A Learning Process.

Moving overseas has been a journey. A process so to speak. As civilians who didn't know how to go about procuring a teaching position overseas, my husband and I were fumbling around blindly for a bit. So to help you avoid making the same mistakes we made, I wanted to share our process with you.

A year ago we painstakingly went through a list of every single international school. Then my husband looked at each school's website to see if there was an opening in his field of education. That resulted in less than a handful of potential jobs. 

What we didn't realize until months later {when I was randomly blog surfing and came across another teaching expat} was that we needed to apply with an agency before schools would even consider us. So we applied with Search Associates. We were told it didn't look good since I wasn't working in the school system with my husband, and it also didn't look good that we had two children. After six months of debating about whether to pursue living overseas or staying in North America, we went ahead and put in my husband's application. We realized that if God's will for our lives was let us live overseas, we had to go ahead and apply. 

You've heard of the old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, "Dear Saint, please, please, please, let me win the lottery." Finally, the exasperated statue comes to life and looks down on the begging man and says, "My son, please, please, please, buy a ticket". 

So we bought our ticket. And we waited. We applied at different schools that were hiring married couples where only one spouse worked. We applied at schools only where it said that a family of four could live off of one income. And we waited. One school we applied to said our kids needed to be bilingual by the time they reached second grade. We sort of figured we weren't meant to leave Myrtle Beach. And we started making our yearly travel plans for the summer. A month in Canada. A trip to NYC and the Hamptons. Camping.

And then my husband had an interview via Skype. And then a second interview the following week...