One day the secret police came to our apartment, ransacked our house and turned everything upside down. They said, ‘We’ve been following your wife and we know she’s been attending an underground church. If we ever see her attending again, your daughter will...
I am Austrian and my husband was Italian, but we met when we were both working in a hotel in Geneva. Because we couldn’t speak each other’s languages, we had to speak to each other in French! We liked our life in Switzerland, but we would have had to reapply for our...
I have a startup which aims to grow ethical diamonds in a laboratory. I came from Japan to do my last two years of school in Armidale, at the same school where my mother had done an exchange 35 years earlier! Next, I got accepted into UNSW to study Material Science...
I was born in Port Moresby, as my father was an Agricultural Scientist who went over to work with the Papuan government when it was an Australian Trust Territory. Then, when I was 7, he founded an Agricultural College in Keravat and became the first Principal. Keravat...
My parents lost a baby in the Gulf War because the hospital was attacked. After that, they fled Iraq to Libya, where we lived a relatively peaceful life until 2011, when everything turned upside down. One day it was a protest, the next it was the Arab Spring, then the...
In the 1970s, anybody who questioned the military regime in El Salvador was an enemy of the state. So one day my parents were uni students sitting around over a cup of coffee and then all of a sudden, they were considered insurgents. And they did what I guess anybody...
