EPISODE 26
May 11, 2022
Ana Ghiban was born in 1998 in Bucharest, Romania, where her parents worked in the textile industry. When she was nine, the family relocated to Delhi, and there she attended an international American school. Three years later, the family moved to Dhaka, Bangladesh. A couple of years later, when she was 14, they moved to Colombo, Sri Lanka. At 16, the family made their final move within Asia, this time to Shanghai, China, where Ana graduated high school, before relocating independently to The Hague for her undergraduate studies. She chose a liberal arts degree with a focus on Global Challenges. Her decision was in part motivated by her desire for a globally-oriented English education, and also due to her experiences growing up in Asia. In 2020, she moved to Amsterdam to pursue a Master’s degree in International Development Studies. As part of her graduate thesis field work, she spent three months in rural Transylvania with a Dutch-American family, interviewing Romanians, Hungarians, and foreigner farmers living in the region.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom – reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:47] Louise: Hello listeners. Welcome to Episode 26 of Women Who Walk. My guest today is Ana Ghiban.
[00:00:54] Louise: Ana was born in 1998 in Bucharest, Romania, where her parents worked in the textile industry. In the post-communist era, many foreign companies set up in Romania offering increased opportunities for local workers, including Ana’s parents, who were ultimately offered contracts in the textile industry in India.
[00:01:19] Louise: The family relocated to Delhi when Ana was nine, and there she attended an international American school. Three years later, the family moved again this time to Dhaka, Bangladesh. And a couple of years later, when she was 14, they moved to Colombo, Sri Lanka. All the while, Ana attended international schools with other kids from around the world.
[00:01:46] Louise: At 16, the family made their final move within Asia. This time to Shanghai, China, where Ana graduated high school, before relocating independently to The Hague for her undergraduate studies. She chose a liberal arts degree with a focus on Global Challenges. Her decision was in part motivated by her desire for a globally-oriented English education, and also due to her experiences growing up in Asia.
[00:02:18] Louise: In 2020, she moved to Amsterdam to pursue a Master’s degree in International Development Studies, which she’s currently finishing. As part of her graduate thesis field work, she spent three months in rural Transylvania with a Dutch-American family, interviewing Romanians, Hungarians, and foreigner farmers living in the region.
[00:02:42] Louise: Her family remains in China and due to the ongoing restrictive COVID lockdown there, she hasn’t seen her parents in more than two years. She’s hopeful they’ll be reunited this summer back in Bucharest.
[00:02:56] Louise: As result of her education in Asia, mostly at American schools, you’ll notice Ana’s accent is a fusion of her mother tongue, Romanian, and the linguistic influences of attending international schools. As a result, listening to Ana, it would be easy to mistake her for a 20-something American.
[00:03:17] Louise: I met Ana via Families in Global Transitions, 2022 virtual conference. She’s one of several young women I’ll be interviewing who I met at the conference. FIGT is a great resource for individuals, families, and anyone leading a globally-mobile life. Their website, if you’re interested to know more is FIGT.org.
[00:03:56] Louise: Welcome Anna. You were born in Bucharest in Romania about 24 years ago. I wonder if you could set the scene for us. Take us back and maybe give us a visual sense of what the landscape around your neighborhood was like in Bucharest.
[00:04:11] Ana: Yeah, definitely. I grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Bucharest in Romania, in the center of the city. We lived in a big communist-style apartment block, very typical in Bucharest. The nice thing was that our apartment block was right across from a small park. So my memories of growing up are largely in this little park, going after school, on the weekends. Um, I often played with the other kids living in the apartment block. I attended, uh, a kindergarten that wasn’t too far from our home. I had a babysitter who would usually take me there and I remember really loving my kindergarten. We did a lot of different activities. We had after school activities. We, we learned a lot of languages. We did English, French and German, which I think it’s a lot for a kid, but we found it very exciting. I always loved learning.
