Marie Percot

Both my parents had been actively engaged in the struggle for the liberation of Algeria from French colonialism. A few months after its independence, we left France to live in Algiers, sharing the house with two Algerian families whose women, Fatima and Jima, were like other mothers to me.

It has now been almost half a century since Indian nurses began migrating abroad, long enough to understand the difficulties and benefits they have encountered in their professional and personal journey. I have studied their migration since the 2000s.

“We try to stop them, but they want to go. They say that Allah may help them to find a good malik. And so, they go; and we let them go because we need food, because here we don’t have enough.