🎙️ Voices Across Borders

In this episode of Voices Across Borders, Preethi Balasubramanian welcomes Ronnie Loaiza, a certified habit coach and master certified professional coach. Ronnie’s journey reflects a profound exploration of identity, migration, and the power of habits to shape our lives.

Embracing New Beginnings

Ronnie shares her unique upbringing, having moved from Ecuador to the United States at a young age. She recalls her first memory of Halloween in Pittsburgh, where she felt both intrigued and excluded, watching children celebrate in costumes while feeling confined by her parents’ strictness. This moment marked the beginning of her understanding of belonging and cultural differences.

“This isn’t our place, but yet we’re not visiting. We moved here. That feeling inside: this is home, but I don’t know this home.” — Ronnie Loaiza

The Journey into Health and Wellness

After years of personal struggle with pain, Ronnie transitioned into fitness and eventually found her true calling in coaching. She emphasizes the importance of building habits over merely relying on motivation.

“Just get in the habit of doing something. I don’t care what it is. Show up. Because it’s got to become a habit.” — Ronnie Loaiza

Ronnie’s approach to coaching focuses on small, intentional actions, helping her clients find their momentum and build a sustainable lifestyle.

Cultural Contrasts and Personal Growth

As Ronnie reflects on her childhood, she acknowledges the cultural contrasts between her life and that of her American peers. She shares how her parents’ protective nature stemmed from their own experiences and fears, which often left her feeling confined.

“I felt like in a constant state of being grounded, even though I didn’t do anything wrong.” — Ronnie Loaiza

Through these experiences, Ronnie began to understand her parents’ struggles with identity and adaptation, realizing the complexity of being rooted in one culture while navigating another.

Moving Forward

Today, Ronnie is navigating yet another chapter of her life, having recently relocated to Atlanta with her husband. She embodies the spirit of resilience and the idea that it’s never too late to start anew.

As we listen to Ronnie’s story, we’re reminded that our journeys, while deeply personal, are also universal in their themes of identity, belonging, and the habits we cultivate. Join us in reflecting on how our past shapes our present and future.

You can listen to the full episode here.

What does it really cost a woman to leave everything she knows—not just her country, but her identity, her community, and her sense of belonging?

Immigrant women’s stories are so often reduced to a brief timeline: she left, she arrived, she built a life. But migration is rarely a single event. It is a long, looping process of identity, memory, and adaptation that continues long after the suitcases are unpacked.

Behind every immigration statistic is a deeply human story waiting to be heard. That conviction inspired Voices Across Borders: Becoming Here—a 15-story anthology curated by author Preethi Balasubramanian and published by Wondering Pages.

Today, we are thrilled to release our official Video Overview, bringing the vision and heart of this project into visual focus.

A Project Born Across Three Countries

Curated by Preethi Balasubramanian—whose own life spans India, the UK, and Canada—this project moves away from cold policy papers, economic reports, and headlines to explore the intimate, lived reality of crossing national lines.

Drawing from narratives across five continents, Voices Across Borders captures the ordinary decisions, sacrifices, reinventions, and small victories that hold extraordinary meaning.

“Moving between India, the UK, and Canada taught me that belonging doesn’t have to mean choosing one place over another,” Preethi shares. “We can carry more than one culture, more than one home, and still build a life that feels like our own.”

The Architecture: 4 Movements, 1 Arc

Rather than treating immigration as a single rupture, the collection is structured around four core movements that mirror the psychological evolution of rebuilding life in a new land:

* 🛫 The Leaving: Holds the heavy weight of departure—the decision to go, the last dinner, the suitcase that won’t close, and leaving home behind.

* 🛬 The Landing: Captures arrival in all its disorientation and possibility—the first job, the first winter, navigating paperwork, and the lifesaving kindness of strangers.

* 🌉 The In-Between: Explores the liminal space so many immigrant women know intimately—feeling too foreign for home and too foreign for here, belonging fully to neither and somehow to both.

* 🌱 The Becoming: The slow, quiet emergence of self—building belonging, one day at a time, on your own terms.

Preserving Stories Before They Disappear

So many women’s experiences are carried through families for generations without ever being recorded. If we don’t document those stories, parts of our collective history risk disappearing with us.

“One woman’s story can move someone,” notes Preethi. “Fifteen women telling their stories together create a record of experiences, perspectives, cultures, and voices that might otherwise remain scattered.”

This anthology stands as a first-person historical record for immigrant women who have never seen themselves in print, for readers seeking a deeper understanding of human movement, and for future generations trying to trace their family’s roots.

❤️ How You Can Support This Passion Project

To ensure that contributors face no financial barriers to sharing their journeys, every writer receives professional editing support, publication, and marketing visibility.

