Meet Uma Mullapudi from India, who is now a meditation teacher. She talks about teaching meditation classes during the pandemic with Libby Ballengee of Dayton.

Meet Zous and Josie Garcia. They came to the US from the Philippines as students in 1967.

Meet Katia Maklouf from Algeria. She talks about how her Dayton roommate has made her transition to life in America so much easier.

We begin a new season of a series about immigrants in the Miami Valley – it’s called The Bind that Ties. In this iteration we meet Ales Ficko – from Slovenia.

Choco Valdez was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. the most difficult way – on foot, at night, through the cold desert. His wife, Jennie Valdez, knows the story well.

Mohamed and Ali Al-Hamdani came to the U.S. as refugees with their parents from Iraq, and they have hair raising stories about their experiences during the Iraq war 30 years ago, when they were just little boys.

Martha Jeannette Rodriguez is from Columbia, where she had a restaurant that was targeted for extortion after years of persecution. As a result, she sent two of her children to the U.S. to live with relatives. Eventually the whole family came and was granted political asylum.

Denis Guriev and Lana Gurieva came to the U.S. 10 years ago from Ukraine. They were young and relatively unattached. Today, they have a family and a business and they say they feel very much at home in the Miami Valley.

In part three of The Bind that Ties, we hear two women who are such good friends, they call themselves twin sisters – even though Gabriela Pickett is from Mexico and Severa Mwiza is from Rwanda.

In the second installment of WYSO's series The Bind That Ties, we hear Mojgan Samardar, who we met briefly last week, and Mirza Mirza, a local businessman of Turkish ancestry.