Women Who Walk (Louise Ross)

Sally Cronin was born in the UK in the early '50s, but from the tender age of 18 months, she began what has been a lifelong nomadic existence living in eight countries, including Sri Lanka, Malta, South Africa, the US, Belgium and Spain before settling in 2016 with her husband on the Southern coast of Ireland. Her work and her desire to see some of the most beautiful parts of the world has taken her to many more destinations around Europe and Canada and south to New Zealand. All those experiences, including her weight loss journey, and the people she met along the way, provided a rich source of inspiration for her, ultimately informing her creative work of the last 20 years as a writer and author of 15 books: SmorgasboardBlogMagazine.com

Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, Doreen Cumberford has been an expat for over 40 years. She has moved 37 times living in eight countries on four continents - plus the country moves she and her husband have made more recently as international housesitters! She worked for the British Foreign and Commonwealth office in London, and Cameroon, West Africa. This was followed by three years in Dubai, 10 years in the US, two years in Japan, and then Saudi Arabia, where she lived for 15 years as an accompanying spouse to her American husband and where they raised their daughter. Returning to the US in 2010, she repurposed her expat experiences and launched her career as a cross-cultural trainer, consultant, coach and writer. She is the author of Life in The Camel Lane, a motivational memoir: DoreenMCumberford.com

Montse Oliver was born in the late ’60s in a town near Barcelona where she says, “I had a standard suburban childhood without any international glimpse whatsoever.” By the late ’80s she was juggling a career in finance, two small children, and when her husband’s job relocated to the US, she was extremely reluctant to go; life was simply too hectic to entertain the challenges and stress of a country move. However, she acknowledged that it would be an ‘opportunity’ for the whole family, and so she agreed to the move, negotiating a spousal work visa so she could continue working. But, several unanticipated country moves later, Montse’s international experiences inspired a career transition from finance into a successful business as a visual artist: MontseOliver.com

Parisian-born Isabelle is a marine scientist, and a classically trained homeopath. She's also one of the women I interviewed back in 2018 for my book, Women Who Walk: How 20 Women From 16 Countries Came to Live in Portugal. Since then, she has moved from Portugal to Spain, and now that she's 'sort of retired' she's been active volunteering abroad, in particular, at Spikenard honeybee Sanctuary in Virginia, in the US, and in Tanzania with the organization Homeopathy For Health In Africa. More recently, she's been volunteering closer to home in Rota, Spain for an organization that helps victims of human trafficking. 

As I reflect on the current crisis in the Ukraine, I'm reminded of eight women I interviewed for my book, Women Who Walk because eight of those 20 women either lived through a war, ultimately fleeing their home countries as refugees, or they worked in environments in the aftermath of a recent war; or they grew up with a father who fought in the second world war, and for several of the women, it was a combination of two of the situations I've just mentioned. Eight out of 20 is almost 50%  and what I think that "almost 50%" figure indicates is that war and its tragic fallout is never too far from us historically. By way of confirming the sad reality of that statement, and by way of recognizing the women's courage and resilience in the face of often times extreme circumstances, this solo episode is me reading excerpts from six of those eight stories.

Ana Ghiban was born in 1998 in Bucharest, Romania, where her parents worked in the textile industry. When she was nine, the family relocated to Delhi, where she attended an international American school. Three years later, the family moved to Dhaka, Bangladesh. A couple of years later, when she was 14, they moved to Colombo, Sri Lanka. At 16, the family made their final move within Asia, this time to Shanghai, China, where Ana graduated high school, before relocating independently to The Hague for her undergraduate studies. She chose a liberal arts degree with a focus on Global Challenges. Her decision was in part motivated by her desire for a globally-oriented English education, and also due to her experiences growing up in Asia. In 2020, she moved to Amsterdam to pursue a Master’s degree in International Development Studies. As part of her graduate thesis field work, she spent three months in rural Transylvania with a Dutch-American family, interviewing Romanians, Hungarians, and foreigner farmers living in the region.

