Not long after she started studying to become a nurse in Portugal, Iracema Ferreira began bringing a dictionary to her classes as a retort to accusations she was speaking Brazilian, not Portuguese. “It was to show that those words are in the Portuguese language dictionary,” she said.
A Brazilian speech therapist, Ferreira moved to Portugal in 2020 and later heard from several colleagues from her home country that the process of getting a licence to work in the European country was a dead end. The 45-year-old soon abandoned the idea of continuing the career she had practised for a decade and switched to nursing instead.
