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 i...
May 25, 2023•37 min•Season 3Ep. 48
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 inf...
May 11, 2023•33 min•Season 3Ep. 47
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 an...
Apr 20, 2023•42 min•Season 3Ep. 46
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 a...
Apr 06, 2023•38 min•Season 3Ep. 45
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 i...
Mar 23, 2023•33 min•Season 3Ep. 44
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...
Feb 27, 2023•32 min•Season 3Ep. 43
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 l...
Feb 23, 2023•19 min•Season 3Ep. 42
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 l...
Feb 09, 2023•30 min•Season 3Ep. 41
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 D...
Jan 26, 2023•37 min•Season 3Ep. 40
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. Rosem...
Jan 04, 2023•41 min•Season 3Ep. 39
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 th...
Nov 30, 2022•41 min•Season 2Ep. 38
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 ...
Nov 10, 2022•41 min•Season 2Ep. 37
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 y...
Oct 27, 2022•42 min•Season 2Ep. 36
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 pe...
Oct 06, 2022•35 min•Season 2Ep. 35
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 opp...
Sep 06, 2022•26 min•Season 2Ep. 34
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, s...
Aug 24, 2022•23 min•Season 2Ep. 33
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...
Aug 09, 2022•29 min•Season 2Ep. 32
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 he...
Jul 27, 2022•32 min•Season 2Ep. 31
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 imp...
Jul 07, 2022•39 min•Season 2Ep. 30
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 ...
Jun 22, 2022•34 min•Season 2Ep. 29
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 Kat...
Jun 08, 2022•34 min•Season 2Ep. 28
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 th...
May 24, 2022•29 min•Season 2Ep. 27
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 f...
May 11, 2022•38 min•Season 2Ep. 26
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...
Apr 07, 2022•36 min•Season 2Ep. 24
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 re...
Mar 23, 2022•33 min•Season 2Ep. 23
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...
Mar 06, 2022•32 min•Season 2Ep. 22
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 acco...
Feb 23, 2022•30 min•Season 2Ep. 21
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 experience...
Feb 09, 2022•34 min•Season 2Ep. 20
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-m...
Dec 17, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 19
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 t...
Dec 08, 2021•30 min•Season 1Ep. 18
