Jo: Hello Travelers. I am Jo Frances (J.F.) Penn, and today I’m here with Catriona Turner. Hi Katrina.Catriona: Hi. So happy to be here.Jo: It’s great to have you on the show. Catriona is the Scottish author of Nest, A Memoir of Home on the Move , which we are talking about today.Tell us a bit about why you left Scotland 14 plus years ago and some of the places that you’ve lived. Catriona: Yeah. Coming up for 16 years ago that we left in 2009 and that was because of my husband’s job. So we had met a couple years before and it was always kinda on the cards that his company might ask him to be globally mobile.
So when the opportunity came up, we did, I had been teaching for 10 years and I was happy to kind of take a career break to move to Southern France for three years, because who wouldn’t?
Jo: Yeah, for sure.
Catriona: — on the company Dollar and off we went. We got married about the same time and 14 years later, we came back having, by then moved to Uganda and back to France and the Republic of Congo and Denmark, and then back to France.
One more time in Paris before we came back, yeah. Coming up for two years ago now we’re back in Aberdeen, in the northeast of Scotland, which was where we left from.
Jo: And with two kids.
Catriona: Two kids that joined us along the way.
Jo: Well, it’s interesting and I wanted to talk to you ’cause although we lived in different places, I left England in 2000 and returned in 2011.
So I was away 11 years and no children so I understand the sort of being away longer, but let’s go back. ’cause I mean, depending on who’s listening, but the South of France, I mean obviously there’s the language, but I feel like —
Congo and Uganda were probably a much bigger culture shock. So tell us about those countries. I mean, most people never have visited. What did you love about them and what was amazing? Catriona: Well, I mean, they’re two really different countries, so, Uganda in particular. So that was my first experience of like being out of Europe, living somewhere completely different. But really the quality of life there was incredible.
In the end, we were only there for a year, or I was only there for a year, my husband was there a bit longer, so we didn’t fully take advantage of it but Kampala is this incredibly cosmopolitan city actually. It’s relatively very developed, great coffee scene, great food scene.
There are people living there from all over the world because it’s like a real hub for the region. Kampala, well the time we were there, I mean, still relatively stable country compared to some of the countries around about it. So a lot of NGOs have a big base in that part of the world. , the World Bank, there’s like big organizations and big companies that are based in Kampala, so it’s a really lively city, relatively developed.
We ate so well. I got really hooked on Ugandan coffee . I know you love coffee. Like East African people know East African coffee. They know Kenyan. They maybe know Rwandan/Ethiopian coffee of course. But Ugandan coffee is what I’m always searching for. Now it’s not exported as much.
But yeah, I stopped breastfeeding at that time and got back into coffee in a big way. And the travel, of living, in Uganda, we were in the city but having gone from somebody who thought that safari would be something I would do, once in a lifetime, you know, something you would do when you retire to then living somewhere, you could go and do it on a weekend.
And we did it on several weekends. It was just a little mini break, well a big mini break ’cause it was five hours of driving across,
Jo: but it’s easier than me visiting you in Aberdeen from down here in Bath.
Catriona: Well, yeah. Oh, definitely, But it was a shorter drive than that. And yeah, we had amazing Safari weekends well, that,
Jo: I mean, that can, sounds pretty, pretty idyllic in Uganda, but obviously the Congo is more known for civil war and, not being a safe, stable country.
How was it living in the Congo? Catriona: We were living in the Republic of Congo. So not the DRC, not the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is where there’s serious problems.
Republic of Congo or what people often call Congo-Brazzaville is much more stable, for good or ill, I won’t get into the politics of the country, but it’s stable. And not as interesting, I would say to live in as Uganda where you can have easy travel.
The tourism in Congo not as developed. We had a good life there, like in many ways, and people, I think a lot of people imagine living somewhere like that as being very confined to sort of compound living and my husband previously had worked in Nigeria on rotation, and that had been his experience, just kind of getting driven in and out of a compound to go to work as opposed to in Congo where we lived in an apartment complex owned by the company, but the town was really quiet.
We could walk around, we could go to the beach, we could walk to the shops and restaurants and very French feeling to me, and I would tell I had a lot of French friends living there, and yeah, there’s a few English speaking people living there, but because the country is so largely French speaking, you really have to be able to speak French to live and work there.
So most of my friends are French, and I would say to them, oh, it feels so French here. And they would say, no, it’s not, it’s Africa. But relatively, the French influence is still very strong . So we had French supermarkets, french restaurants, French patisseries.
Jo: It’s an ex-French colony, right?
Catriona: Yes.
Jo: And look, I mean —
Colonialism is a difficult topic, but I always feel like people just assume that it’s always a British colony, whereas of course, Sub-Saharan Africa, there’s French, there’s Portuguese, there’s German influence down there as well, wasn’t there? Catriona: Yeah. Yeah. We went to Namibia
Jo: Very German.
Catriona: Yeah. Yeah. I think probably most people wouldn’t realize how how vast of an area is considered francophone. Africa is so many countries that are still, where the main language or the official language is French, where the currency is still linked to the Franc. Still kind of linked to French economics. And it’s the franc that is the currency across a lot of African countries still, which is fascinating.
Jo: And so, I mean obviously you had young kids as well, so —
What were the challenges of living in these countries at that time for you? Catriona: The challenges of living in countries like that? Like, I’m moving all the time. I think that’s more
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