Moving Your Family Abroad Part 1

This is the first in what I hope will be several blog posts about the challenges and triumphs of moving a family to an overseas assignment.

On Christmas Day, 1985 my wife, our two young daughters and I had lived on a small Eastern Caribbean island for three weeks. Given the specialness of the day, we did what most Canadians would do: we went to the beach. 

The white sand beaches were almost deserted and the water was warm. Our two and a half and four and a half year old water babies were happy.

While I have since experienced the conflicting emotions that go with being a trailing spouse, at the time I was the one whose future job prospects depended on a successful transition for my family from life in Canada to life on a tourist island where I would be traveling for one third of my working life and my wife and children would be left to find their way in the new environment.

Surprisingly, everything worked out.  

While there were a few small challenges, none of us experienced any medical emergencies, financial disasters or car accidents. The tenants we’d found to rent our house back home stayed for the full three years we were away. We learned how to drive a car with the steering wheel on the right side, my wife found decent schools for the girls and we made friends.

For many adults, the arrival of the Christmas holidays brings with it loneliness, alienation and stress. And that’s when they’re in their home environments. That first Christmas away from home, ensconced in our little tropical paradise, we experienced all three.

While the NGO I worked for had chosen a house that was big enough to also serve as my office— when we arrived, it had only rudimentary furniture.  We had beds, a small couch and a kitchen with a propane stove and an electric refrigerator. It took us a week or two to discover that the oven and one of the burners didn’t work, that ‘pipe water’ from the city supply was more theoretical concept than reality and that we’d be dependent on rain for our water supply.

The cockroaches were huge and a little too friendly. The herds of pigs and cows that daily meandered through our yard would continue their ruminant ways until our land lord built a fence.

So we did the only sensible thing: we invited my mother-in-law to join us. She arrived a week or two before Christmas and provided a support for all of us. She was resilient, resourceful and positive. She was company for my wife when I was off the island and safe, intelligent and loving company for the children. She loved spending hours coloring with the kids.

That Christmas our tree was a thorn bush collected from the dry hillside around our house and decorated with lights.  Our little television sat on a cardboard box. Among the best things that Christmas was the cable TV with CNN, Cinemax and ESPN. This was a really big deal for people who had lived in the hills north of Ottawa where cable TV had not yet arrived.