Life is for the Living

Are you afraid of death? What do you think happens after death? What is a good death? These are the questions I pose to our guests in this episode. 

**CONTENT WARNING** This episode contains discussion of suicide. 

The things that make us happy and sad are explored in this episode, with our guests sharing happiest and saddest moments of their lives. 

What we teach our children and what they teach us are the focus of this episodes, and we learn of the struggle of parents trying to keep the values of the old country alive, while their children absorb the values of the new country. 

Ghada tells the story of her 17 year marriage to her ex-husband and details all the fault lines that led to their divorce. 

What makes us fall in love with someone? What do we still find attractive about each other after years of marriage? Our guests open up about what brought them together with their spouses and what keeps them together. 

As the only guests to immigrate as adults, Makram and Hannah had a life time of experiences  before their immigration, so in this episode they detail their lives prior to the Gulf War. 

Immigrants in America and Canada can face enormous hardships, so why to they stay? I ask our guest this question and find that despite their troubles, none of them regret coming here.  

Even when our guests made it too their new home country, they face the difficulty of fitting in. In this episode we explore the shock of immigration and the struggles of not being able to go back home. 

In this episode we look at three ways people come into America and Canada: by boat and Ellis Island, by foot over the Rio Grande, and by convincing the American Embassy to give you a visa. 

People rarely leave their homes and all they know behind them to start a new life in a new country without a very good reason. In this episode we learn what home was like for all of our guests and why they (or their parents) felt they had to go.