More to follow

125 days to go.  I wanted to make sure you knew that I have been writing... it is just taking me longer than I had hoped to get the next post written as I remember it, or as I would like it to read.  Maybe I should just let it be.  I will have it up in the next day or two, I promise.  Patience!

Separation

Another day gone, making it 128 days until we go home to Canada.  Matt came home last night.  He had been away for almost a month, on and off.  It was certainly nice to have him home again.  Not that  we aren't used to seperation.  We often joke that this is the secret to our success; spending half of our time apart!  A year after we got married, we had to make a decision to live on opposite sides of the country.  Matt got a job working for CIDA, Canada's International Development Agency, which he couldn't pass up.  The job was in Ottawa.  A week earlier, I had been accepted into a teacher's education degree program at UBC in Vancouver.  We lived apart for a year, making the 5 hour trip across the country to see each other every couple months.  It was the start of our life apart.  This was in 1997, when email was still emerging.  It soon became our best friend.  We wrote pages and pages to each other over the course of that year.  I found a printed stack of our correspondence several years later when I was going through boxes of our stuff.  I laughed to think that Matt had thought to print them in case our computer crashed, which it had indeed done. 

After I graduated from UBC, I moved east to be with Matt and we were together for a while there.  That was a record stretch of two years, I believe.  Then I went to Kyrgyzstan while Matt stayed behing in Ottawa to complete a month of language training.  Nice of the Canadian government to be so concerned about Matt's language training and not at all about mine.  I arrived at the airport without a word of Russian and struggled through my first month in Central Asia on my own.  Matt soon followed and, apart from a few short trips in country, we were together for a year.  Then came the UNHCR emergency roster training in Spain. That was a month, and it saw Matthew travelling on September 12th, the day after the attacks on the twin towers.  He was home for only two days before shipping off to Pakistan.  I spent the next two months on my own in Bishkek, while all the "non-essential" expatriate staff were being sent home.  It had nothing to do with Kyrgyzstan being close to Afghanistan though, as most people thought.  They say that it was because of the US Airforce base that opened up.  I still hold to my belief that it was because the country ended with STAN.  I spent my days at school and my nights at the Hyatt either in the gym or marking in the lounge over hot chocolate.  It was a difficult time, but the chocoate helped me get through.

The following year, after our assignment in Kyrgyzstan was over, Matt was posted to Kabul. We were separated for six months then, as I politely declined to join him there.  Post 9/11 Afghanistan really didn't hold an interest for me.  I went home and moved in with a couple friends.  They had an unfinished loft in the house they were renting, so I offered to paint it and decorate it if they would let me move in with them.  Not that I didn't have family in Vancouver, but I was worried about choosing one family over another, and this gave me neutral ground to use as home base.  I went back to school and started my teacher librarianship diploma, and I worked at a famous kids bookstore in Vancouver to make ends meet. 

When Matthew returned to Canada, we had two months together while we waited to hear about his next assignment.  To pass the time, we took a trip down the west coast to Baja California and went kayaking.  Then we spent time with our families in Vancouver and on the island.  We took a road trip with my parents up island, across to the Sunshine Coast, back down to Vancouver and over to the island again.  While on this circle trip, we found the house of our dreams and decided that it was as good a time as any to invest.  It was just after that when we found out our next posting would be to Angola.  Matt was expected to start immediately, but we had to finish the basement on our home so that we could rent it while we were away.  It was decided that I would stay to do this while he went on to Angola to find us a home there and settle in to his new assignment.  This was another four months' seperation.  I think I got the better end of the deal on this one, though. 

I joined Matthew in Angola later that summer, and it was the beginning of the most difficult assignment we had ever been on.  Luanda was a dirty, noisy, angry city.  In my first month there, we were stopped and threatened that our car would be impounded if we didn't pay a fine, I had hundreds of dollars of goods stolen from my car while it was under surveillance, I was attacked getting into my car and I saw someone killed outside our apartment for no apparent reason.  We made some essential changes to our living arrangment, and I purchased some self defence items to keep on me at all times, and that was the only way I was able to cope.  Despite all efforts though, I was eager to leave after a year in Angola. 

Matthew received news of his next post in January the following year, and was asked to go immediately to Geneva, Switzerland.  Talk about exact opposites!  Geneva was everything Luanda wasn't; organized, clean, pristine, safe.  He left in March that year, and so we began another three month seperation.  As a teacher, I had an obligation to the school, so I had to stay in Luanda until the end of the academic year.  It would have been impossible to maintain two apartments in both cities, however, so the school made arrangments for me to move into housing on campus.  It was a whole other world living on a compound.  It helped me to better understand why many expats live this sort of life in dangerous places like Angola. 