Born in Sri Lanka in 1984, Florence Chabert d’Hieres grew up in a loving family in Lyon, France with her adoptive parents, an Italian mother and French father. Fast forward to the pandemic: While in lockdown, and working from home, Florence saw a YouTube documentary, "The Stolen Children of Sri Lanka." She learned that as many as 1500 Sri-Lankan babies had been stolen and trafficked during the 1980s and  after months of research, Florence discovered that she was one of those babies. Learning that her origin story was not what her adoptive parents had been told and realizing that she would never know the circumstances around how she was separated from her birth mother, Florence transformed this potentially devastating information into something positive, applying it in her practice as an Intercultural Trainer & Cross-Cultural Coach. 

Kate is a mid-30s millennial from Germany, a self-professed ambitious career woman. She studied in the UK and Spain, relocating to Taiwan and then the US for work. Her background is in digital marketing and business development, which she ultimately evolved into a business of her own as a certified coach. By way of building her reputation as an expert in her field, coaching international women, she piloted a fascinating study, interviewing 30, expat-women principle-breadwinners, resulting in Kate designating 4 types of “Thriving Female Expats.” In this interview, she talks about the '4 types' and an additional study she conducted, exploring the topics, employability when moving abroad, and re-entering the workforce after a career break of 5-plus years.

Sa-Eun Park was two-years-old when her family moved from South Korea to Saudi Arabia, where there were work opportunities for her parents, both of whom had struggled to survive the poverty and hardships of post-war Korea. In contrast to her parents early years, Sa-Eun spent her childhood adapting to the cultural and social mores of life as a veiled girl in Saudi Arabia, before transitioning to the very different culture of boarding school in the Austrian Alps. At 17, she relocated independently to UC Berkeley, California for college and so by the age of 20, Sa-Eun had adapted to four very different cultures. Now 41, she has moved with ease 32 times across 46 countries for study, for work, for adventure, and to satiate her curiosity and restlessness. But as was the case for many young nomads, with the onset of the pandemic her peripatetic lifestyle came to a halt.

In this interview, my guest, Tanya Crossman, talks about her own experiences as a TCK relocating from Australia, her country of origin, to the US as a teen, and then living in China as a young adult and over the last 10 or more years living and working between China, the US, and Australia. From her position as a cross-cultural consultant and TCK specialist, she talks through the current, and ever-evolving definition of a Third Culture Kid (TCK). Tanya is also the author of Misunderstood: The impact of Growing up Overseas in the 21st Century, which weaves together interviews and surveys with 300-plus TCKs to provide a window into their world. And her most recent publication, a co-authored white paper titled, Adverse Childhood Experiences in Globally Mobile Third Culture Kids is an eye-opening and important piece of research.

Anglo-Brazilian Alexandra Clark was born and raised in Rio in a neighborhood on the iconic Copacabana beach, later living near Ipanema beach, made famous by the sultry bossa nova jazz song, "The Girl from Ipanema.” In her early teens, she made her first international move to attend boarding school in her father's birth country, Scotland, later attending university in England, followed by further studies in Madrid. In the 80s, she relocated to the US and eventually pursued a career in holistic health, specializing in Biomagnetic Pair Therapy, having trained with David Goiz, the son of Mexican Surgeon, Dr. Isaac Goiz Duran who discovered Biomagnetism in 1988. Unable to see and treat clients during the pandemic, in 2020, she moved to Portugal for a sabbatical.

Gillian Harrison is Scottish, now living in Portugal. She moved here in 2018 from Hong Kong, where she and her husband and children had lived for 6 years, and on a boat! Gill has a background in marketing, but when her mother died from cancer in the early 2000s, her interest in energy work and healing lead her to make significant personal and professional changes, culminating with a synchronous event that resulted in her buying and then running a New Age crystal shop in the north of England. Ten years later, when she and her family moved to Asia, she discovered the vibrational healing power of  ‘gongs.’ Studying with a master gong player in Hong Kong, she eventually invested in six of her own. At her community studio, Enso Space, on the coast outside of Lisbon, she plays the gongs in sessions with private clients, and with groups, for relaxation, energy balancing and healing.