Ana in the kitchen of her family’s apartment in Bucharest
[00:05:08] Ana: I have very fond memories of my childhood and of this time in Bucharest. Going back recently I visited the street where I grew up and first of all, it’s all completely renovated. So that’s interesting to see, like, what was once this very gray block is now painted in this light pink. And the roads are all paved, everything is very manicured. It looks very put together and, and, taken care of but there’s almost a kind of sadness about it that it’s just so different from what I remember.
[00:05:39] Louise: Returning to your place of origin can sometimes be disappointing because It sometimes doesn’t fit with your memories. The interesting thing about your childhood, is that was only a decade after the coup that resulted in the death of Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu and I believe that decade after the fall of communism was not an easy time for Romania.
[00:06:03] Ana: I was born in 1998, so that was quite some time after the fall of the Ceausescu regime, but my parents, they were in their 20s when this happened. So for them it was quite present and in their lives and a lot of things changed. For a lot of young people, that was also in many ways, a time of hope and a new beginning because there were a lot of new opportunities that came with the fact that the country started to open up. For example, a lot more European companies started entering Romania. And my parents were able to really take advantage of that because they both had backgrounds in textiles. And that had been one of the communist-time industries.
[00:06:42] Ana: Another advantage is that my mother spoke English, because she had really loved English growing up, and so for them it was a period of opportunity because they were able to get jobs at these foreign companies that came into Romania working in textiles . And then they also then moved to Bucharest, our capital, from their hometown in the Northeast of the country, and I came along around that period.
[00:07:07] Louise: When you say textile industry, what exactly was that?
[00:07:12] Ana: Basically, from what I know, it was very technical, almost like textile engineering. Both of them were preparing to work in factories, not necessarily on the supply line, but more like factory managers or quality control. After the fall of the regime this changed a little bit, and It actually became possible to get more managerial-type positions in the offices that were opening up in Bucharest. It started from this very engineering practical level, but then it quickly became something else also because the industry itself was changing from this centralized model where it was very focused on production for exports on a national level to much more international trade level.
[00:07:56] Louise: In 2007 the family moved to Delhi, India and presumably this is because of your parents background in textiles. That’s such a fascinating country and cultural move from a post-communist country in central Europe. What was it like for you all?
[00:08:14] Ana: I was eight years old, my little brother was four, and my parents had gotten to a stage where they gotten the loan for a house, they had their mortgage to pay off and they felt that they were in this phase where they had followed the traditional trajectory and they had achieved everything they felt they could achieve in Romania. Then this opportunity came around at a time when it just felt right, is how my mother described it to me. They really saw it as a new opportunity to experience something completely different.
[00:08:45] Ana: The initial position was actually for two years, so it was meant to be temporary, so there wasn’t this kind of pressure, ‘goodness, it’s such a crazy move, what if it’s big mistake.’ It was like, ‘well, it’s only two years, let’s try, you never know.’ And I think what was attractive also is that often with these expatriate contracts abroad, they come with benefits that you wouldn’t otherwise have in a local contract.
[00:09:10] Ana: So in India, my brother and I were able to attend an American international school. That was a very attractive point for my parents moving from a Romanian school to a school with a very big campus, lots of facilities, like a library, a swimming pool, weekend sports activities, things like this. I remember the first time I ever saw that school, I was just in love. I was running all over the playground, um, multiple playgrounds. All kinds of rocks and things to, to play around . And I think realizing that also the quality of life would really change for us and that the experience overall would be very valuable.
Ana and her mother and brother in India
[00:09:50] Louise: It really sounds like it. But then the family moves again, and this time to Bangladesh. Was this challenging given that the move to Delhi was positive and you integrated into the American school and it was a wonderful experience?
[00:10:08] Ana: In some ways, yes, it was sad for me to move away again. But then there was another opportunity and, um, we decided to keep living abroad and I was sad to leave the friends I’d made. I really felt like I belonged in this community in India. But I was also excited for a new chapter.
