My parents separated when I was on a student exchange in Geelong. That can be a very significant change for anyone, but when you’re 16 and living overseas, and something so profound happens to you, it really turns your world upside down. As a result, the relationship...
When we were 10 years old, one of our friends said that he had heard the adults say that Aleppo was going to turn into a war zone in less than year, and we felt such fear in our stomachs. We said, ‘No way, that’s never going to happen.’ But soon after that, our...
Although my mother is Jordanian and I was born in Jordan, my father is Syrian and in Arabic countries we follow the citizenship of the father. Every year we used to go to Syria for holidays, and every year my father would say, ‘Just one more year and then we’ll move...
In Vietnam, Mum was making four nuggets of gold a day as a butcher and Dad was making seven nuggets as a tailor. We had three servants; one to cook, one to clean and one to look after my brother and I. But when they know that you have a three-story, flashy house and...
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...
