Oh, the People You'll Meet!

It started 25 years ago in Brasilia. Not my travels, that I was born to do. My mother flew to Rio on my due date and continued on to New York and London with me only two months. No, I married someone I met at a National Geographic conference and began a longer journey, a wonderful wandering one.
It was a great conference. National Geographic did a great job making the teaching of geography meaningful and I have used much of what I learned there in the classroom.  In closing, the group of teachers gathered to say goodbye and sign each others' atlases. (This was a geography conference, mind you!) Someone signed mine, "I don't know much about you... Jon."  Well, he at least knew my phone number by the time he left Brasilia, and that was the start of our long-distance dating. We took turns traveling 14 hours by overnight bus to be together on week-ends. Later we traveled from coast to coast across the US with an air-pass, and explored Southern Brazil by bus and train. We got engaged in the romantic historical town of Tiradentes and honeymooned off the northern coast of Brazil on the island of Fernando de Noronha. I suppose I gained much more from that conference than a few teaching tips!

Jon and I decided to continue our careers overseas and started out having our first child while teaching in Bulgaria. Jake was a well traveled little boy by the time he entered first grade in EARJ. There were plenty of others like us choosing to bring their children up overseas, and we made lasting friendships.
One of the curses of this kind of life is that you move from country to country and have to leave friends behind.

I was struggling with this when we lived in the Marshall Islands. I remember asking the company president's wife how she coped with their life of moving every two or three years. She explained that she saw it as a blessing because she had had the opportunity to meet so many people in each place she lived.
And now that Jon and I, our children all grown, are coming to the end of our time overseas, we will miss that part the most. We won't miss international education, which has sadly lost its way as it attempts to become competitive in the business world; we won't miss all the planes, trains and bus trips; we won't miss the shipping of boxes and storage of memories; but we will miss meeting the people.  Over these 25 years we have had the privilege of spending time with outstanding educators, diplomats, ambassadors, commanders, military families, preachers, missionary kids, linguists, musicians, engineers, rocket scientists, pilots, doctors, entrepreneurs, Olympic athletes, Canadians and Nigerians.

These, along with our cleaners, nannies, drivers, teaching assistants, and school secretaries, students and parents, have made our life infinitely richer.
We recently were invited to attend a Ramadan 'iftar', a meal which breaks the fast at sundown. We normally would have jumped at the chance since this is what makes living overseas so interesting. But we would have had to cancel a long-standing invitation to Happy Hour at the American Embassy. We love this chance to meet people like us who are temporarily in Kuwait, misplaced and away from home. The conversation never starts with the question, "Where are you from?" because that is often not so easy to answer. Instead we say, "How long have you been here?" and "What brings you to Kuwait?" Then we wallow in the familiarity of meeting someone from a country we have never lived in, doing something we never knew was possible. Jon and I feel at home in a place where everyone readily shares a part of themselves to enrich the experience of others.