OH, THE PLACES THEY’LL GO

While Wally keeps Kilgore Trout on top of its game and Andrea continues to grow her OY-L natural skin care company, daughters Katie and Betsy Naymon are now all grown up—still traveling fearlessly, living kindly and making their parents beam with pride. It’s been five years since they’ve been featured on these pages. It’s a great time to check in!

Katie wasn’t looking for love during her study abroad program in Sweden, but along came Robin Odelind, a Swede finishing his law degree in Stockholm. The pair instantly hit it off. After six months, Katie returned to Johns Hopkins University and their relationship continued—with alternating visits over the next four years while Katie completed her BS in creative writing, received her Swedish Visa, attended graduate school, taught freshman English and acted as an editor at hercampus.com. In the meantime, Robin joined a boutique tax law firm in Stockholm.

Last year, Wally traveled to Scandinavia to visit Kilgore Trout vendors, and while there he enjoyed spending some time with Robin on his home turf, seeing Katie’s future apartment and doing “research” in the menswear stores on the Götgatan and Biblioteksgatan shopping streets.

This May, Katie received her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and promptly boarded yet another flight to Stockholm, this time with all her belongings in tow. Katie loves her new career as an English language editor for an education marketing firm. Though most Swedes speak perfect English, Katie’s goal is to become fluent in their language quickly, because “Ett språk är aldrig nog!” (one language is never enough).

Betsy became an intrepid traveler during high school when she joined a National Geographic Student Expedition to Peru. In the two years that followed, she traveled to Thailand, Laos and Tanzania, spent six weeks in Kenya researching global health and political issues, and backpacked across Europe. And that’s just the start! You’ll need to pull out your atlas to keep up with the rest of her adventures with a cause.

In 2016, Andrea and Wally endured six nervous months while Betsy worked in northern Uganda for Krochet Kids International, helping women affected by the civil war to start their own businesses. Next up was a month-long field research program on social entrepreneurship in Cape Town, followed by four months with a non-governmental organization (NGO) helping the indigenous women of the Guatemalan Highlands. After that, she studied in Chile for five months, before chilling out for a month—by hiking in Patagonia.

Betsy kicked off this spring with a camping trip to Iceland before starting her final co-op at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, where she’s working on randomized control trials measuring the effectiveness of interventions in healthcare, poverty and education in North America. Then, it’s just one more semester before Betsy graduates from Northeastern University with a well-deserved degree in International Affairs and minors in Global Health, Global Social Entrepreneurship and Economics. Look out, world.

Top: Betsy kayaks in the highlands of Guatemala. Center: Katie and Robin, now living in Stockholm, Sweden. Bottom: Betsy celebrates reaching 3,528 meters at the border between Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.