About Luke

I left the UK as a backpacker looking for adventure, simple living, and enough Spanish to get by. I had no idea I was not really going home.

It started in Nebaj, a town in the mountains of Guatemala, where I volunteered in a local eatery and got up at six every morning to wash the pots. The people I met in that kitchen changed the direction of my life. I helped paint the local library and worked on eye campaigns offering reading glasses.

Then I moved deeper into the highlands, to an isolated mountain town called Todos Santos, where I was given the chance to run a small language school for more adventurous travellers and backpackers, with the money going toward local scholarships. I lived there for eight months, wore the local clothing, built friendships, and felt, for the first time, that I belonged to a real community.

Then came a phone call out of the blue. Some of the people I had known from Nebaj offered me a volunteer role with an organisation called Social Entrepreneur Corps. I was nervous about it. It meant giving up the life I had built in Todos Santos, and I genuinely did not know if it was the right decision.

I took it anyway.

That leap turned into more than a decade of work across Guatemala, Mexico, and South Africa, much of it in rural, non-tourist villages and towns. I helped expand community entrepreneurship programmes that brought reading glasses, basic eye exams, energy-efficient cook stoves, water filters, and solar lamps into remote villages. I ran internship programmes, trained first-time local entrepreneurs, helped develop local partnerships, and later set up a community health and eye-care programme in Chiapas serving rural communities through vision care, nutrition, diabetes education, and local leadership.

None of it was glamorous. Most of it was slow, practical, and learned by doing things wrong before learning how to do them better. I learnt that my passion was innovating and supporting others.

Somewhere in there, my life put down roots. My partner is from Huehuetenango, in the Guatemalan highlands. Our first child was born across the border in Chiapas and came home to Guatemala three days later. A few years later, we moved to Chiapas more permanently, and our second child was born here too. We still make that crossing regularly, and I’ve written up how I take our own car through La Mesilla and back.

I spoke English to both of my children from the day they were born, and I still remember the moment, when my daughter turned five, I realised she could understand me but could not really speak it back. They are bilingual now. Raising a family around the border between Guatemala and Mexico, rather than passing through, taught me more than any project did.

I now live in Chiapas, Mexico, where I have raised my family, worked remotely, built and managed remote teams, and self-managed the construction of my own house in San Cristóbal de las Casas.

These are not romanticised places. They can be hard, and the trade-offs are real. Safety, education, money, paperwork, language, and family life all become part of the experience. But these places are also full of generosity, opportunity, and the kind of learning you cannot plan for from a desk in the country you grew up in.

That is why Alternative Lives exists.

Over the years, I have met many people who made a similar leap: people who traded comfort and routine for learning and adventure, and ended up living extraordinary lives in difficult, unlikely, opportunity-filled places.

This site is a platform for those experiences: practical, first-hand knowledge from people who actually lived it.

I am starting with what I know most concretely: building a house in Mexico, from the real costs to the real mistakes. From there, I want to build outward into other parts of alternative life: moving countries, raising children abroad, working with communities, building homes, and creating a life that does not follow the standard route.

If you are standing at the edge of a decision: backpack on, family in tow, house plans open, or simply wondering whether there is another way to live, I hope what is here gives you something more useful than generic advice: honest detail from people who have actually lived it.

And if you have a question about anything on the site, write to me at luke@alternativelives.org — I read and answer these myself. I’m also on LinkedIn if you want to check who you’re dealing with.

— Luke Burchell