Between Passports

This week is different. Urmi Hossain asked us to use her real name. She was born in Italy. Her family is Bengali. She now lives in Canada. For years, she lived a dual life. Not because anyone asked her to. Because it was easier. Italian outside. Bengali at home. Different rooms. Different versions of herself. When people asked where she was from, being Italian was the simpler answer. Bengali felt...

Emeka left Lagos for London at 22. Twelve years later, he finally went home. He expected to feel like himself again. Instead, he found that home had moved while he was away—not just the city, but his place in it. His accent was no longer Nigerian enough. He was called "the Londoner" with pride and love. But something about the name landed like a recognition of something he hadn't ful...

Lucas from São Paulo moved to Munich for work. When he got sick, he did what he'd always done: he called his manager and told him everything. The fever. When it started. The exact feeling. The paracetamol at 2am. The orange juice his flatmate brought. The call lasted 6 and a half minutes. His manager, Klaus, replied with a three-paragraph email, a form, and a reference to Section 4.2 of the em...

Mei-Lin walked into her first job at 24 years old. Her manager mispronounced her name twice, then asked: "Do you have something easier?" She invented Amy on the spot. She used it for three years. This is a story about the small surrenders immigrants and minorities make in professional environments. About a name her grandmother chose carefully—Mei (beautiful), Lin (forest/jade)—and how on...

Ana is a nurse in Singapore. For six years, she's handed hospital forms to hundreds of patients. They fill in the emergency contact line without thinking—husband, mother, sister. One Tuesday, she became the patient. And she couldn't fill in the blank. This is a story about the safety net you forget to build while you're busy building everything else. About the gap between having a care...

When Layla decided to marry Marco, she didn't just marry him. She married two families—one Iranian, one Italian. Both loud. Both loving. Both absolutely certain they knew the right way to do a wedding. The Tahdig was non-negotiable. Three types of antipasto was the minimum. The ceremony would last two hours. No, six hours. The flowers should be white. No, abundant and colorful. And the music?...

“There was a gap. I stepped into a gap.” What happens when something completely normal in one culture… is a silent crime in another? This episode follows Youssef, a Moroccan project manager living in London, who makes a simple mistake in a coffee shop — stepping into a gap in a queue. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s just broken one of Britain’s most deeply respected unwritten rules. No one sa...

Arjun is an engineer from India living in Seattle. For six months, he spent every night on a commuter train practicing a new accent—working on his R's, flattening his sentence rhythms, erasing the sound of where he came from. Nobody asked him to. His boss never complained. The system just made the adapted version easier. Then his seven-year-old daughter asked: "Papa, why do you talk like that? Lik...

Gabby arrived in Toronto knowing nobody. When her roommate invited her to a birthday party, she thought she'd finally found her moment to belong. So she stayed. While everyone else left, one by one, she stayed—honoring an invisible rule from home that nobody in Canada seemed to follow. This is a story about cultural scripts, loyalty, and the quiet heartbreak of learning you've been playing by the...

Have you ever moved countries and realized your life just became a beautiful, hilarious disaster?" Welcome to the trailer for Between Passports , a new podcast dedicated to the raw, unfiltered, and deeply human experiences of living abroad. Hosted by Vini T. —a trilingual international education expert with a Master’s in Sociology—this show explores the "in-between" spaces of the immigrant experie...