Dana (Bulgaria) Dana*, a 19-year-old woman from Bulgaria, received a job offer that looked so real and promising. Imagine receiving an opportunity you had been waiting for—a letter offering a chance to finally move toward where you want to be. With the hope of a stable income and a new life, she decided to accept the job and left her home country of Bulgaria to pursue her dre....
High school was not the best of times for me. To be honest, I used to avoid even thinking about it. Sure, there are some precious memories from those years, but the hard parts always seemed to outweigh everything else. I was a thin and fragile girl and I struggled with mental health issues for a while. I can still remember standing in the middle of the cafeteria in the 10th gra....
I was born in Kurdistan, Iraq. Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, hated our people. He and his regime systematically tortured, persecuted, imprisoned and murdered thousands of Kurdish people in an attempt to exterminate us completely. Mass shootings, live burials and chemical attacks on cities and villages, he was brutal and merciless. My father was a journalist and musicia....
I was sitting at traffic lights, my mind occupied with nothing more profound than the likelihood of getting a free, shaded parking space near my favourite spot at the beach. As the light turned from red to green, I heard a voice in my mind say one word, ‘pursue’. Now, I am an even more conservative driver than my 86-year-old mother-in-law, so I knew that the word had nothin....
One of the things that I love most about Christmas is singing Christmas carols. There is something so comforting and inspiring about these Christian anthems, some of which are hundreds of years old. My absolute favourite is ‘O Holy Night’. This musical masterpiece never fails to reduce me to tears, as it powerfully conveys the breadth and depth of the redemptive, Christmas ....