In July, I moved to Geneva as well, and we spent the next three years there.  There were short seperations, but nothing compared to those we had already endured.  A month here and there, sometimes more, but never more than six weeks at a time.  It was a time to settle down and learn to deal with each other full time again.  We both felt the void left by not having as much time to ourselves, but quickly found a way to fill this space with our individual interests.  Both of our children were born during these three years, and our lives changed to meet the new parenting roles that we were in.

Just after our son Zachary was born, we found out that we were to be moving to Bogota, Colombia.  After consulting with our pediatrician, it was decided that Zachary might be better off in Canada until he was six months old and could receive his yellow fever vaccine.  So, we began a four month seperation, this time involving the children.  Matt went ahead to Bogota to find housing and check out life in Colombia, and I stayed in Canada with the children.  This was a whole new experience for me, being alone with two small children, rather than being on my own.  Luckily, family and friends were nearby, ready to help.  I don't think I would have survived the seperation without their help.

We are coming to end of three years in Colombia now, and it has been difficult, but not impossible.  Our seperations over the past three years have seemed harder somehow.  I have tried to explain it time and time again to Matthew.  He senses my unrest, but I have had a hard time articulating exactly what the difference has been.  I think that I have finally laid my finger on it, though.  It is a matter of independence, I believe.  I have been struggling with my loss of independence.  When Matthew leaves, it is no longer me on my own in a foreign country.  It is now two children and I coping on our own without him.  This is a hard thing to do in a country where security is such a major issue.  I cannot simply pick up and head out of the city with the children.  A single woman travelling alone with two children?  By car? Something like this requires planning and security clearance.  It requires courage and letting go of my fears.  It is a hundred times more difficult than it was when I had only myself to worry about.  I don't say these things to complain.  I tell you this simply to help you understand why it has been trying for me.  Being a trailing spouse is much easier than being a trailing mother with children.

So it is that we have reached a moment in our lives when we have decided to take a year off.  We have made a decision to stop working for a year and to spend some quality time together as a family reassessing our priorities.  It is something that we need to do together as a family, and something that will help us decide where we should go from here.  All the years of seperation have brought us to a place where we need some time together.  This has also taken courage, and commitment, and I am so pleased that it is becoming a reality.

In sickness and in health

130 days to go!

I am very excited about this blog.  I almost couldn't sleep last night thinking about all the stories that I have to share... I was sick yesterday, and it made me think about all the weird and wonderful things that have happened to me overseas.  I am therefore going to begin with a tale of my first sickness abroad. 
It happened in 1996 in Guatemala.  Matthew and I had just been married, and we decided to take a volunteer position in the Ixcan jungle area of Guatemala.  We were volunteering with an organization called Project Accompaniment, a group that was started to monitor the return of refugees from Chiapas, across the border back into Guatemala. After the massacres in the 80s, the refugees demanded that they be allowed to have internationals living in their communities to witness any acts of violence that may or may not take place.  They were incredibly strong as a group of refugees, and they organized their own return!  This was the first time any group of refugees had done this.   We were well-equipped for the job, as both of us had taken Spanish in University.  After two weeks of language training in a town known as Xela (actually named Quetzaltenango, but the Mayan people still call it Xela), all of our academic knowledge was converted into an ability to speak fluently, and we were ready to go.

We were to be posted to a small town called Ixtahuacan Chiquito, near the River Ixcan in the north-west corner of Guatemala.  It was a long journey in, starting in Guatemala city.  We took a bus to Coban, several hours north of the capital.  Then we climbed on board a small Cessna plane which was to take us into the Ixcan jungle.  It was a four-seater plane, but they had removed the two seats in the rear and placed small step stools on the floor as seats instead.  This miraculously tranformed the four-seater plane into a six-seater, albeit without seat belts.  Logically, me being the tallest person in the group, they gave me a seat near the back of the plane, where the roof begins its decent to the tail.  So I spent the entire flight folded in half, unable to see anything, feeling like I would lose my stomach if I didn't get some air.  Matthew, being the only male who spoke Spanish, was given the seat next to the pilot.  Gotta love that latino "machismo", eh?  To make matters worse, the flight had been delayed for several hours because of fog.  But, there was a job to be done, so the pilot shrugged off the weather and took off despite all warnings.  I was scared to death. No seat.  No seatbelt. No stomach.  No problem.  We landed about an hour later in Cantabal and hopped on a bus to Pueblo Nuevo where we spent the night.
 
