All the things I’ve been meaning to write about living overseas (well, at least the ones I haven’t forgotten yet…) PART I

We’ve been living in Doha, Qatar since August 2011 and the other night, our son Luca (who was four when we moved here) said, “I’m just starting to like it here and we are going to move away.  I think I’m gonna kind of miss this place.”  To his credit, he has spent a greater percentage of his total life here than the rest of us, but I guess I am gonna kind of miss this place as well. 

There are a few things that I have been thinking about over the months that I want to make sure and write down.   I was told by a boss once that I am quite verbose and, although the truth hurts, he was right.  That’s not going to stop me from writing too much.  It’s just going to force me to put these thoughts into a few different blog posts.  

Part 1:

I read on some website before we left Colorado that moving overseas was as traumatic as having a death in the family. 

The Slumps

What could possibly worse than a death in the family and why would anyone subject themselves and their family to something so traumatic?  Don’t get me wrong – we have had our bad days.  Our daughter Wilder, who was 10 when we moved here, was terribly homesick for the first several weeks.  She put up pictures of her friends from home, her cat and her friend Jim Olson.  She cried herself to sleep sometimes and broke my heart on a few occasions by asking me why we had moved away from home.  But then slowly, gradually, she came out of it.  She makes friends easily and is afraid of nothing, so she is actually the perfect candidate for an overseas adventure. 

Innes, who is always so content and happy, admitted to feeling a bit low for a while that first year.  He was missing his friends, his mountain bike and his skis.  Facebook and writing this blog kept him in touch and made him feel less homesick.  Luckily, he was a bit low while I was still doing ok.  We heard that some couples hit the “slump” at the same time.  I can see in hindsight why that would be so hard. 

I went through a slump about five months after moving over here.  I had been told this would happen, but while it was happening I couldn’t seem to convince myself that this was “normal”.  It’s not “normal” to wake up with an anxious knot in your belly every day.  It’s not “normal” to think everyone is mad at me for something.  It’s not “normal” to feel paranoid all the time.  I felt like I was 22 again.  OK, so being 40 and feeling 22 shouldn’t be so bad, right?  But it was all the bad stuff about being 22 – not the “get four hours of sleep, work two jobs, party all night and start over the next day” kind of 22.  It was the “does my butt look fat in these pants?” kind of 22.

Communication

I guess in the old days (circa 1995), packing your bags, moving to the Middle East and leaving your family and friends behind could have been much more traumatic.   After all, you were dependent upon snail mail and a simple phone call cost about $200.   These days, we can Skype to our hearts content for free!  We can call our families or friends and it only costs a few Qatari Riyals.  We can text our friends all over the globe and get an instant response.  We can email anytime we want.  In fact, our Internet and mobile phones work better from over there than they ever did in the US. 

My mom actually said at one point that she thinks she “sees” and talks to me more since I moved halfway around the world than she did when I lived an hour away.  All that said, it is still the best feeling in the world to step off that plane in Colorado and know that our family and friends are nearby.  There is no replacement for human touch.  It’s also comforting to know that no matter where we move around the planet, our friends are still our friends, and even if we forgot their birthdays (again) that we can still pick up right where we left off (like forgetting their birthdays in person). 

First World Problems

Maybe it would have been more traumatic had we moved to a “more difficult” country.  We had these delusions of moving to some third world country to show our kids how most of the world really lives and works.  We thought we would be forced to learn a new language.  Instead, we moved to the country with the highest per capita income in the world and the only language we’ve had to learn is proper English (as opposed to American) or Kiwi (we have MANY friends and co-workers from New Zealand).  The fact that our son Luca thinks his friend British friend Ollie is really Ali and thinks Abraham Lincoln is really Ibrahim Lincoln shows us that he is really the only one learning any Arabic in this family. 

The national pastime in Qatar turns out to be shopping – on steroids.  There is more shopping in this country (and nearby Dubai) than I could have ever imagined.  We left our cozy little Colorado ski resort lifestyle, where people with millions of dollars spend two weeks a year in their $3 million dollar homes, for a country where people with BILLIONS of dollars buy football (aka soccer) teams and Ferrari’s for their 17-year-old sons and spend two weeks a year on their own private islands.  (Ok, well this last part is sort of made up…sort of.)

For a family like ours, the hardest part about living in Qatar has been the lack of sports and athletic pursuits in general, the lack of trails/bike-friendly drivers, and lack of any sort of hill whatsoever.  Every little 5K race or sprint triathlon they put on over here is called a “marathon” (but the prizes they pay out and trophies they give away make winning a 20-minute race feel like you’ve just won the London Marathon).   People act like you are crazy to ride or run outside or regularly partake in any form of exercise.  (Did I mention that Qatar has the highest obesity/diabetes rates per capita in the world?)  That said, we’ve gotten outdoors.  Thanks to Innes we’ve found places to run and ride bikes on dirt – places where camels graze on the sparse weeds and occasionally you’ll stumble across the mummified carcass of a dog, goat, or camel.  And if that smell isn’t something dead, it’s probably the open pit garbage incineration area, just over that big man-made dirt hill that seems to be encroaching on our Friday morning bike route.  However, if you are into road riding, the 4-lane highways here are practically deserted on Friday mornings so you can really get some good kilometers on the pavement.  You always know that the amazing hot, sandy headwind will, at some point, become a tailwind.  If it's hills you need, Innes discovered a great route through the parking structure near our house that is a full kilometer from top to bottom.  I'm not kidding.  That's where he does his hill workouts.  

So yes, maybe the overseas move could have been harder on us emotionally in many ways.  It hasn’t been too bad.   We’ve decided to really test ourselves next time with a big move to Caracas, Venezuela in July.  The city with the highest murder rate in the world, some of the most dire poverty in the world, and a fresh dose of political unrest to boot.  But at least we’ll learn a new language.  Via con dios, for now.  Lisa