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 connec…

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 an…

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 univer…

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 bl…

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 intervi…

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 …

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 …

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…

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 open…

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. …

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 live…

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 dest…

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 …

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 i…

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…

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 w…

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 profe…

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 atte…

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 sp…

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…

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 exp…

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 ba…

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 f…

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 sec…

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, …

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 …

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 Afr…

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…

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…

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 l…

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. Th…

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 …

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 …

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, wher…

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,…

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 retu…

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.…

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 f…

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 t…

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 …

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 ea…

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 Sydne…

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…

.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 tw…

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 dugou…

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 heal…

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 internati…

This wasn't what this episode was supposed to be about, but the conversation took us here so we hope you enjoy hearing about how we found YouTubeVon Dustin Coney, Veronica Flournoy

Getting through customs in Mexico was a struggle... don't make the same mistakes that we did!Von Dustin Coney, Veronica Flournoy

Ok so our move to Mexico was definitely less than glamorous. Hope you enjoy!Von Dustin Coney, Veronica Flournoy