Daphne Margaret Morrison and Neil Kamalakar Shenai were married Nov. 3 at the Four Seasons hotel in Mexico City. Chloe Brown, a Universal Life minister and a friend of the couple, officiated at a ceremony that incorporated Hindu wedding traditions.
The bride, who is 33 and works in Mexico City, is the regional manager for ethics and compliance at Goldcorp, a gold mining company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, with operations across Canada and Latin America. She graduated from Middlebury College and received a master’s degree in global affairs at the University of Toronto.
She is a daughter of Barbara E. Jordan and Allan L. Morrison of Toronto. The bride’s father is the principal and founder of a Toronto-based international and commercial law firm that bears his name. Her mother, who is retired, was a consultant in Toronto for Toronto Children’s Services.
The groom, also 33, is the senior adviser to the under secretary for International Affairs at the Department of the Treasury in Washington. He previously served as the Treasury Department’s financial attaché to Mexico and Central America, and was based in Mexico City. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University, from which he also received a master’s degree in international finance and a Ph.D. in international political economy. He is the author of “Social Finance: Shadow Banking During the Global Financial Crisis” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
He is the son of Shaila K. Shenai and Kamalakar P. Shenai of Orlando, Fla. The groom’s mother, who is retired, was the vice president for marketing production at the Xerox Corporation in Rochester. His father, also retired, was the chief client officer of Sutherland Global Services, a business process outsourcing firm in Rochester.
When Ms. Morrison booked a one-way ticket to Mexico City in September 2014, leaving behind a good job in Toronto, “everyone thought I was crazy,” she said. “But Mexico was undergoing fiscal and financial reform, which opened up many new opportunities.”
She soon found work there as a senior associate in the investigations and dispute practice at Kroll, a corporate investigations and risk consulting firm based in New York.
In December 2016, she found Mr. Shenai, whom she was introduced to through a mutual friend at a bar in Mexico City. He had arrived three months earlier, just after being appointed the Treasury Department’s representative to Mexico and Central America.
“I had broken up with the woman I was seeing prior to moving because neither of us wanted to date long distance,” he said. “So when I moved to Mexico, I was single and a little bit lonely, and decided to throw myself into my work.”
Then he met Ms. Morrison, who threw him for a loop.
“I thought she was just this incredibly dynamic, intelligent woman,” Mr. Shenai said. “We clicked immediately, and spoke as if we had known each other all of our lives.”
They learned they had grown up about 100 miles away from each other on opposite sides of Lake Ontario, she in Toronto and he in Rochester. They also lived a block apart in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, and had several friends in common.
Mr. Shenai told Ms. Morrison he thought her move to Mexico City, “was courageous, not crazy.”
“Anyone willing to leave behind a cushy life in a developed world and move to a more uncertain place, well, there’s a certain level of adventure there, a willingness to roll the dice,” he said, “and I found that very attractive about her.”
Ms. Morrison, who would start at Goldcorp in March 2017, knew she had found someone special in Mr. Shenai. “He was a very handsome and extremely positive person,” she said. “He was also very easy to talk to, someone I just wanted to be around.”
When they returned to the States for a few weeks to enjoy the holidays with their families, he was all she could think about.
“I was counting the days until I saw him again,” she said.
