Women Who Walk

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.