Ree Pashley

Ree has always felt drawn to East Africa; she used her allowance to order Teach

Yourself Swahili when she was just 12 years old. 

After backpacking through Uganda and Kenya in her twenties, she crossed the border into Tanzania and immediately fell in love - with the culture, with the country.

She spent a few months working in Zanzibar and another stint volunteering in

Mainland Tanzania before settling down in lovely Arusha. The rest is a Happily Ever After trope: a wedding, a big family, and a dream house.

Pashley has a background in social work and criminal justice, but since relocating to Tanzania, she spends most of her time chauffeuring her kids around and writing at cute cafes. 

Pashley's work has been featured in Herstry, University of California Press, Matador Network, Go World Travel, and others. She is a contributing author to the devotional anthology Darkness is as Light (Parkend Books, 2021) and Guideposts' Too Amazing for Coincidence (forthcoming, Fall 2026).

Ree and Kyle are cousins — Ree's mom is Kyle's first cousin, which makes them just enough family to show up at the same family events but distant enough in age and distance (Indiana and Pennsylvania are not exactly neighbors) to not have spent much time together growing up. The kind of family where things are warm when you're together, but sadly, life gets in the way.

Then in 2017, Kyle was lucky enough to be invited to Tanzania for Ree's wedding — and everything changed. What started as a family visit for a wedding turned into ten thousand words of correspondence about their shared great-uncle's twenty-six-year-old box of journals, and, eventually, a co-authorship. Turns out all it took to become co-authors was a wedding, a savanna, a love of adventure, and one very stubborn box neither of them could throw away.