What I've Learned: Tracy Bach

Tracy Bach has traveled around the world visiting places such as Switzerland, Spain, Germany and Costa Rica. Her family created a website called Kai Ohana to document their voyages of a circumnavigation while sailing on a boat of the same name.

To create the website and to prepare for the trip, she took classes at Austin Community College in 2004 and 2005 focusing on classes in design, multimedia, and languages.

"I took a variety of classes, which were taken for the purpose of using them toward this business plan I was working on with my family," said Bach. "So I was taking things like digital publishing, TV field production, photography, things that focus on media, marketing, and those sort of things."

Currently, the Bach family is not on the Kai Ohana boat due to the economy. However, they are trying to get funding for a new website as an offshoot of Kai Ohana called the Kai Ohana Volunteer Voyages.

Volunteers in Kai Ohana Volunteer Voyages would stay off-shore for a week to provide funds and labor to the island of Île à Vache, Haiti. The organization is partnering with Hope for Haiti, a non-profit organization based in Maryland.

"We wanted to help a community that we visited and that really struck a chord with everyone in our family, because the Haitian people have so very little and they got so much joy for barely having anything. We wanted to try to help make their quality of life a little better, so we started the Volunteer Voyages project," said Bach.

Bach has been traveling because of her upbringing.

"When [my parents] were raising us, they believed it was very important to have an expanded knowledge of different cultures around the world because it leads to greater understanding and compassion for humans. So my whole life as I was growing up, we traveled a lot," said Bach.

By the time she was a sophomore, Bach had traveled to Canada, Costa Rica and Mexico. Because of all this traveling and being home-schooled until the 6th grade, her view of the world was different than many students her age.

"I was not as impressionable as most of my high school peers, because I had spent a lot of time traveling to different parts of the world. I just had a different perspective on the world," said Bach. "I think that probably had a big effect on my early life."

She enrolled at Austin Community College in 2003 and 2004 to take advantage of the Early College Start program. Through this program, high school students can take two college courses per semester before they graduate.

"I loved the early start program because for me, the work pace for high school was usually a little slow, because I just memorize things really fast. I tended to get bored in class, and being able to take the more advance classes was really a big deal for me. It kept me more interested," said Bach.

After she graduated from high school, she then studied in France at École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, an art school specializing in art, communication, and design. Upon returning home in 2004, Bach and her family started the Kai Ohana project.

Bach is also an accomplished artist. Having created art as soon as she learned "crayons were not for eating," as stated on her website, Bach has had commissions for her work since she was in high school.

"I've been doing freelance art since I was 11 or 12, and realized that my stuff was good enough that I could actually sell it," said Bach. "[Sophomore] year was my biggest project. I actually was commissioned to do a mural on South Congress for Factory People."

Bach is currently living in San Diego, Calif. with her grandparents and is working as a freelance artist and web designer. Even though her family is not aboard the Kai Ohana, they still have plans to continue their voyage.

"When the economy picks up again, we hope to continue sailing," she said.