One woman, two homes, a life on the road
My name is Yvonne Frei. I live in Endingen in Switzerland — and in a house in the middle of the Porini, the wilderness of Tanzania. In between lies what drives me: travel, people, movement.
Who I am
For fifty years I have been a world traveller. I set off, came back, set off again — with a backpack, in a VW bus, with my son in my arms, alone as a woman through countries that others avoid. Our honeymoon with my husband Marcel Frei took us across Africa for a whole year.
I believe in the small encounter at the side of the road more than in many of the world's great theories. It is the people who show me who I am and where I am right now.
Engagement
For more than ten years my husband and I have been accompanying, for the Stiftung Zuversicht, the „Orthodontic Center of Osh“ in Kyrgyzstan — the leading treatment center in the region for children with cleft lip and palate. In Tanzania I support a coffee farm and the people who work there.
My message
To travel is to live and to grow. And encounter is what turns travel into more than just movement. I tell these stories on stages, in books, and in conversation — always in the hope of inspiring and motivating others to set off themselves.