By: Lisbeth Mora
Teodora Yordanova was thirteen when she left Bulgaria for boarding school in Switzerland. What she did not leave behind was her grandparents: her maternal grandfather, who stopped working at fifty-seven because Bulgaria's pension system could no longer support him, and grandparents in a rural village where a power outage was a real problem with no one to call. Visits home meant watching relatives navigate a healthcare system where insurance covered very little, leaving people uncertain about what treatment they could afford.