We slept in a small hostel (which turned out to be someone's home with hammocks strung up for us).   It was a very long night.  Matthew got sick from eating rancid peanuts and spent the night outside puking his insides out, and we had to get up at 4am to catch the "bus" to the next village.  Everyone was there waiting at 4am, everyone except the driver.  Apparently he forgot to set his alarm, so we finally pulled out around 6am.  The "bus" was another exaggeration.  It was a Ford pick-up, with a metal railing around the bed at the back.  This allowed for more people to be crammed in like sardines.  We stood for hours, holding on to the metal frame for support.  With each hour, more passengers were packed into the bed of the truck.  It was so full by the end that we didn't actually need to hold on to anything.  There was no way you could move, let alone fall.  We arrived exhausted in the next village, where we caught a boat down the river to Ixtahuacan Chiquito.

We arrived in the dead of night, and I distinctly remember the fear that gripped me as we walked in total darkness up the steep bank of the river, through the jungle and into the village.  Our mimi maglites were not much help.  We were led to the home of the village leader, Don Marcos, who officially welcomed us and led us to the house that the community had built for international accompaniers like ourselves.  It was conveniently located smack dab in the middle of the village, on a hill.  This way, everyone could keep an eye on us, and we would be sure not to miss any of the late night fiestas that were a regular occurance in Ixtahuacan Chiquito.  The full deal, marimba and everything.

We had come prepared for our stay in the jungle.  Prepared for anything, really... we carried with us all the clothes we would need for two months, our toiletries, mosquito nets, sleeping bags, thermarests, boots, sandles, swimming suits and towels. On top of that, we brought books to read and journals to write in. Furthermore, thinking we might get tired of beans, rice and tortillas, we carted in bags and bags of oatmeal for our morning breakfast. We also brought a two month supply of M&Ms to eat after taking our weekly chloroquin pills, which anyone who has had to take them will attest to, taste absolutely disgusting. The M&Ms were a survival tool.



We settled into the rhythm of village life quickly.  Our daily routine took on a life of its own... wake at dawn with the roosters, make a fire and cook some oatmeal with bananas.  Wash at the water pump or, in Matthew's case, shave at the water pump with all the little kids giggling between the slats of the wall.  I don't think they had ever seen anyone shave with such white foamy cream on their face before.  Ah, the North American comforts.  The water was freezing, which was nice on hot days, but not great on cold, rainy mornings.  Lunch and dinner were at a different family's house each day.  The arrangement was that we would eat with a different family each day.  We were, in turn, expected to purchase non-perishable foods from one of the local stalls to bring as a gift for the family that was cooking for us that day.  It was usually rice, beans and tortillas.  There was an occasional egg fried in so much oil that it was unrecognizable by the time it reached our plate, or the wild boar that the family had killed that day that had been smoked over the fire until it was too tough to eat.  We were, however, expected to eat everything that was put in front of us so as not to offend anyone.  It was easy to do when thinking about the life of the people who were hosting us.  Waste not.

Matthew as doing research for his thesis, and I helped by interviewing the women. They´d be damned if they were going to talk to a man, so I was the natural alternative.  This helped to pass the time.  We interviewed the family with which we were dining that day, and this arrangement was explained to the community members at a meeting just after we arrived.  I would sit down with the women while they were weaving and ask them a set of questions, while Matt would go off into the fields with the men and do the same thing.  I learned how to weave as a result of these encounters; a skill that I hope I still possess, and hope to pass on to my daughter one day.  I felt so priviledged to be living among such amazingly courageous people.  The stories that they told us filled our hearts with compassion and wonder at the joy that they had for life.  It was an unforgettable time.

Then came the fateful day that I came down with a cold.  It seemed like a cold, anyway.  I started to cough, and this soon turned into something debilitating.  I deteriorated quickly and was soon unable to even rise from my bed.  I would lay for hours in the hammock, coughing.  Our only medical resource was the infamous book, ¨Donde No Hay Medicos¨, translated to mean ¨Where there are no doctors¨.  Using a list of symptoms to come to a diagnosis, we came up with a horrible shortlist including TB.  Panic.  Matthew decided to speak to Don Marcos to see if there was anything they could do to get me out of Ixtahuacan Chiquito to a doctor.  It was decided that we needed to go back up the river to a village called Los Angeles, where there was a working radio and an air strip.

There was the problem, however, that I was unable to walk.  The men in the village quickly came up with the most logical solution.  They decided to lift me onto a chair and strap me tightly to it, despite our protests.  The chair had a thick strap that went under the back legs of the chair, around the forehead of a man that was only half my height and then back under the chair where it tied together in a tight knot.  The back of the chair rested against the back of the man, with my feet dangling out behind.  It was, needless to say, not the most comfortable form of transportation that I have ever encountered.  The man, who I felt eternally sorry for, carried me down to the river where there was a long narrow boat waiting to carry me up river, against the current, to the next village.  The chair was lowered into the center of the boat, and I remained strapped to it for the duration of the journey.  It was a long trip, and I had visions of myself falling overboard, strapped to the chair, unable to swim or save myself for certain death.  Matthew rode behind me, holding on to the chair.  Not that he had a choice; he was to hold onto me or die trying. 

