Part 2 of 4:

Kathleen grew up in Chatsworth, Durban, in a community she still describes by the warmth of the faces in it. She left with her husband shortly after the 2021 looting that tore through Durban and Johannesburg – the kind of event that turns a long-held maybe into an immediate, unarguable now. She and her husband had talked about leaving for years. The unrest was simply the final push. 

Everyone in her life already knew it was coming. Her mother cried through the whole conversation anyway – not because she doubted the decision, Kathleen says, but because she already understood what it meant: the beginning of a distance that would never fully close again. She knew, too, that her daughter would build a good life on the other side of it. 

What Kathleen didn’t expect, landing in Australia, was to find her own country waiting for her in a completely different form. 

“I discovered that Australia was also a rainbow nation,” she says, “so being surrounded by people different to me was something that made me feel at home.” 

It’s a strange, lovely inversion – the very diversity that once defined South Africa’s identity, rebuilt by accident, twelve thousand kilometres away, inside a boutique home care company she’d never heard of before she needed a job. 

“When you leave your home country, you don’t realise the sense of belonging you are looking for. And I found it here. No, I wasn’t paid to say this. It’s the truth.” 

Before Chris Barnard Health, Kathleen spent ten years caring for her own grandmother – an experience she says gave her a real understanding of, and appreciation for, the work aged care actually involves. These days, she’s often the first friendly face a new candidate meets, and she doesn’t take that lightly. “I get to be the frontline impression of Chris Barnard Health,” she says, “so my friendly South African disposition comes into play here, allowing people in interview to feel comfortable to be themselves.” It’s also, she points out, an opportunity she never had back home: the chance to be the one doing the employing, not just the one hoping to be employed. 

Part of what makes it feel like home, she’ll tell you, is Supun. He’s Sri Lankan – a different accent, a different rugby team to argue about – but the same particular ache of leaving one country for another. Kathleen talks about him like a favourite uncle, the kind who doesn’t need the backstory explained because he’s already lived it. He just also happens to run the company. 

“It epitomises what South Africa stands for as a rainbow nation,” she says of the team she now works alongside. 

Kathleen found her own country reflected back at her twelve thousand kilometres from home. Annelize’s story starts somewhere stranger – a gap year that quietly, almost accidentally, never ended.