Elodie Ribeiro is a podiatrist and reflexologist, now based in Portugal. Elodie is second generation French of Portuguese heritage, her grandparents having moved to France in the 1960s. As a native Parisian, learning Portuguese from her parents and grandparents, her spoken Portuguese was old school and this she found, along with her French accent when she spoke Portuguese, the basis of some clients mistrust of her when a year ago, she returned to live and work in Portugal. Prior to her return, she took her podiatry training from France and her reflexology training from Barcelona abroad, working in Dubai and Istanbul and on the island of Mauritius, and then in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where she built her own private practice. This past year, Elodie has been working at a clinic outside of Lisbon, gradually winning the trust of her Portuguese clients, while also building an international clientele whose interest is mainly in her reflexology work.

Hayley Enright grew up in Florida in the US where she graduated from university with degrees in French and German. But in her mid-twenties, living in New York City, she had a sudden epiphany that changed the direction of her life. Returning to school, this time around, she graduated with a Master’s in Acupuncture, followed by a Master’s in Oriental Medicine and a Bachelor’s in Public Health. Well credentialed, in 2009 she began practising as an acupuncturist in Florida. Four years later, the opportunity to move to Europe came via her partner's Italian passport. The couple decided on France, relocating to Paris, where Hayley’s fluency in French, opened the door for her to build a private practice as an acupuncturist, treating French and international clients. Visiting Lisbon in 2016, Hayley and Frank found themselves captivated by the city to the extent that they relocated to Portugal the following year, where once again, Hayley set up private practice as an acupuncturist treating mostly international clients, but also some Portuguese. 

My guest in this episode is Belgian, Suzanne Vanden Schrieck. I met Suzanne the summer of 2015 at a social gathering of international women in Lisbon and I was curious to learn that she’d trained as an osteopath in Belgium, ultimately practicing cranial sacral therapy. Around the time of her 30th birthday, she relocated to Portugal from Kathmandu in Nepal, where she’d been volunteering as a cranial sacral therapist, working with traumatized exploited women, orphaned street children, and young performers with Circus Kathmandu. Prior to Nepal, Suzanne and her Dutch boyfriend were living in the Czech Republic, very close to the Polish border. However, there she had trouble attracting clients because Suzanne was practicing an unfamiliar therapy that people were not open to receiving from a foreigner. Now, after eight years living in Portugal, she has a thriving private practice treating both internationals and Portuguese, and for Suzanne, the logistics of setting up her business was a relatively bureaucratic-free and simple exercise.

British-Australian, Georgia Marnham, is an Iyengar yoga instructor whose story is full of twists and turns and fateful events that caused her to make dramatic shifts in her life's direction, including country moves with extreme consequences: When in Sri Lanka, the 2004 tsunami struck; while living in Johannesburg, and with 2 young babies, her home was violently burgled; in Brazil, she and her husband chose to live in an isolated eco village in Bahia where Georgia was often solo-parenting her 3 young children while her husband traveled. Georgia credits her success navigating these challenging circumstances, including the impact of surviving a near-fatal car accident as a 20-year-old, with her daily yoga practice, saying that it's the reason for her spiritual, psychological and physical well being.

