A Bakery in Montreal, Minus Thirty Outside
Firas ran a bakery in Homs, lost it in 2013, and opened a new one in Montreal six years later. He talks about Quebec winters, French classes at night, and the first customer who cried.
The Nurse Who Learned Arabic on Night Shift
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Show notes
Marisol, Cebu to Riyadh
Marisol trained as a nurse in Cebu and took a Riyadh contract in 2014 to pay for her younger brother's schooling. The two-year plan became eleven. In this conversation she is funny, precise and completely unsentimental about what it cost.
- Why the recruitment agency fee took her first fourteen months of salary
- Learning Arabic from elderly patients in the dialysis ward
- The monthly remittance ritual and what her family built with it
- Raising a daughter through a phone screen, and the day she flew home for graduation
- What she tells the new nurses arriving from Manila
Recorded in Riyadh during a rare week off. Thank you to Marisol for her trust and her coffee.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome in. I am Tolu Adebanjo and this is Two Suitcases and a Visa, the show where one person tells me the whole story of leaving home, not just the headline. Today I am with Marisol, a nurse from Cebu who went to Riyadh in 2014 on what was supposed to be a two-year contract. She is still there. Eleven years, one daughter raised mostly through a phone, a brother put through university, and an Arabic vocabulary she learned entirely from patients on the night shift. We talk about the agency fee that ate her first year, the remittance ritual that her whole family planned their lives around, and the graduation she nearly missed. Stay with us, it is a good one. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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