Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

It was a pleasure to meet Valeska Hass who works as a Project Manager in the Business Improvement and Projects Unit at the University of Kent, where she has been for the last two years. She started working in the automotive industry delivering intercultural training for sales teams and we discuss the role and importance of transferable skills. Valeska was born in Germany but grew up in Namibia in southern Africa and later Venezuela while her father was a teacher who taught in German schools abroad. She has lived in the UK for 13 years which is the longest time she has ever been based in one country. We talk about how home for her has always been the people she has met and about her earliest memory which pertains to the day when her sister was born which, as we discover, she associates with eating cottage cheese. The discussion then turns to the notion of homesickness and how and why Valeska is homesick wherever she is. She explains why she has a frozen memory of the places she has lived, which always stays