Landis Wyatt is from the 'bread basket' province of Saskatchewan, Canada. Though she considers herself conservative and somewhat cautious, as an avid outdoors woman and adventurer, she has repeatedly faced her fears, and as a young adult, she learned to ski, rock and ice climb, and more recently she's learned to surf. Her travels have included destinations that could be considered 'risky' for a woman, however, she and her partner, Kent, also an avid adventurer, have been a team for more than 20 years now. And perhaps their biggest adventure to date, has been their joint decision to live and work on Africa's west coast in post civil-war Liberia, one of the world's poorest countries. There they've been working since 2008 for a foundation that Kent's family set up, the Universal Outreach Foundation, and where they've been busy providing clean drinking water, developing new industries, building schools and much, much more ... 

In this last episode of Season 2 and 2022, my guest from Episode 9, Danish-Egyptian, Yasmin Abdel-Hak, starts by interviewing me, Australian, Louise Ross, the host of Women Who Walk podcast. Halfway through the episode, we switch, and I interview Yasmin. Ahead of time, we decided that the focus of our conversation would be female agency in our lives and work. I chose this as the topic because it's the red thread connecting the stories shared in this podcast. In other words, to some degree all the women I've interviewed exercise agency in their lives. Relative to our discussion, agency is a woman's ability to make her own decisions and live her life on her terms.

Rosemary Gillan grew up in India in the 1960s. A child of mixed-race parents, she was called “Anglo-Indian.” At 13, her family immigrated to Australia where she was called "small and dark." In her late 20s, Rosemary's international relocations began when she married. Over a 16-year period she moved 12 countries with her then hotel-manager husband. Along the way they had two children. But when her marriage ended, and her children had launched, with her IT work, she moved two more countries. Rosemary has documented the highs and lows of her peripatetic life in her writing, including contributions to a number of expat anthologies. In this episode we talk about her heritage, the discrimination her family encountered in India and the discrimination her family then encountered in Australia in the 1970s, and how feeling different, like an outsider, was somewhat diminished as a result of finding her tribe and a sense of belonging as an expat.

Originally from Massachusetts, Elizabeth (Liz) Shick began her international journey as a young college student when in the mid 1980s, majoring in Africana Studies, she spent a year at university in Tanzania. Thereafter, she went on to obtain a Master’s of International Affairs in Economic and Political Development at Columbia University. This opened the door to a career in humanitarian affairs and development with country postings in The Gambia, Angola, Mozambique, Italy, Malawi, Myanmar, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, where Liz, along with her Italian-Australian husband, is currently living and working. While living in Rome, she took a creative writing course. A year later and living in Malawi, she began her first novel. Liz’s Malawi novel was not published, but her second novel, The Golden Land, inspired by six years living in Myanmar, won the 2021 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Prize for The Novel.

Tabitha Sowden's story of country hopping is reminiscent of today’s Gen Z digital nomads. But Tabitha’s a Gen X’er, born in 1966, and as a young adult in the 1980s, she was moving with ease between countries, not with her laptop and IPhone, since there wasn’t the technology that’s available today, but with her handcrafted jewelry, which she made in Brazil, and sold at markets in London, Milan, in Germany and back in Brazil. She says it was all a bit hippy’ish, but in-keeping with the time. Now living in Lisbon, she says she's too used to upping and moving to put down roots, but nevertheless, she's not feeling the urge, even after 7 years in Portugal, to move again, well, not yet, anyway.

International mobility is in many ways a privileged one. Yet there is a price to pay and that is the sadness and grief that comes with having to say goodbye, whether you're the one that's staying, or the one that's leaving. Recently, a young woman who was my Episode 25 guest, and who has been my right-hand helper and support person for upward of 5 years, emigrated to the US, where her extended Ukrainian family lives. Elisabeth's departure from Portugal opened flood gates of grief because I was losing someone who had become like family. Her leaving also triggered an acute sense of loss, which I'd never fully processed, over the many friends I've made here who in recent years, have moved onto new lives in other countries.