[00:10:26] Ana: One thing that was interesting was that because we were in this south Asian network of international schools, I already knew about the school I was moving to because they were in the same sports competitions as my school in Delhi. So I knew I was gonna go from being in the Falcons to being in the Tigers and that for me was exciting. And even the first year living in Dhaka, I got to travel back to Delhi for track and field and to represent Tigers. That for me was quite interesting because what you described earlier about how for internationals to go back to a place they’ve lived, they can sometimes be a little bit disappointed, because it’s never as you remember it, or that nostalgia is often disrupted by the reality. And so that also happened when I, I stayed with an old friend, um, and we were by then 10, 11, and we realized our friendship had changed or we had changed. And that was also interesting for me to feel at that age.
[00:11:25] Ana: The transition itself to the new school was also a bit less drastic just because it was another American school. So by then I was used to speaking and learning in English. I was quite comfortable in this environment. I remember having a really nice time because Dhaka was a unique place; the city itself and in general, Bangladesh, can be a very overwhelming city. There’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of commotion. The expat community in Dhaka is quite small and it’s quite concentrated. Everybody you know goes to your school and you would then meet up in the weekends as well. It was a very tight-knit community. I had a very tight-knit group of friends. My parents also had a tight-knit group of friends. Socially, it was a very, very nice place to live.
[00:12:13] Louise: Have you, have you heard of the term expat bubble?
[00:12:18] Ana: Yeah.
[00:12:20] Louise: Do you feel that, that was a part of this period of your life, moving in, uh, kind of an expat bubble?
[00:12:27] Ana: Definitely. I think these expat bubbles are interesting because on one hand, they exist out of the need for community for, for being around like-minded people, people who you feel you can connect to you resonate with in a very different environment, in a different culture. And for us as a family, these expat bubbles were really nice because they offered a sense of comfort. If you are a new expat family you know you can talk to other expat families who are already there and get tips for things like where to buy certain groceries. Simple things like that, which sometimes in, in a place like Dhaka it’s not necessarily as obvious as you might think. That’s the positive side of it.
[00:13:12] Ana: But then I think, especially growing up and looking back, I’ve definitely come to be also a bit critical of these expat bubbles, especially because often they become very sheltered, privileged communities that isolate themselves from the local community and from local people. A lot of the activities take place within the four walls of the school, let’s say, or within, like a weekend clubs where the expats would meet up and hang out. That does create that nice community feeling. On the other hand, I feel like it does create this parallel life in these places.
[00:13:50] Ana: It’s interesting now for me to reflect on the effect it might’ve had on my perception of when you live in a place and you’re different that it’s maybe normal to just be separate and not interact so much in this local community. That’s something I’ve been reflecting about a lot over time, much more so now, as an adult.
[00:14:11] Louise: The one thing it did provide is, despite the moves, and you made another move after this or a couple of moves, there was a sense of continuity for you, which I think is really important for a teenager. You talked about returning to Delhi to play sports and reconnecting with some of your former classmates and so on. And this was actually very positive for you as a teen, the continuity of the American school kept you connected.
[00:14:40] Ana: Yeah, definitely. I think throughout all our moves and, and in all my schools that I attended, there’s definitely a red thread of the school cultures, despite them being in very different places and not always being like American schools, um, they always had some things in common, so they were all English-speaking schools. The teachers were all from Anglophone countries and the students themselves, not only were they all fluent in English and spoke it cursively just amongst friends and so on, but there was also this, what I’ve come to learn is, is a type of Western cultural capital that we all kind of possess because we were receiving our education in this context and not just literally through the textbooks, but also our, for example, media exposure. We were mainly exposed to American / Western European media. And that was something that, regardless of whether I was living in, in Dhaka, Bangladesh or in Colombo, Sri Lanka, my peers and I had access to the same kind of media and that’s something the internet age made possible.
[00:15:51] Ana: So I very much recognize that in a way these school environments and this culture that was created at these schools, um, it definitely fostered some kind of continuity for me that I think made it also easier to adjust to the new school, because I knew what to expect and in a way I already fit in before even having to think about it.
