After finishing university, I packed my rucksack and travelled across Europe for a year. On my return, I opened a restaurant/café in Santiago, which I ran for three years. In 1983, I met my future husband, Brian, and moved to England the following year. We now have three grown-up daughters. I worked in insurance for five years while the girls were young but then decided to change careers and retrained as a teacher. I taught Spanish at Epsom College for ten years, where I was able to share my passion for Latin America with my students, opening up a whole new region to them that up to then had not been included in the standard language teaching.
Although I have spent most of my life in the UK, I have always maintained strong links with Chile, both socially and through charity work, and encouraged my students to learn more about the different cultures and life in South America, and Chile in particular, helping them organise work experience and gap year activities in Chile, attending conferences , etc.
The travel bug has never left me and Brian and we are not planning to stop quite yet.