When we reached the village, we were filled with hope.  The same little man heaved my chair onto his back and carried me up the steep bank into the village.  The parade of children following behind giggling at the gringa strapped to the chair is something I will never forget.  I was laid down in the international accompanier's hut; a kind woman who had walked to Ixtahuacan Chiquito to meet us several weeks earlier.  Matthew was beside himself and set about trying to get me some help.  He found the men who knew how to use the radio, but  found it to be broken.  He was desperate though; so desperate that our host offered to walk to the next village to get help.  It took three days until we heard the plane,  but then it was a whirlwind rescue.  The pilot landed, they loaded me into the plane, and I was flown directly to Guatemala City.  Matthew had arranged for someone to radio ahead to have our friend from the Canadian embassy there to meet us, and I was whisked off to the best hospital in the city.  After a series of tests, they discovered that I had broncheal pneumonia.  The treatment?  Antibiotics.  Yes, it really was that simple.  Our friend from the Canadian embassy insisted that we stay with them while I recovered.  We stayed for a week, until I had regained my strength, and we headed back into the jungle.

We took a different route this time, and flew directly into Los Angeles.  Everyone was happy to see me alive and kicking.  We ran into a problem trying to find a boat that was going back up river to our village, though, and decided to walk in.  It was a full days hike from Los Angeles to Ixtahuacan Chiquito, but we were confident we could do it. The trail was clearly marked, as it was the rainy season. By rain, I mean torrential downpour, by the way. The sort of rain that you hear coming before it actually shows up. After it does appear, it only lasts for a few minutes, and then it moves on. Quite nice if you are sitting in the comfort of your "champa" looking out at the jungle. Not so lovely if you are in the middle of the jungle with nowhere to hide. The rainy season translated into muddy season on the ground. The trail was clearly marked because of the mud. We had been warned about the mud, and told not to wear our North American hiking boots in it or they would be ruined forever. So, we were wearing the black rubber boots that we had picked up for a few dollars before our first trip into the area. Needless to say, neither of us had worn them hiking before and, about an hour into the hike, our feet were killing us. Both of us had blisters and we had to take regular breaks to apply mole skin to our heels.

I had always wanted to see the jungle. I can remember dreaming about it as a child. Let me tell you, though, after a couple hours in the jungle, I was beginning to miss home. Endless vines and trees and mud. No bright, colourful birds, no snakes (thank goodness) or interesting animals. Only the trail, the mud, my pack and Matthew, who was trying to encouraging. We both lost a boot at some point along the path, and our socks were no longer any shade of white.
After hours of slogging through the mud, which we had come to know as ¨lodo¨, I reached a breaking point. The intense heat of the jungle, thick with humidity, began to get the better of me. It probably didn't help much that I was still recovering from pneumonia.  I started to breath more quickly and my pace slowed considerably. It was getting dark, and we knew that we still had a ways to go. I started to panic. I did not like the idea of sleeping in the jungle. My breathing quickly turned to panting, and I soon found myself hyperventilating. Matthew quickly came to my rescue, coaching me with a ¨breath in, and out, and in, and out¨ that miraculously brought me back to reality. I rose to my feet, determined to prove my strength in this impossible situation. One foot in front of the other was the mantra I was repeating over and over in my head. And then, there it was... a village at the bottom of the small hill we had just climbed. As we emerged from the jungle, we found ourselves on a path leading into Ixtahuacan Chiquito.  Never had I been so happy to see civilization in all my life.

We had a couple other minor illnesses while we living there, but this time we were prepared.  Cipro became a very good friend of ours, and we learned to try anti-biotics first, rather than evacuate.  It was certainly a challenging way to begin our life together; we had been married for only four months.

Trials of a Trailing Spouse

My name is Stephanie.  I am a wife, a mother and a teacher.  I am also a trailing spouse.  
I decided to start this blog as a sort of self-help mechanism.  I guess I have been having a bit of a hard time... although most of you will probably scoff at my trials.
I have been living away from home for the past 14 years, trailing my husband as he is posted from one country to another with the UN.  It sounds so romantic and exciting to live in places like Kyrgyzstan, Angola, Switzerland and Colombia, I know.  But it does indeed have its trials. 
As a result, my husband and I have decided to take a year off next year and go and do the things that we have always wanted to do.  Our two children deserve a break from the craziness of overseas living, we feel, so we are packing up and heading home in 131 days.  Yes, I am counting.  Sad, you say?  Perhaps.  I call it coping.  Over the next 131 days, I will write down what I can remember of our 14 years overseas.  My sister has been bugging me to do this for years.  It is about time I got started.
I hope you enjoy!  And I know that there are many of you out there who can relate, so please feel free to comment.