[00:16:15] Louise: How do you think that that experience has informed your young adulthood? You’ve grown up during a period where the worldwide web has exposed you to a global community that’s so vastly different from the environment in which your parents grew up. How do you think that that’s impacted your young adulthood as you now are studying back in Europe ?
[00:16:43] Ana: What first comes to mind when thinking about this is that I don’t necessarily think that, especially in this discussion of, of how the internet has facilitated this worldliness, let’s say for me, um, actually don’t think that living abroad necessarily had that much of a role to play in that specific aspect, just because when I’m now at university in Europe in the Netherlands, I have peers who here in the Netherlands, perhaps they’re international, so they’ve moved here from a different country to, to attend the university, but they didn’t have this mobile upbringing and lots of different countries like I did. We still share this, this worldliness that you mentioned. So I think that that’s something that is a more sort of generational experience that suddenly we were all exposed to, to so much, and to a lot of the same trends growing up.
[00:17:40] Ana: I think for me what’s more apparent is worldliness comes from a lack of rootedness in any one country or cultural context. Also in this university context, what I’ve noted is that a lot of my peers have a very secure sense of where they’re from and of identity. So if they come from Germany, they understand exactly what people are like in Germany, what German politics is like, very specific cultural nuances that you only really gain growing up in that place all your life. Having left Romania when I was eight, I have a very distanced relationship with what Romanian culture is, um, with my identity, as a Romanian. In that sense, my self awareness as someone who’s globally mobile, who doesn’t have any one national identity that’s very fixed, I think that made me much more aware of this worldliness than specific exposure to different cultures and influences.
[00:18:44] Louise: I imagine then that the friends that you resonate with are other young adults like yourself, who’ve had international lives who are quite worldly and sophisticated.
[00:18:57] Ana: Yes, and no. That’s been an interesting thing to discover as well, that’s what one would expect. When I meet someone who is a third culture kid, which is a term we sometimes use to describe children who have grown up abroad in a country that is not their own or that of their parents, there is a sense of mutual understanding on a fundamental level where some things just do not need to be explained. For example, this insecurity around the idea of home and of identity, when I meet somebody else who grew up also in a lot of different countries, I can immediately understand that they also have a very tricky relationship with their home. So that’s not something that needs to be explained.
[00:19:37] Ana: Whereas when I talk to somebody who isn’t familiar with, what growing up this way is like, then that’s something I have to explain. And, so in that sense, it is kind of nice to feel immediately understood by somebody who can relate. But on the other hand, I think because of what we’ve been discussing, this the sense of a more universal culture, or this dominant English-speaking culture that we share as young people, at least here in Europe and in Amsterdam specifically, um, I definitely feel that I can get along with a vast array of people from different countries and contexts.
[00:20:18] Ana: More recently, I’ve made very good friends with some Polish people living here in the Netherlands, who have their Eastern European background, which I also in a way still resonate with, but then they also have this Western cultural capital mindset that I much more familiar with. And so that for me has been an even more relatable experience to meet people who I can relate to on both sides.
[00:20:46] Louise: You know, I want to go back a little because we’ve been talking quite a bit about Western culture and so on, and you and your family were still back in Asia during your, your teen years, and one of the last country moves was to Shanghai. And, uh, I was actually in Shanghai at the same time, I think you were in 2014, and I found it extraordinary because it was this combination of old China-meets-futurist China and nobody spoke English then, it was kind of overwhelming. What were your experiences like? Were you, in the international school system, American school system?
[00:21:23] Ana: I moved to Shanghai when I was 15 years old. This was where I finished high school. We moved away from where we’d been living in, in south Asia for the last seven years, um, to a place that was very cosmopolitan, highly modernized, highly technologically advanced city. Until that point we’d been living in places that were considered less developed than Romania. Flying home to Romania every summer we were able to appreciate a lot of what Romania did have to offer.
[00:21:56] Louise: So each summer you were going back to Romania?
[00:22:00] Ana: Yeah. Yeah. We still have our house there where my grandmother still lives. A physical home, I think was very important for us to be able to go back to.
