About our community and why we'd like you
to be a part of our online South America expat family.

After many years of living here it became clear to me that expats in South America face situations and difficulties, and look for a different type of information, than expatriates in other regions of the world. Moving to Ecuador or Brazil is not the same as moving to Dubai or Holland... moving to South America presents its own special challenges.

I'm especially interested in creating a sense of community among us because I've lived as an expat my ENTIRE life! I was traveling before I could walk or talk and have never known any other type of life. Even as an adult, I can greatly empathize with the confusion and lack of identity expat kids and teens often feel and I know this isn't limited to expatriate children. Expat men and women also need to feel supported.

As a person who has spent most of her life in South America, I now feel very integrated with Latin American culture. But I didn't always know my way around. It took years to learn to live here, many more to feel a part of the culture, and many others to figure out why I felt like a stranger in what was supposed to be my 'home country' (where is home?)

In June 2007 I began to create a site about Bolivia, where I currently live. There are plenty of Bolivia travel sites (mostly in Spanish and some poorly translated) but I wanted to provide information directed at people who would be moving to Bolivia and living in Bolivia, not just touring. In other words, it provides information expats look for.

Two years later what began as a hobby has blossomed into one of the top viewed English language websites about Bolivia in the world. As soon as it went online it began to soar through the search engine rankings and now gets over 120,000 hits per month. BoliviaBella.com now offers over 1000 pages of first hand information about Bolivia, almost all of them written personally by me. However, dozens of pages have also been contributed by other people who really live and work in Bolivia. The point is, it's all FIRST HAND information and that's why it is so well received.

In addition, I began to receive dozens of messages per week from expats all over the world asking for more and more information. Exhausted from searching all over the web, they are always so happy to find a site where real people who really live in Bolivia actually answer their questions.

So I put my real life explorations of all things Bolivia on hold for a time and began to do some exploring online. I was curious to know why, when there are so many world-renowned expat websites and forums, are people not finding the information they need? And what I came across were huge Southeast Asia online expat communities, and ginormous online European expat communities. Why in the world are South America expats not finding each other? No forum dedicated just to us! That's why!

I took the questions, the hundreds of questions, that I've received over the past 2 years from my Bolivia website visitors and I began organize them to get a good idea of what people really need. And after reading through many many dozens of them again I realized that what so many of them wanted was a real person, experienced in the country they were going to move to, to answer their questions! All the online information in the world did not seem to be enough to ease their nerves about moving to Latin America. They just need someone to listen, to tell them the truth, and to point them in the right direction. Expats don't have time to spend days and days online surfing from one site to another trying to piece the whole story together.

Expats need to know someone else has felt those same nerves, taken the trip, made the same mistakes... somehow it's comforting to know you have a real human helping hand on a computer somewhere down South listening and responding and trying to ease your fears. Expats trust the information they get from other expats. They rely on it to make life changing decisions. It's not like choosing the wrong vacation destination and going home two weeks later slightly disappointed.

Shortly after this 'situation analysis' I decided to build this site as a way to help South America expats organize, network and introduce them selves to each other. It's a sort of "build it and they will come" effort (and here you are).

I now run several websites (I'm dedicated to this!) and it's a lot of work! We need each other and as a former expat kid myself, and now the mother of one, I can tell you our expatriate children and teens do need us to do this for them too. So won't you please join me and help me create our South American expat family and community together?

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