From Qatar to New York to Texas, Jiby Joseph took the long way to find her home.
“My roots may be elsewhere, but my heart and soul are in Texas,” said Joseph, R.N., Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Flower Mound. “I love my life here.”
Finding her way
While Joseph’s extended family is from the southern Indian state of Kerala, she was born in Qatar in the Middle East as the oldest of three sisters. The family moved to the New York borough of Queens as she was entering high school.
The neighborhood and school were quite the melting pot, with so many immigrants all in the same situation,” Joseph said. “I had always gone to girls’ schools, so one of my biggest surprises was going to school with boys.”
Joseph dreamed of becoming a flight attendant but decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a nurse. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Adelphi University in Garden City, New York.
Meeting her groom
Soon after graduating, Joseph got engaged to a man she had never met. No, this wasn’t a typical dating-app love story. Joseph’s was an arranged marriage.
“My father felt it was important for me and my sisters to get married in our early 20s, and arranged marriages are very common in my family’s part of India,” she said.
Her father put together a profile for her with photos, her educational background and family information and shared it with other parents in India.
“He did let me include a few of my preferences in the profile,” noted Joseph.
A match was found, and an engagement was made. Two weeks before the wedding, Joseph and her family flew from New York to India to meet her groom for the first time. The two were married in 2015 and moved to Texas in 2018.
‘Very thankful’
Today, Joseph is a nurse on the observation unit at Texas Health Flower Mound, where she enjoys what she calls the “little joys” of being a nurse.
“Seeing a patient smile, having them say, ‘Thank you,’ sitting and talking with them – these are the best parts of nursing for me,” she said.
Joseph and her husband, Georgey, have two boys, ages 2 and 4. The dream of being a flight attendant is still there, and Joseph fulfills her wanderlust through family road trips.
“Our goal is to see all 50 states by car,” she said. “We’ve been to almost half of them, and I’m thinking Alaska might be the biggest challenge!”
Looking back on her eight years of marriage to a man she barely knew, Joseph is grateful for how it has worked out.
“We have learned to accept both the good and the challenging about each other as we go,” she said. “I am very appreciative and thankful to God for my husband and children and the life I have.”