[00:22:09] Louise: And it grounds you, doesn’t, it, it grounds you in your heritage.
[00:22:13] Ana: In a way. Yes. It’s a bit more complicated than that, especially when I was younger, there was a lot of joy associated with spending summer in Romania. It was very idyllic. Grandchildren visiting the grandparents and they were cooking for us and they were so happy to have us there and spoiling us.
[00:22:30] Ana: Growing up, it was a little bit different because I realized I almost expected this from Romania. For the first few days it would be very exciting and special to be back and quickly I would realize that I don’t really feel that at home there anymore. It’s a familiar house and familiar streets, but I don’t have friends in Bucharest that I can spend time with and a lot of things going on, on the TV, I’m not really up to date with all of that. So I think there was also sometimes a sense of disappointment and of almost inadequacy. Like not really being able to match up to being fully Romanian and feeling that this is my home, and I would be ready to go back to wherever we were living at that time.
[00:23:19] Louise: I see well, let’s, let’s go back to Shanghai then.
[00:23:22] Ana: Moving to Shanghai for me was exciting because I was really excited to, to live in a place where I could be a little bit more independent. That had been tricky for me growing up because my parents didn’t feel it was safe for me to be out, even just with friends on my own.
Ana and her family in Shanghai
[00:23:39] Louise: I just have to interject. How could you be independent in Shanghai, a city of 24 million people? Really, how, how were you independent there without getting lost?
[00:23:52] Ana: I understand where you’re coming from because when you first get there, It’s a lot. It’s a city of now I think 25, 26 million people and it feels like 10 cities in one, because you can drive for over an hour on the highway, in the middle of the city, and you’re still in Shanghai. You’re not in a suburb, you’re still surrounded by high-rises and bustling commercial centers and restaurants. What’s overwhelming to arrive there as a foreigner is maybe the fact that yes, there is definitely very little English, you don’t see English very commonly on the streets, or you don’t hear English that often, unless if you’re in the downtown area, there are more foreigners these days so that’s more common.
[00:24:36] Ana: But I think what’s true about Shanghai specifically, and I think China in general, in these big cities it is a relatively safe place because it is a controlled society. If you walk on the streets, for example, you do feel quite safe. And traffic laws are very much respected because there’s a lot of CCTV cameras that are able to catch even slightest mistakes, if you, for example, cross on red.
[00:25:01] Ana: There is a bit of a learning curve when you first arrive and you have to kind of figure out, okay, how does the Metro work? Which app do I need to download to have access to the Metro? Um, how do I take the bus? Once you get to that stuff, it’s really very accessible in a very friendly city to be in because it’s very well connected. There’s a lot to do as well so for a young person living there, you can go out for food. You can go to the mall. There’s tons of cool restaurants.
[00:25:29] Louise: It sounds to me what you’re talking about is not what was happening in 2014. I don’t remember anything like what you’re talking about. So is this the experience you have now when you go back to, to see your parents?
[00:25:42] Ana: Yeah. So, I do think it’s gotten even more advanced over time. For example, now there’s this, WeChat is the sort of main messaging service in China. You can use it to order a cab. You can use it to order food. You have your life at your fingertips. In that sense, things have also changed a lot in the last 10 or so years. Since the pandemic, I haven’t been back because the country has been very restricted with its travel. My parents also haven’t been able to leave the country. Hopefully that’s going to change the summer.
[00:26:12] Ana: Before the pandemic I did go back and indeed, I think going back made me appreciate the place in a different way because I was going back as, uh, as a young adult from Europe and able to appreciate how advanced the society is. Um, but on the other hand, what happened once I moved to Europe was that, I hate to use this word, but the authentic culture of Shanghai or the more historical aspects of the city are lost in this rush to advancements because historical buildings are torn down to make room for new high-rises that can house a lot more people. Um, so when you’re there, you do wish to see a little bit more historical architecture or some local foods, but then that’s maybe harder to access if you don’t know exactly where to go.