British-Italian-Brazilian, @JaiaSowden, references three generations of her family moving countries as a "tradition," even proposing that moving countries is "in their blood," and that putting down roots "would feel claustrophobic." Jaia is the daughter of my Episode 41 guest, Tabitha Sowden, and certainly there are overlaps in their stories, such as relocating from Milan, Italy to the UK at around 17, where both mother and daughter finished secondary school. But from the UK, Tabitha ultimately went South, falling in love with Brazil, and a Brazilian, Jaia's father. In contrast, Tabitha went north from the UK, falling in love with the Nordic countries Denmark and Sweden, becoming proficient in the Swedish language. Jaia says it was her grandparent's move from the UK to Italy, when Tabitha was two-years-old, that put this family in motion.  And "It's one of the best legacies," she says. 

Wiebke Anton is German – from a city that was formerly part of the communist state of East Germany. She’s a PhD in Political Science and her dissertation is on the Discourse of Russia in the European Parliament. But Wiebke deviated from academia into a career as a Mediator-cum-Certified Relationship Coach for Expat Couples. In the following interview, she explains how her heritage inspired her interest in Eastern European & Soviet history and how her skill as a political discourse analyst informed and encouraged her transition into work as a relationship coach, and how living in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan – part of Soviet Union until 1991 – was the motivator and inspiration behind her co-creating the Expat Couples Summit. 

Founder of The Black Expat and The Global Chatter Podcast, American Amanda Bates, talks about her cross-cultural experiences growing up in an immigrant community in the US and moving in her tweens to her parent's West African passport country, Cameroon. She explains how and why as an adult she was in the perfect position to change perceptions of black and brown global mobility, especially for folks of color who historically, have not been afforded the opportunity to see themselves represented as expatriates.

Joyce Agee is originally from the US. Currently she lives a couple of hours southeast of the Australian city of Melbourne. Her childhood was peripatetic with her family moving every couple of years. As is often the case with individuals who moved frequently as children, Joyce continued to move, relocating internationally once she'd graduated university in the mid-70s, building a successful career as a freelance photographer in London. She says, "Freelance photography is the perfect career for anyone accustomed to moving frequently. It follows the same learned pattern. We arrive, we do the job, and then we depart." From London she moved to Australia, and then back to the US, and then back to Australia. From her website: "Moving internationally four times has tested my newcomer survival skills. Fortunately, words and images can surmount different time zones and cultural shifts." With that in mind, this past year, Joyce released her first book, The Newcomer's Dictionary, which she describes as the A to Z of words that explore aspects of relocation.

Jo Francis Penn is English, currently living in Bath. As an 11-year-old, she lived in Malawi, Africa; in her teens she lived for a short period in Israel; and as a young adult she lived in New Zealand and Australia. Once back in the UK, she made a career change, moving from tech into writing fiction and non-fiction. Her international relocations and ongoing travels inform her trove of fiction thrillers, and dark fantasy stories, and her entrepreneurial savvy with the business side of  writing informs her collection of non-fiction books. Jo is also an avid walker, often solo-hiking long distances. And in this episode we talk about the circumstances that lead Jo to walk three ancient way walks, including the Camino from Porto in the north of Portugal, to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and her recently-released, aptly titled memoir, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned From Walking Three Ancient Ways.

In this final episode of Women Who Walk, I bid farewell to podcasting (for now). Throughout the three seasons and 48 episodes, I’ve had the honor of interviewing globally mobile women, who shared stories of courage, adaptability, and resiliency moving multiple countries for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom. The podcast has not only connected me to the women and the worlds they inhabited at the time of the interview, but also brought to life the vivid landscapes, streets, and cultures in which they were immersed. To help me reflect on the significance of the past 2 years and how meaningful this creative journey has been, Fiona Marques, a podcaster and fellow Australian also living in Portugal, interviews me.

