Vancouver, Canada - For thousands of years, people's lives went on with barely noticeable, incremental changes. But now changes seem to occur daily.

The climate is changing. Whole countries disappear and others appear. Not that long ago, there was no Nunavut. Soon, Britain may no longer include Scotland. Towns and villages are being abandoned worldwide; friends and families scatter to different cities and even different countries.

Neighbourhoods change, buildings are demolished and new ones built. Venerable companies and even political parties that survived world wars, depressions and recessions no longer exist. Jobs that were once secure and valued no longer exist.

Most people feel powerless in the face of it. Not Bill Bell, he's embraced it — "You gotta make change," says Bell.

He's been a businessman, political adviser, politician, nomad and expat.

Eleven years ago at age 48, Bell and his family packed up the RV and headed to Mexico. After 12 years as a councillor, Bell had just lost the North Vancouver mayoralty election by 284 votes to Barbara Sharp. Two years earlier, Bell — who had run election campaigns for NDP premiers Bob Skelly, Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark — ran as a Liberal in the federal election and got clobbered by Conservative Ted White.

Clearly it was time for something new. So, Bell shut down his government-relations company, which had clients such as Pacific Western Brewing and Interfor. His wife, Dorothy, gave up her career, which had included being executive director of the B.C. Recycling Council, commissioner of hazardous waste reduction, as well as stints on the school boards of both Burnaby and North Vancouver.

They gave away their power suits, sold their North Vancouver house and all its contents. At first, their two teenagers, Adam and Dylan, weren't happy. Big-screen TV was replaced by a moving landscape; comfy couch by camp chairs; going to school by Internet learning. "It can be scary," says Bill. "I can still remember the butterflies of worry back then."

For two years, they wandered around. It brought them all closer together, forced them to rely on each other and not take one another for granted.

But after Dorothy was hit by a truck when she was riding a motorcycle and temporarily lost her memory, they looked for and found a permanent base.

"We came here because nobody has any memory here," Bill says of the small village of La Penita de Jaltemba Nayararit near Guadalajara, where close to 5,000 Canadian snowbirds spend their winters.

Once settled, the Bells continued to build their website for RVers, ontheroadin.com. The driving guide for Mexico now gets 100,000 distinct visits a year. And, they started Sol Mexico News, an online newspaper for English speakers that has 5,000 subscribers.

But what they're passionate about is charity work. Together, they have founded and led 10 different charities under the umbrella of the Jaltemba Foundation. While Bill has raised thousands of dollars for computers for schools, Dorothy most recently organized a cancer walk that raised money for a mammogram machine.

They're working twice as hard as they did in Canada for about 1/10th of the money - but they're happy.

After years of trying to make a difference in people's lives through policy change and the political system, Bell says they've learned that it's easier and more gratifying to put that time and energy into grassroots efforts.

"It's fabulous when you go to the villages to deliver food to the food banks or at Christmas when you take Santa Claus to the Colonias. I'm doing that rather than trying to make policy changes where you don't see what's accomplished and everybody's shooting at you because that's the nature of politics."

For all their work, the Bells were recently named 'Real Heroes of Mexico' by a government-funded magazine.

"How can I not be happy?" he asks when we talked via Skype.

Which is not to say that Bell doesn't miss things. He misses the snow-covered Lions on a bright winter day and his bilingual, bicultural kids who moved back to Canada to finish school and to work.

Still he says, "I'm quite satisfied with what we've accomplished ... When I can't go anywhere else or make any more changes, I'll look back and say I did it my way. But it ain't over yet."