Because this is a community-supported passion project, behind-the-scenes editing, production, and distribution rely on readers like you. Here is how you can help give these stories the platform they deserve:

* 📖 Pre-Order the eBook on Amazon (releasing November 2026): Pre-order here

* 🤝 Support Production Costs on GoFundMe: Donate to the campaign

* 💬 Share this Post & Video Overview: Help us spread the word across your community and networks!

Thank you for believing in these stories and helping us bring them to life! ❤️

Recently, I had the opportunity to be a guest on Lucie’s Inspiring Stories, where we talked about my journey from India to the UK and eventually to Canada, identity, belonging, and the story behind Voices Across Borders: Becoming Here.

After the conversation, I found myself thinking about one particular phrase.

Becoming here.

I like those two words because they describe something that arriving never quite captures.

You can arrive in a country on a particular day, but becoming part of that place takes much longer.

For me, it happened through all the small, everyday experiences that followed.

It was learning how things worked in a new country, building friendships, navigating work and family life, figuring out where I fit, and gradually becoming comfortable with a life that was very different from the one I had known before.

There was never one moment when I suddenly thought, “I belong here.”

It happened slowly.

Becoming here does not mean leaving everything behind

One thing I have come to understand over the years is that moving to another country does not mean we have to leave our old identity behind.

I can be connected to India and still feel at home in Canada.

I can celebrate the festivals I grew up with, cook the food I know from childhood, share stories and traditions with my children, and still embrace the life we have created here.

I do not have to choose one over the other.

In fact, I don’t think identity works that way.

When we move, we don’t become an entirely different person. We bring our experiences, memories, habits, values and traditions with us. Then, as life unfolds, we add new experiences, relationships and perspectives.

We keep adding to who we are.

That idea has become very meaningful to me.

I see it in my children too

As a mother, I have become even more aware of what it means to carry culture forward.

I want my children to know where their traditions come from. I want them to understand the stories, celebrations and values that were part of my childhood.

At the same time, I don’t expect them to experience those things exactly as I did.

They are growing up in a different place and a different time.

So we find our own way of bringing those traditions into our lives. Sometimes it is through food. Sometimes it is through festivals. Sometimes it is through stories.

For me, preserving culture isn’t about keeping children in the past. It is about giving them the opportunity to know their roots while allowing them to grow into their own identity.

Perhaps that is another form of becoming here.

Why immigrant stories matter to me

This is also why Voices Across Borders became more than just an anthology idea for me.

When we talk about immigration, we often hear about numbers.

How many people arrived? Where did they come from? How many applications were submitted? What contribution do immigrants make to the economy?

Those conversations are important, but they leave out so much of the human experience.

They don’t tell us what it feels like to start again.

They don’t tell us about leaving behind family and familiar surroundings. They don’t tell us about finding your first job, building new friendships, raising children between cultures, learning new ways of doing things, or figuring out where home now fits into your understanding of yourself.

Most importantly, they don’t tell us how people actually feel as they navigate all of this.

That is where stories come in.

Stories give us the human part of immigration.

They give us the uncertainty, the excitement, the loneliness, the resilience, the humour, the sacrifices and the unexpected moments of joy.

They remind us that behind every statistic is a person.

Fifteen women, fifteen different journeys

When I decided to create Voices Across Borders: Becoming Here, I did not want to create a book that presented one definition of the immigrant experience.

There isn’t one.

The women whose stories are part of this anthology have different backgrounds, different reasons for moving, different experiences and very different paths to belonging.

Some found their footing quickly.

For others, it took much longer.

Some felt caught between cultures.

Some discovered that they could comfortably carry more than one culture with them.

Some journeys were shaped by opportunity. Others involved sacrifice, uncertainty or circumstances they never expected.

But as different as these stories are, there are common threads running through them.

There is the desire to belong.

There is the challenge of building something new while carrying pieces of the past.

There is the question of identity and how it changes over time.

There is the quiet work of creating a home.

And there is resilience.

Not always the dramatic kind that makes headlines, but the everyday resilience that allows someone to keep moving forward when everything around them is unfamiliar.

Now the stories are moving beyond the book

This week also marks the beginning of another part of the Voices Across Borders journey.

The Voices Across Borders Podcast has launched, and I will be having conversations with the women featured in the anthology over the coming months.

I want readers to have the opportunity to hear not just what these women wrote, but who they are, what shaped them and what they have learned along the way.

The first episode has already gone live, and there will be 14 conversations, one with each contributor.

This conversation with Lucy was a little different because, this time, I was the one being interviewed.

Usually, I am the person asking the questions.

This time, I had the opportunity to step back and talk about my own journey and why this project matters so much to me.

It was a useful reminder that I am not separate from the stories I am curating.

I have my own story of becoming here too.

Maybe belonging is not about choosing

The older I get, the less I think belonging is about choosing one place, culture or identity over another.

Perhaps belonging is about becoming comfortable with all the different pieces of ourselves.

Some parts come from where we were born.