Originally from the Netherlands, Anouk Cleven has lived in Lisbon since 2017. Anouk and her husband Mark, moved to Portugal from Brazil, where for seven years they ran a foundation, a social and educational center that Anouk founded, and which delivered English classes, computer courses, work training preparation, sport, and music classes, and healthy nutrition support to children aged 6 to 15 from vulnerable situations. Prior to Brazil, Anouk and Mark worked for three years for Voluntary Services Abroad in Indonesia where their work placements were on two different islands. Because of the pandemic and because of the nature of her work, Anouk now works remotely from home in Lisbon as the Director of Sales and Marketing for the Bhutan Spirit Sanctuary. 

Carolyn McCarthy is originally from Boston.  She has lived for the past 15 years in Chile, 12 hours south of Santiago in a rural area, where she's based herself as a writer, authoring 50-plus travel guides for Lonely Planet focusing on the Americas. A fluent Spanish speaker and skilled at tough travel, Carolyn has explored the Amazon basin via dugout canoe, and solo hiked Patagonia for Lonely Planet's Trekking in the Patagonia Andes. She has documented life in some of the most remote corners of Latin America. More recently, Carolyn transitioned to working remotely as Global Communications Coordinator for Tompkins Conservation. The foundation's landscape-scale projects focus on restoring native species in Chile and re-wilding threatened wildlife, such as the Jaguar and giant otter in Argentina.  Carolyn's website is carolynmccarthy.org

In this solo Episode, writer and host of Women Who Walk, Louise Ross, talks about how this podcast came to be and what she hopes to offer listeners, such as conversations with women doing extraordinary things, independent women travelers, inspiring women who for a myriad of reasons left their countries of origin, sometimes making multiple international moves, for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom.

.Andrea Barton is an electrical engineer, turned career consultant, turned writer. She's lived in the U.K. and spent 12 years with her husband and two sons living in Nigeria, the United States and Qatar before we repatriating to Melbourne Australia, where she's from. As a result of her years and experiences abroad, Andrea has compiled and edited two anthologies on the expatriate  experience. She's also written nine stage productions tackling social themes. In Nigeria by request, she wrote about child trafficking, malaria, gambling, safety, and heart disease. Eight of those stage productions were produced in Lagos, and two were performed at Woodlands Preparatory School in Houston, Texas. Andrea is  also an accomplished dancer, and in this episode, she talks about how she combined her writing, dancing and stage production as she moved country-to-country. Her website is BrightsideStoryStudio.com

Joia Lewis was born in Portugal to American missionary parents during the Salazar dictatorship. Ten years later, her family moved back to the US. After studying violin at Boston Conservatory, she continued college in Massachusetts, and at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow, Russia, graduating with degrees in Russian Language and Literature, and Soviet and East European studies. Looking for a way to continue study in both the humanities and the sciences, led to a Ph.D. In the Philosophy of Science from Indiana University. Following three decades of teaching scientific reasoning, philosophy of mind, logic and medical ethics in California and Minnesota, with a hiatus has software publications manager in Silicon Valley, she returned in 2018 to her birthplace, Portugal.

Asia-Pacific Travel & Lifestyle writer, Samantha Coomber, talks about working in Vietnam and Indonesia for the past 19 years living the "Anthony Bourdain experience from a woman's perspective." Samantha  left London in 1998, since then she's been a full-time freelance travel and lifestyle writer, based in Asia Pacific, including three years in Sydney, Australia followed by five years in Hanoi and five years in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, eight years in Bali, Indonesia, relocating back to Ho Chi Minh City in 2018 where she's currently based. She has contributed and updated travel guidebooks such as Frommer’s, Fodors, Rough Guides and Insight Guides, mainly on Vietnam. Her work has been published in countless international publications and in-flight airline magazines. She is author of the first edition of Insight Guides: Hanoi and Northern Vietnam Pocket Guide and co-author of the first edition Inside Guides: Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City Smart Guide; and she contributed to the travel focus, compilation books: To Vietnam with Love; To Asia with Love; and Travelers Tales from Heaven and Hell.

