Our Family Adventure: Our family of four lives abroad for a year.
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| image from wikipedia |
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“What are the criteria for selecting your destination?” is another great question. It’s really interesting how different our criteria are now that we have kids as opposed to when we were young and single and traveling around Latin America. All of a sudden, access to good health care and political stability are much higher on the list.
It’s also a mixed blessing that we have so few constraints on selecting a place or the fact that one of us isn’t being transferred. There are countless wonderful communities all over Latin America, and any number of them would be a great destination for us! So where to begin? We knew we had to narrow it down, so here are our criteria (so far):
1) Latin America; same time zone for Dan’s work and Spanish for the kids
2) Reliable high speed internet for Dan’s work (that eliminates a lot of regions and countries where rolling blackouts are quite common)
3) A second, third, or fourth city in a country. A manageable size, less pollution, and more of a chance to get to know a community than in a capital city. At the same time, probably not a rural town which might have limited resources in terms of schools and healthcare.
4) Politically stable
5) Not touristy. Not too many gringos.
6) Coastal. I’ve finally decided if I’m to leave land-locked Minnesota for a year, I’d like to be able to view the ocean on a regular basis (sorry Bolivia).
That’s our short criteria list – which of course is ever-evolving.
Another big questions is “What will you be doing?”. Dan will continue to design and write software remotely with his current company Integral 7. We hope to enroll the kids in a local (Spanish-speaking) school. And I hope to do some volunteer work in our community in addition to helping the kids negotiate another school, language and culture, and in general manage our transition. We hope to travel some but mostly we want to be part of another community for the year. We want to make friends, understand what it is like to live in that country. We want to learn about the people and the cultural traditions. And in the process of learning about others, we hope to learn more about ourselves and what’s important in our lives.
Most common question….”Where are you going?”
My friend Annie and I joked today that everyone’s interest in our destination is reminiscent of when Dan and I were waiting for our kids to be born and both were 2 plus weeks past their due dates. Friends and family tried not to harangue us with, “Is the baby here yet?”, but really that’s all anyone wanted to know. Similarly, folks would love to know where we’re heading in 3 months – as would we. We’re working on it... stay tuned.
