I Have Interviewed 32 People Living Abroad In The Past 3 Years And Their Stories Are Shocking, Funny And Tragic! Here Is A Glimpse Of An Emotional Roller Coaster!

For the past 3 years, I have interviewed people living abroad, reflecting on their life stories and thoughts on what is going on back at home. I have collected the interviews in a book; Stories of Global Citizens. The interviews reflect on their stories with insights into culture shocks, their motivations to move abroad, funny experiences they have had and thoughts on what is going on back at “home”. While reading these interviews, one can be surprised, amazed, at a loss for words, saddened and sympathetic. I wanted you pandas to have a glimpse of this emotional roller coaster by sharing 3 interviews.

We start with Hans who is from the Netherlands and lived in Denmark, Spain and Greece, respectively. When I conducted the interview almost 3 years ago, Hans was 74 years old. Although not necessarily related to travelling or living abroad, here is the answer of him to my question of "Do you have any nice/interesting memory in countries you lived that you want to share with us?"

- Aside from kids in Netherlands and Denmark, not really. As said before, I like living in all those countries and could easily move to another tomorrow. I feel good in the place I am, and if not, I do something about it. I never left a place for a negative reason; I only started doing something different, some other place for a positive reason. But wait! I think I do have an interesting story:

When I was a child, I was kind of naughty and an explorer, which led me to be quite active physically. For that reason, my parents would send me to another family to be taken care of in summers. One summer, I was again sent to this particular family and spending time in my room. The woman who was supposed to take care of me came in and started seducing me. Suddenly, we had sex, and months later, we found out that she was pregnant. Her husband thought the child was from him, but years later, he discovered the truth, which is a totally different story.

For many years, I was not in touch with that woman and she never allowed me tell the child the truth. At the same time, the fact that I had a son somewhere and he did not know me felt quite strange. Over the years, I got more and more curious, and contacted his mother, but she still did not allow me tell him the truth.

She was really obsessed with not telling the truth.In her last days in the hospital, when I visited her, she did not even want me to tell the truth after she dies. She was really aggressive. She died, by the way, but I could not hold it anymore, so I tried to find my child and contact him. I searched every way possible and found him through Facebook. I sent him a message, but the message was in his “other” inbox; therefore, I did not get a response for over a year.

Eventually, one night around 2 am, my Facebook message box was red and I did not know why, but I was so sure that it was from him. I clicked it and I was right! He wanted us to meet. We arranged a meeting with him and his family. He is 54 and has two daughters. Yes, I met my son 54 years later! At the family meeting, his 3 lovely daughters, namely my granddaughters, were really looking forward to hearing every single word that comes out of my mouth.

Shocking, right? It took me a couple of hours to stop thinking about this after I first recorded it. Now, we turn our attention to Angela who was 24 when I carried out the interview almost 3 years ago. Angela is from China and together with her family they immigrated to Canada when she was five years old. Below is her answer, again, to a similar question: Do you have any nice/interesting memory in Canada that you want to share with us?

- I do have a funny story. My birth certificate is lost and it's not that my mother lost it one time. It's that my certificate is permanently lost. Now, this was fine for a long time because it never really affected me. However, in 2013 my passport expired, and in order to apply for a new one, I needed to submit a lot of different documents to prove that I'm Canadian. They required either a birth certificate or a certificate of citizenship (every Canadian is supposed to have one).When I became a citizen in 2001, though, they were still using the old system (in place until 2003, I think) -where new citizens received a citizenship card (about the size of a driver's license) instead of a certificate. But the system no longer accepted the card as valid ID unless I physically had the card and submitted it in person. If I had had a certificate, though, they would have accepted a scan of the certificate instead of the physical card.

I was living in Toronto alone at the time, while my mother was in Vancouver. She had the card somewhere but did not know where. And even if she found it, she could not have gotten it to me, because in Canada, it's illegal to mail documents like these. So I turned to the birth certificate option. But my mother could not find that, either. We called my grandma in China, who was hiding some of our documents for us, and she said she thought maybe it was in one of her cabinets... but also no clue. Eventually, my uncle offered to go to the municipal office to get it reissued for me. However, the only ones they could have issued would have been on a flimsy piece of thin paper, and printed entirely in Chinese. The Canadian government would not have accepted it.

After about two months, the passport expired. And then we started getting worried because we were a few months away from my driver's license expiring, too. During this time, we had a running joke amongst my friends that since I had no documentation to prove who I was or that I'd ever been born, I was legally stateless. If I'd gotten into any trouble, it might have been pretty risky, because the Canadian government may not have even recognised that I was theirs. And I definitely could not leave the country, either, without a passport. Eventually, we were able to sort it out, but I had to go all the way back to Vancouver to get the little card from my mother after she found it. We never did find my birth certificate. That's okay. I know I exist, even without a flimsy piece of paper in dot-matrix printer that tells me I exist.

Since I first heard that story, I am keeping a copy of every identity revealing document just in case :). And finally, the spotlight is on Farzad who is stateless and was 26 years old two years ago when I interviewed him. His family is of Afghan origin and in 2010 he smuggled into Turkey and since then he has been living there. Below is his answer to my question of "How did you end up being stateless?"

-Well, it is pretty complicated. I was born in a border town in Iran, while my parents were running away from Afghanistan because of the war. I do not have a birth certificate. To get a refugee status in Turkey, one should have a legal document, be it passport, identity card, or a birth certificate. I do not have any of these. I contacted the Afghanistan Embassy here in Turkey to have one of these and get my Afghan passport. They do not want to take responsibility and refuse to register me as an Afghan simply because I do not have any document proving it. As I mentioned earlier, Turkey also do not grant refugee status without any of these documents, which itself creates the legal limbo I am involved in.

I have to say that this particular story was not the only thing that saddened and shocked me. The stories of sudden disappearance of his entire family which is still a mystery and the sneaky yet very smart way of him escaping from Iran to Turkey thanks to a smuggler are almost unbelievable. If you would like to hear more such stories both about these 3 people and 29 others interviewed, Stories of Global Citizens is available both on paperback and e-book in Amazon.

More info: amazon.com