Originally from Australia, Jodie and her wife Natalie have been traveling as full-time international house-and-pet sitters since early 2013. They've enjoyed 95% free accommodation all over the world thanks to their back-to-back housesits. With no home base and no residency anywhere, they travel with all they possess, which is less than 50 pounds each, enabling a sense of freedom with the minimalist lifestyle they now relish. Jodie, and Nat's website is InternationalHousesitting.com 

In the early '70s, Diana left Chicago, relocating permanently to London, where she graduated from the University of London's School of Oriental and African studies. Her postgraduate research focused on Islamic studies. Following positions at the University of Bath, and within the University of London, she was appointed Director of Education at the British Council in Hong Kong. She lectured at various educational institutions throughout China and East Asia, and during this time developed an interest in the history of the Silk Road. Today, Diana has more than 40 years of experience studying and exploring Ancient Near and Middle East history, languages, religion, and culture. Her research now covers the history, art and archaeology, cultures, and religions covering over 5,000 miles of road and 3000 years of history from Rome, Italy to Xian, China and down through the Indian sub-continent.

Yasmin Abdel-Hak was born and raised in Denmark. Her father is Egyptian. Her mother Danish. For several generations the migratory paths on both sides of her family have stretched from the Middle East to Scandinavia, the US and Europe. Her Danish childhood was somewhat unconventional as her father is Muslim and her maternal grandfather, who was in the resistance movement during World War II, is a communist and staunch atheist. In contrast, Yasmin attended a private Christian school for girls in Copenhagen. Her career as a Human Rights Law, began at the Danish Immigration Service,  where she worked with asylum seekers, refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Today, commuting between Lisbon and Copenhagen, she runs her own consultancy, Global Migration and Politics. As a consultant, researcher, and blogger on Middle East issues, she works specifically with analysis and commentaries on the politics and the power games that define the region and the economic, religious and ethnic problems of the Middle East.  

Marie-Pierre Nicoletti grew up in a small town in the French Alps, in a bicultural French and Italian family. After graduating college with a BA in both Applied Foreign Language for International Business in English and Italian, and Italian Language and Civilization, she moved to Paris to attend fashion school. Upon graduating, she worked for the fashion house of Yohji Yamamoto as a trilingual marketing assistant and brand manager. In late 1990, she traveled to the US for a six-month sabbatical in Boulder, Colorado. Eight weeks after arriving, she met her future husband. Ten years later, now a resident of the US and a mother of a young family, she founded the Language of Food, a French culinary, cultural and language program for children and adults. Missing France, she returned to Paris, working in fashion while also researching culinary trends. Several years later, she made a permanent move back to Boulder, rebranding and growing her original program into Blossom Bilingual International Preschool, set to open its doors in May, 2022.

It's the middle of August and the height of summer in Europe, and in Portugal, where I live, that means everyone heads to the beach and life slows down. So today I thought I'd record a solo show and reflect back on the past three months and the evolution of the podcast to date, and that would be the first 10 episodes.

Sandhya is one of the women whose story appears in my book, Women Who Walk. She talks of a happy childhood growing up in the immigrant Indian community of Mozambique, where she was born. When Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in the mid-70s, escalating civil unrest caused her parents to abandon the comfortable life they’d built, and return to Gujarat in the north west of India to start over. Three years later, when she was 10, the family migrated again this time to Lisbon, Portugal in search of opportunities. In this episode we talk about her grown daughters and the family's tradition of Bollywood-style weddings, her vitiligo, which she has lived with since she was a teen, and the evolution of her work with the philanthropic foundation, Minhembeti, that she and her husband founded in Mozambique and where Sandhya is actively involved in seva or selfless work.

I first heard Aparna Aurora speak on a Women in Business panel at the annual Lisbon Web Summit, Europe's most influential tech event, which will be live once again November 1-4, 2021. Aparna talked to a largely millennial and female audience about growing Chutnify, her Indian restaurant from its inception as a street-food concept in 2014 in Berlin, to locations in Portugal, including Lisbon, Porto, and more recently Cascais. In this podcast episode, she talks of her restlessness and moving countries while juggling marriage, a family, and what the ups and downs of building a 5-restaurant business taught her about herself.

