Help Jodi Find Her Feet

This is Jodi Ettenberg.

(She’s the one on the right.)

Jodi is a Canadian ex-lawyer turned travel-helper. On her award-winning website Legal Nomads it also says she “tells stories through food,” and her many bylines and mentions in the world’s top online publications (The New York Times , National Geographic , the BBC , The Guardian ) will absolutely back this up.

But for the people whose lives she’s touched, “travel-helper” is equally accurate.

Ever since abandoning the legal world after a life-changing jaunt along the Trans-Siberian Railway, Jodi has been helping people.

Tirelessly.

Relentlessly.

Politely (she’s Canadian).

She’s helped people all over the world to explore the world around them, not with fear and suspicion, but with open-minded curiosity and compassion.

She’s helped a whole generation of digital travel writers and publishers find their feet in an ever-changing landscape, spending colossal amounts of her time offering advice freely and championing quality writing and storytelling wherever she finds it.

She has poured vast amounts of energy and all her formidable communicative skills into her site, Legal Nomads, creating a portal that celebrates cuisines and cultures around the planet in a level of detail you’ll rarely find outside professional travel guides - and her posts are permanently available for free, for anyone to read and use. (Check out the best of them here .)

She’s published a book on street food and runs tours in different countries, teaching tourists how to enjoy the best food while supporting local businesses. As a celiac disease sufferer, she has also dedicated herself to educating everyone about the truth behind the myths about this condition, and now helps fellow celiacs pick the right foods with a series of exhaustively-researched gluten-free restaurant cards she sells through her site.

Again and again, you’ll find her helping people - because she believes it’s the right thing to do. That’s just who she is. And that’s why she’s so loved by everyone who meets her.

Now it’s Jodi that needs the help.

And since she’s too Jodi-like to ask for it, we, her friends and fans, the people whom she’s been helping these past nine years, we’re asking on her behalf. (No need to write in, Jodi - we’ve got this.)

Here’s what happened, and why it’s proving so catastrophic for her life right now.


In late August of this year, after a long, debilitating six months of increasingly ill health, Jodi went to the hospital to get checked out. (Her immune system had previously been compromised by dengue , and doctors she’d seen were stumped about why she hadn’t made a full recovery.) As part of the investigation, the hospital gave her two (!) spinal taps.

When Jodi returned to the New York apartment she was staying in, she found she’d been burgled. Her laptop, her camera, and all her precious digital archives recording her work around the world - all gone.

Unfortunately, what came next was even worse.

In rushing round the apartment in a state of overwhelming distress and filling out the required police reports late into the night, Jodi put pressure on her body that it wasn’t meant to bear.

This is exactly as bad as it sounds.

Your spine is filled with something called cerebrospinal fluid, and it circulates all the way up to your brain, cushioning it. Less cushion? A whole world of agony awaits.

CSF leaks are notoriously slow to heal - and utterly debilitating until they do. Since the leak, Jodi has been suffering from excruciating headaches. She can’t sit upright for more than a few minutes before the pounding starts in her temples. She spends all day laying down, and in horrible pain.

Consequently, everything has stopped for her . She can’t return to her current home in Oaxaca, Mexico. She can’t write, apart from typing into her phone. She can’t run tours. She can’t attend meetings. She can’t do any of the jobs she’s done to pay her way through the world these last 8 years - and as her friends, we want to make sure she can make ends meet for the time being.

Jodi needs our help to keep going, until she can get back on her feet and return to what she does best - helping others.

That’s what this GoFundMe is for.

With the funds this campaign will raise, you’ll be helping with Jodi’s medical, business, and living expenses. This way, she can concentrate on healing and on getting her life back together. You’ll be creating a safety net for her as she struggles through these next difficult months.

Jodi’s loyal, caring community of readers and friends have been hassling her to launch a Go Fund Me over the last six weeks - but she refused, saying that she prefers not to ask too much of them. (Way too Jodi-like for her own good.)

So we decided that if she won’t do it, we’re going to do it for her.

Please consider donating money - or maybe purchasing one of Jodi’s beautiful hand-drawn food maps from her site: https://shop.legalnomads.com/

To echo Jodi’s motto for the last decade - every little bit helps.

Let’s help get this legal nomad back on her feet.

Thank you.

- Mike Sowden (travel writer at Fevered Mutterings ), and the many, many friends of Jodi.