Roze and Dana going out for Saturday brunch and bottomless mimosas! (2014)

I don’t even know where to begin when sharing about Dana. I first met Dana when she was a high school student and a few things stood out to me: her pearls, her blond hair and her confident demeanor and willingness to speak up. As you can see in the picture to the left, she still rocks the pearls.

Dana is so much more than meets the eye. She is a woman who has persevered and experienced some of the hardest things one could ever imagine, though you’d never guess it. In spite of what she’s been through, she is fun loving, outgoing, adventurous and passionate. She lived in Japan for two years and has traveled extensively around Asia. She speaks Japanese and Chinese. I often joke that she thinks she was asian in a former life.

Dana has a mouth on her. For those of you who might not understand what that phrase means – she is someone who speaks her mind and has no problem speaking up and out when something is wrong. I believe it might have even gotten her in trouble when she was younger. She wanted to be named the mouth but I changed it to the advocate.

Dana fiercely believes in equality and fighting systems of injustice. Human trafficking in issue that she is committed to working on. She is someone who seeks out all the information she can find to learn about an issue and puts the information to use in order to make change.

I love Dana and am so proud of the woman she has become. She follows through, pays attention to detail and is focused on living a life that models accompaniment and relationship building. Dana is someone you would want to travel with, especially to a place like Cambodia, where we are going in January 2017. You can learn more about her adventurous spirit and all of the places she’s been on the Journey Guides page.