Originally from New York City, Berne Weiss moved from California to Central Europe following the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. An activist, Berne is also a Quaker, working for peace and social justice. Now in her late 70s, her stories of coming of age during the cultural revolution of the '60s, and eventually relocating to Hungary, where she lived and worked through the country's transition from communism to a 'sort of democracy' are a fascinating reflection on a slice of history that echoes something of the complex times in which we're living today.

With a BA from Sotheby's Institute of Art and an MA in Dutch Baroque Art from London's Courtauld Institute of Art, in 2013, Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff founded, Art Historical London, offering art lectures, courses, tours, travel and events from London. Over the years, she expanded to events in New York and Amsterdam, and in March, 2020, due to Covid and the cancelation of her in-person lectures and tours, Mariska quickly up-skilled, taking her programming online and worldwide – a marvelous example of how resourceful, and creative we've all had to be over the last two years, navigating the enormous restrictions imposed upon our lives by the pandemic.

In this episode, I have a kitchen-table style conversation with German-born, wise elder, Ingrid Bloser Martins. Ingrid is my neighbor in Estoril, Portugal, and she is someone I've come to know over the years as a woman whose diverse cultural experiences have afforded her a unique perspective. Our conversation focuses primarily on her insights into Japanese culture, as Japan is the longest posting her Portuguese husband was assigned as a diplomat, and it's where they lived in the Shibuya center of Tokyo for 8 years in the early 1960s. During this time, Ingrid mastered the ancient art of ikebana or cut flower arranging. Later, as a teacher of the art, she promoted the exchange of Japanese and Portuguese cultures, which the Emperor of Japan recognized by honoring Ingrid with the Order of the Precious Crown.

Equipped with a law degree, an internship from the BBC White City in TV script writing and film production, plus certification as an ESL teacher, and still only in her 20s, Zoe Popham headed for Thailand for adventure, and to teach English. Serendipitously, she knew an English guy working in Bangkok on a film and he invited her to work with him. The realization that there was international production work in Thailand, led to a job opportunity with an Indian-Thai production company that made TV commercials for India. Over the next 18 years, Zoe worked her way up in the industry, but after a nearly 2-decade career in Asian TV commercial, news and feature film production and post-production, in 2015 she relocated to Portugal in search of a more balanced and healthy lifestyle for herself, and her young son.

Born in 1983 in the tiny country of Moldova, which at the time was still a part of the Soviet Union, Inna was in primary school when in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Because she attended a school where classes were taught in a number of languages, she went on to graduate from University with a degree in English, French and Spanish language and literature, eventually teaching languages in Moldova. But as an intellectually curious woman with multiply interests, Inna adapted her skill set each time she moved countries resulting in a number of career changes. While living in Dubai, she began freelancing as a copywriter, which lead to the publication of two non-fiction books. Her third and most recent publication, Multiversed: Poems of Dreams and Reality, is a poetry collection inspired by her interest in quantum physics.

In 1985, Jill Henry joined the Australian Federal Police and over the next 15 years, while based in Sydney, her work involved general crime, drug seizures and fraud cases. Dissatisfied with 'plain clothes' policing, she applied for overseas peacekeeping roles and was offered a post in East Timor with the UN. In 2000, she was relocated to the former Portuguese colony where she was an officer in the Vulnerable Persons Unit, dealing with crimes of sexual abuse, rape, child abuse and incest. The 6-month posting in East Timor was a springboard to 7 more overseas postings, including Cyprus, the Solomon Islands, Jordan - where Jill trained Iraqi police recruits on human rights and crimes against people and property. This was followed by a posting to a remote Aboriginal community in Australia's Northern territory and then Papua New Guinea.