Women Who Walk – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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.

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.