Some come from where we live now.

Some come from the people we meet.

Some come from the experiences that change us.

And some come from the choices we make about what we want to carry forward.

We don’t have to erase one part to make room for another.

We can keep adding.

That is what becoming here means to me.

And that is what I hope Voices Across Borders will continue to explore through the stories of the women who have trusted me with their experiences.

Help us keep these stories moving

Thank you so much for supporting this project. It truly means a lot to me.

Voices Across Borders is a passion project, and I am committed to making sure contributors never have to pay to share their stories.

There are, however, many behind-the-scenes costs involved in editing, publishing, marketing and producing the podcast and other content that helps us give these stories a wider platform.

There are several ways you can support the project:

Donate:https://gofund.me/67b7d0691

Purchase the book:https://www.amazon.com/Voices-Across-Borders-Becoming-Here-ebook/dp/B0HHJYLP1F

Become an early reader:https://forms.gle/YyRvinsrNNkopd567

Every donation, purchase and share genuinely helps.

Thank you for believing in these stories, supporting the women behind them, and helping us bring their voices across borders. ❤️

Watch the conversation

I have also shared the full conversation with Lucy as a special Voices Across Borders episode.

This time, instead of interviewing one of the contributors, I am sharing the story behind the anthology and a little more of my own journey of becoming here.

What happens when you leave home at seven, grow up between countries, and spend years figuring out what “home” actually means?

In this episode of Voices Across Borders, Preethi Balasubramanian sits down with Prenaka Ram, a Fijian-born, Indian-descended Canadian entrepreneur and “queen of many trades,” whose journey has taken her from Fiji to Toronto, California and, eventually, Alberta.

Prenaka shares the story of leaving Fiji during the 1987 military coup, arriving in Canada as a child, discovering her Fijian-Indian identity as a teenager in California, and learning to adapt with every move. She reflects on belonging without needing to choose a single label, and why Toronto still feels like home decades after leaving it.

Her story also takes us into entrepreneurship, resilience and purpose. From earning her first money as a child to building wellness businesses without investors or a business degree, Prenaka has always measured success differently. For her, success isn’t simply about revenue. It’s about lives changed, communities supported and people walking away feeling better than when they arrived.

We also talk about motherhood, health, adversity, cultural traditions, and the experience of writing her chapter for Voices Across Borders: Becoming Here – Volume I.

One idea stays with us throughout the conversation:

“In order to go ahead, we have to go back.”

This is a conversation about remembering where we came from, making peace with the different versions of ourselves along the way, and becoming who we are meant to be.

Guest: Prenaka RamHost: Preethi BalasubramanianSeries: Voices Across Borders — The Podcast

Voices Across Borders: Becoming Here – Volume I brings together the stories of immigrant women building lives, families, identities and communities across Canada and the United States.

Support the anthology and podcast production through our GoFundMe campaign. Your contribution helps support editing, book design, publishing and video production.

Donate here: https://gofund.me/adf173825

When I first imagined Voices Across Borders, I thought I was creating a single anthology.

I wasn’t. I was creating a community.

Over the past several months, I’ve met remarkable women whose journeys span countries, cultures, languages, and generations. Each one has entrusted me with a deeply personal story about leaving, belonging, identity, resilience, and home.

Our first anthology is now complete with fifteen contributors.

The next stage is turning those stories into a professionally published book—and that’s where I need your help.

Publishing a high-quality anthology involves much more than printing pages. Every chapter is professionally edited, carefully designed, and supported by interviews, podcast episodes, marketing, and community outreach so these stories can reach the readers who need them most.

To help fund this work, I’ve launched a GoFundMe campaign.

Whether you contribute financially or simply share the campaign with someone who believes in the power of storytelling, you’re helping preserve voices that deserve to be heard.

This isn’t just about publishing a book.

It’s about ensuring these stories become part of our shared history.

If you’d like to support the project, you can do so here:

👉 https://gofund.me/9a414285d

Thank you for believing that stories have the power to connect us across borders.

— Preethi

Voices Across Borders is more than a book. It is a growing collection of stories about leaving, landing, belonging, identity, and becoming.

Beginning September 2026, this podcast brings those stories beyond the page.

You’ll meet the women behind Voices Across Borders: Becoming Here and hear more about the experiences, choices, cultural tensions, unexpected turns, and moments of becoming that shaped their journeys.

We’ll also introduce the partners and sponsor organizations helping make this work possible, and have conversations with people whose work connects with immigration, belonging, community, representation, and the stories we carry across borders.

Some episodes will take you inside an author’s story. Others will introduce the people and organizations standing beside this project.

Different voices. Different journeys. Different definitions of home.

Welcome to Voices Across Borders.

A Wondering Pages original series.

Coming September 2026.

#VoicesAcrossBorders #BecomingHere #ImmigrantStories #WomenStories #Belonging #WonderingPages