Part 1 of 4:

Natasha didn’t recognise the name at first. In fairness, she wasn’t entirely sure what country she was in either, for about ninety seconds of that conversation.

She’d been applying for jobs everywhere, the way you do when you’re trying to build a life from scratch on the other side of the world, and one application had blurred into the next. So, when the phone rang and a recruiter’s voice came through – warm, familiar, unmistakably South African – her brain did a small, confused little loop. Was this a callback from home? Had she somehow applied for a job back in Cape Town by accident? She genuinely couldn’t tell, and honestly, she didn’t much care, the voice sounded like home, and she wasn’t about to interrupt. “I wondered why someone from South Africa was calling me for a job opportunity,” she says, laughing about it now. It took the whole conversation for the penny to drop – the surgeon, the heart, the history – by which point she’d more or less forgotten she was supposed to be the one answering questions.

Then the name landed. Chris Barnard Health.

Natasha grew up in Cape Town, in a big, loving family – the kind that gathers for a braai, a swim and a lot of laughter. She didn’t come to Australia alone. Her husband and daughter came with her, and the decision itself built slowly, in small pieces rather than one dramatic moment. The one that mattered most: her husband had stopped sleeping properly, worn down by the feeling of always having to be on high alert. So, when the job opportunity in Australia didn’t ask him to learn a new language, only needing his particular skills. It was, in the end, an easier yes than either of them expected – even if leaving family behind was, without question, the hardest thing they’d ever do.

The first month felt like a holiday. Surreal, she says, in the way a new country is before it becomes ordinary. Melbourne’s café culture was a pleasant surprise, more of a *thing* than she was used to. The beaches, less so – she pictured Bondi, and then landed in Melbourne to find not a single lifeguard tower in sight and a lifestyle that was Cape Town on steroids. She laughs about that now.

For almost two years, Natasha describes feeling lost. Not dramatically – not in a way anyone watching from the outside would have noticed. Just quietly, persistently, the way you feel lost in a country that looks enough like home to ache, different enough to remind you constantly that it isn’t.

And then she started working at Chris Barnard Health, and the ache was less persistent.

“This job became the missing piece,” she says, careful to say it plainly, almost defensively, the way you say something true that you’re worried won’t be believed. “No, I wasn’t told to say this.”

She never wanted to do just one thing for the rest of her life, and this role – writing content, driving campaigns, working alongside a team doing something genuinely good for older Australians – let her use everything she’d learned across her entire life, in one place. She thinks often about South Africa’s own elderly, and whether they have access to anything like the care she now helps deliver every day.

If she could tell her younger self, still in Cape Town, one thing, it wouldn’t be a warning. “Leaving your family means they get an opportunity to explore the world too, and if the only way to support my family is to leave the country, I will do it; even if it is with a heavy heart.” she says. South Africa, from this distance, will always be home. She just wishes it were kinder to the people still there.

Natasha’s story turned out not to be a one-off. We spotlight three other women who found their way to Chris Barnard Health, for entirely different reasons of their own – a wave of unrest, a grandmother’s memory, a decision made at twelve years old on someone else’s behalf.

Next in the series: Kathleen, and the moment a wave of looting in Durban became the final push.