who choose themselves without believing that choosing themselves means they have to stop loving or serving everyone else.

Women who ask God, “Show me what is mine,” and then have the courage to move when He answers.

And women who turn around and do the same for another woman.

Because I don’t believe transformation is supposed to stop with us.

Imagine what happens when a woman remembers who she is. It changes how she mothers. How she loves. How she leads. How she builds. How she walks into a room. How she uses her voice. How she treats other women. What she teaches her daughters and granddaughters.

That’s the movement I want to spend the rest of my life building.

Not millions of women trying to become someone better.

Millions of women remembering they were already free.

Filled with unforgettable characters, breathtaking ocean scenes, and heartfelt moments of friendship, Evan’s Stormy Voyage is a rich coming-of-age adventure that celebrates empathy, resilience, and the power of human connection across cultures. Perfect for readers who love emotionally rich adventure stories, this second book in the Evan’s Adventures in Africa series invites children into a world of discovery they will never forget.

If I could start a movement, I would call it “Open the World to a Child.”

I grew up in Africa, became a teacher, an entrepreneur, and eventually an author, and each chapter of my life has taught me the same thing: when we help children understand people whose lives are different from their own, we plant the seeds of compassion.

I would love to see a movement that uses books, education, and personal stories to introduce children to cultures beyond their own neighborhoods and borders. Children are naturally curious. When they read about another child’s home, family, struggles, dreams, and adventures, that child who once seemed “different” suddenly becomes someone they understand.

That is one of the reasons I created Evan’s Adventures in Africa. In Evan’s Stormy Voyage, children experience the excitement of crossing the Atlantic on a freighter, meeting a new friend from Ghana, facing a frightening storm, making mistakes, forgiving one another, and discovering the courage to face the unknown. They are traveling the world without ever leaving their chair.

As a teacher, I learned that education is about far more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. We are also teaching children how to become human beings—how to be kind, curious, resilient, generous, and accepting of others.

Imagine if every child regularly read stories about children from other countries and cultures and then had opportunities to talk about what they had discovered. We might raise a generation that doesn't begin with, “How are you different from me?” but instead asks, “What can I learn from you?”

That is the movement I would start.

Because if we want to change the world, I believe one of the best places to begin is with a child, a book, and an open mind.

We were shown films in school with images of an enormous blast, followed by empty streets with trash blowing in the nuclear wind. The announcer would insist again and again that if we heard the atomic warning siren, we were to “duck and cover,” wherever we were. And we were told there might be no warning, that a blast as bright as the sun would suddenly happen, anywhere, anytime. Duck and cover movies warnings were played in schools and in the base movie theaters. Readiness warnings were issued at sports events and even in church. Repeatedly, we were told to be always alert for the warnings or the sun-bright blast itself. The message was meant to live in our psyches and be part of our thinking, our identity. We were people under threat. Nuclear holocaust was in my dreams and fueled a steady sense of fear and trepidation. From one moment to the next, you had to be ready for the world to fall apart under your feet. It was a tremendously unsettling discourse and kept all of us, I think, on edge and fearful.

I see this now in hindsight as a terrible experience for a child. Whatever the actual threat level at any given moment, ducking and covering probably wouldn’t have helped much. It only left us with a habit of fear. It probably made some of us more philosophical or religiously-minded than we might otherwise have been, given the end-of-the-world scenario we lived with all the time; but I think the more general effect was a fear, bordering on neurosis, of what could happen from one moment to the next. No wonder the late counter-culture that followed saw such an explosion of liberation and care-lessness, to counteract the intense, imposed caution of our childhood years.

I’d like future readers to know what life was like in the middle-to-late years of the twentieth century, particularly for the children of military families, a generally little understood component of American society. The focus of attention to US forces fighting overseas and preparing for war at home is usually on the service members themselves — all their adventures and sacrifices. I’d like readers to know more about the people who came along with them, followed in their wake — the spouses and children of the warriors. They may well not share the warrior’s priorities or even their ideology, but the children in particular are called on to be part of the picture anyway, like camp followers of all ages everywhere. I’d like people to know more about what life was like for us in our time, but I also hope readers will see how military children still experience the difficulties of moving all the time and the instability of life in warrior society. It’s an age-old portrait and one that’s little understood.