[00:27:01] Louise: From China, you’re back in Europe, you’ve mentioned the Netherlands you’re, you’re studying in The Hague now. It’s certainly a very orderly environment to be living in after the chaos of China. And your graduate studies required that you do some research, that was three months living in a rural Transylvania, interviewing Romanians, Hungarians, and foreign farmers for your theses field work. As you’ve taken us through these country moves, from South Asia to China, and then back to Central Europe and Transylvania, I find the contrast mind-boggling. I mean, what was it like for you?
[00:27:48] Ana: I think recently living here in the Netherlands and thinking a lot more about what is home to me and, and where do I want to maybe build a life or I don’t want to settle down? Where do I belong? A lot of what has come up is my relationship to Romania and that’s also just been a recurring theme throughout, but I noticed that I, I do have this desire to spend time in Romanian to, to get to know the country better because right now I feel like I have such a filtered perception, largely through my parents’ eyes and also through my limited childhood experiences. And I’m really curious. I really wish to discover more about this country that I come from.
[00:28:29] Ana: From that general sort of feeling, I channeled my thesis work into making this experience possible. Um, I am not from Transylvania. My family is actually from the Moldova region. A few years ago traveled to Transylvania on a holiday. It was like a one week tour and it was beautiful. We absolutely loved it. Or at least I did. The region is really special because it’s got amazing natural beauty with the Carpathian Mountains with waterfalls and amazing forests and wildlife. And, and on top of that, you’ve got the cultural heritage.
[00:29:05] Ana: Transylvania used to be a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and before that time there have been Hungarians living in this region and also German Saxon. They have left behind a legacy of beautiful fortified churches. There’s a lot of unique architectural styles, like wooden facade houses, and also some wooden churches in this region that are just amazing. So I was very attracted to this region and I really thought that this was like one of the treasures of Romania that we still have.
[00:29:37] Louise: Before we did this interview, I Googled Transylvania looking for images. Just beautiful countryside. Listeners, I’d recommend you Google Transylvania and get a sense of what Ana is talking about.
[00:29:48] Ana: So in parallel to this, I’m studying international development studies and one of the sort of themes I was focusing on um, this topic of food sovereignty and of farmers’ rights. This idea is the idea that populations and communities have the right to define their own food systems. So that’s from how food is grown and, and what kind of food is grown and produced to how it’s sold and distributed and consumed.
[00:30:16] Ana: It’s quite radical when you think of our global industrial food system, which is a huge global supply chain, especially when it comes to all kinds of fruits and vegetables cultivated in the global south for import to the global north. So to Europe and the Americas. And there are a lot of latent inequalities in the system where the farmers who are producing these foods for European consumption, they themselves don’t have enough access to a variety of foods because most of the farming the region is monocultures of bananas, for example or pineapples.
[00:30:49] Ana: And I became quite fascinated by this idea and discussing this while I was thinking about Romania and about how there is still a big legacy of small-scale farming. There’s a big culture of open-air markets. My grandmother in Bucharest is going to the market every week to get her vegetables, even though she has convenience stores very accessible to her.
[00:31:10] Ana: I was very intrigued by how there’s some informal food systems still in place in many countries like Romania that can combat this dominant system, or if not, combat, at least provide an alternative to this dominant narrative that’s at least here in the west. So picking Romania as my fieldwork sites was very much a way for me to combine my interest in this topic with my personal desire to live in Romania and to learn more about life there.
And during her fieldwork in Transylvanian collecting potatoes
[00:31:39] Ana: I ended up getting in touch with a family that funnily enough was a Dutch-American family who had settled in Romania to start farming small scale because they were attracted by this life. And when they visited Romania, they realized the infrastructure was completely in place. When they bought their land, it came with a house, it came with a barn, it came with fruit orchard, and this is quite typical for this region. They very much perceived this like uh, unrecognized wealth.
[00:32:08] Ana: But the larger reality is that small-scale farming is very much dying. It’s mostly practiced by the elderly generation who is still farming on the small plots. There’s very little farm succession on these small farms. More than 50% of farms in Romania are large-scale, over a hundred hectare monocultures of mostly sunflower seeds and corn, grain as well.
[00:32:34] Ana: So this type of small-scale farming is a model that is, is slowly falling out because it’s not perceived as efficient. But I find it very interesting that still in 2022 that there’s around 2 million households in Romania that are still self-provisioning in some way. It doesn’t have to be that they have a lot of animals and growing fruits and vegetables. Like sometimes it’s just a small vegetable garden, some chickens. And with this, they’re able to supply their entire household for the week with eggs and with meat and with the basic veggies that they need.
[00:33:08] Ana: Having grown up in environments where I was very disconnected, not just from my food, but also from nature in general, because I grew up in big, big cities that were very car dominant and quite polluted, I think this for me is a different kind of homecoming where I’m trying to reground myself almost literally. Like I was really interested in being more connected to land and to food and to seeing where this thing that is a part of my culture of, of Romanian culture, which is food provenance and preparation, and, um, there’s all this philosophy around the best tomatoes and the best way to prepare the certain preserves. Yeah, I think it touches something very personally for me.
[00:33:53] Louise: It sounds that way. That’s a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing the personal journey that you’re making with your studies and the academic reflections on your research. What do you think you’ll do with this Ana with your degree? Do you think you’ll stay in research or do you think that you’ll take it into some kind of practice?
[00:34:12] Ana: I love research. I find it very relevant. I think things like policies, projects need to be evidence-based before they can be properly designed and implemented and executed. I’ve developed an interest in the development industry, this world of NGOs and of international cooperation around providing humanitarian aid. However I’ve increasingly been questioning whether I do want to work in this field, because living in Europe and the global north, there is a big colonial legacy connected to this industry.
[00:34:47] Ana: A lot of the continuing relationships between countries in the north and countries in the south are not exactly the most equal partnerships, but often it’s just a lot of money from the north going to the south for projects that are then also designed mostly in the north. And then conditions need to be met for this money to keep coming in. And I think I’m just realizing it comes with a lot of caveats to work in this field. So I’m increasingly questioning whether that is something I want to actively participate in and if I do, what would be an ethical way to do that. Um, so that’s an ongoing journey for me.
[00:35:26] Louise: And then do you see yourself staying where you are?
[00:35:30] Ana: Yes and no again. So this is my fifth year living in the Netherlands and I must say I do feel quite rooted here. I have a lot of friends here that I’ve made. Um, I really feel that I, I know the country. I understand about how things work and I’m trying to learn the language. I could in some way, see myself maybe settling down here. I very much see how the Netherlands is a wonderful place to raise a family. Education here is really good. And there’s a lot of benefits for children. There are very good laws around work / home balance and childcare that are advanced and favorable.
[00:36:11] Ana: On the other hand, I’m not quite ready yet to make that choice to just settle here and stay. I’m still curious about the world. I’m curious what it would be like to live in another European country, or to move on my own somewhere outside of Europe, to work maybe in development. Those are two competing needs inside me right now. I’m definitely working on figuring out which ones to follow and to pursue.
[00:36:34] Louise: It may well be at some point that the work that comes to you, that interest you, could easily take you abroad, that there could be many country moves ahead of you, depending on what direction you take your studies. Well, Ana, this has really been a rich and fascinating discussion. You’ve touched on a lot. We could have just gone deeper on so many things that you’ve shared with us. Thank you for your time today.
[00:36:59] Ana: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been wonderful to chat and reflect on this whole journey. LinkedIn would be a good place to connect with me, Ana Ghiban, feel free to send a message.
[00:37:11] Louise: Terrific. I’ll put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the transcript. And again, thank you so much, Ana.
[00:37:17] Louise: Thank you for listening today. And so you don’t miss future episodes with more impressive, intrepid women do subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel, Women Who Walk Podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on either Apple or Podchaser, I’ve linked to them both in the transcript of this episode, on my website, LouiseRoss.com.