Bidding, glorious bidding!

IT'S BIDDING SEASON!!!!

We’ve been in Angola exactly 6 months today!  I think we should celebrate!  I have to take a minute and say, “We’ve made it!”  We’ve survived 6 months in a completely foreign…extremely foreign… and not only foreign, but 3rd world, country!  Before we had kids, I went to Brazil with Briant.  After just a few days in the country, I ran to a McDonalds when I saw it.  I can’t remember, but I may have even worked up some tears as I ate the fries.  And now here we are living a life abroad, without McDonalds, and a lot of other things, and somehow surviving!  I think it’s important that I (and my entire family) take a minute to recognize how far we've come.  It’s difficult to see our progress on a day to day basis, but the growth is there when we look back over time.  This is one of those moments of reflection for me.  Living abroad with kids is not something that I felt totally capable of doing before we joined the foreign service.  When we discussed it years ago, I was very hesitant and remember saying, “I think we need stability.  Besides that, I love our country and appreciate the laws and order that are in place here along with the modern conveniences and ease and general peace in which we can live our lives.”  The kids were excited about going abroad but wanted to take the Alpine mountains and friends and relatives with them (that hasn't changed for them, or anyone :)).   

Now, it’s bidding season!  And not only are we celebrating 6 months in a 3rd world country, but we’re now looking ahead to where we’re going to be for our next post.  It’s hard to believe that we’re already bidding on our next post seeing as how we’re going to be here for another year and a half, but moving people around the world to work in the hundreds of embassies demands organization and planning for everyone involved.  And I don’t mind of course--Briant and I have always preferred to know what the future holds instead of being completely in the dark.  :)

 

Here's Bri creating an excel spreadsheet for our bid list to try and make sense of it all

“Bidding” on a post gets tricky.  Those serving at “hardship” posts get priority in the bidding cycle for their second tour.  Angola is a hardship, high crime post with a 25% differential, so we get to bid first after those in the Middle East, and then they move on to the groups of less and then no differential at all.  They provided a list of 500 possible post options (many of them being the same country but different starting dates and job positions), and you have to find the countries that match your timing of when you will be leaving your current post, the time needed to get language training if necessary, and then match the timing of when you get out of language training to when the post is requesting you to be there to start your job.  And along with all of that, you get home leave which is usually about a month that you need to account for in your timing.  It gets tricky because with all of this juggling, there are different start dates for all of the different language courses and they’re not all equal in length (e.g. Chinese, Arabic, and Russian are much longer than Spanish).  And of course when you have kids, you have to work around the school year if you can or you might find yourself going to literally three different schools in one school year.  We’re thinking that we need to avoid Spanish speaking posts for that reason this time.  Because of timing, and Briant already having some Spanish, we would have to start the school year here in Angola for just 2 months, move to Virginia for language for 4-5 months, and then move to post only to have 3 or 4 months left of school--3 schools, 3 different teachers and classmates, and way too much adapting in one school year.  We don’t think our kids would appreciate that. :) Needless to say, we’ve been working on identifying the lesser of evils so to speak between all of the posts.  We’re supposed to come up with a list of 30 countries that we’re interested in (not all perfect though, some Spanish, etc.).  We’ve worked all week researching these posts, trying to learn about the schools, church, housing, lifestyle, etc. to see if they will meet our needs.  It's weird (and difficult at the same time) to look ahead and forecast what we will need.  For example, after our time here and language training, the kids will arrive at the new post just turning 13 (Thomas), 11 (Savvy), and 9 (Rhea).  When we first started looking at the bid list, my mind was still thinking of my kids as little, so I was thinking of playgrounds and the elementary school.  It was weird to think that I actually also needed to look at middle school options for Thomas, and then for Savvy for the 2nd year that we're there! I’ve reached out to wonderful people, most of them complete strangers, that have served or are currently serving in these posts, and they’ve been more than happy to share what they know to help us make better educated bids.  I’m so grateful for them because the countries have become less foreign and unknown to us.  So, we just turned our list in and now we wait.  There's a lot of "hurry up and...wait" in the foreign service I've learned.  As my good friend Melissa in Mauritania said, we can’t wait to see where the “drunk monkey” decides to send us!  Briant and I laughed at her choice of words because it seriously feels like it’s a drunk monkey making the assignments as to where everyone goes (actually, we have felt more like the drunk monkeys because one day we want to go to a certain country and then the next day, we don’t.  We have been all over the map—literally, no pun needed!).  Joking aside, we know that our lives are in the hands of the Lord and all will work out to be for our benefit, just as Angola is.  This life, foreign service or not, requires a lot of faith! 

Ironically, a game that we ordered called “Take Off” that Briant played with his family as a child, arrived a few days after we started working on the bid list.  The goal of the game is to get your jet from Honolulu, HI all the way across the globe back to Honolulu before your opponents do.  There are colored paths that you navigate on, using colored dice that dictate your path when you roll them.  It was so fun to see the kids recognizing countries that we had been discussing during our bidding and learning where they were located.  It’s definitely                                                                                               a fun way to learn geography!

About half-way through the game the power went out.  The colored travel pathways were difficult to see without overhead light so we brought out some flashlights.  We didn’t have electricity for 3 hours.  The power goes out ALL the time, but the longest has been only 10 minutes or so because our building has a generator that kicks on pretty quickly.  This time it didn't.  This was the longest that we have ever gone without power here thankfully.  Most people here are not as lucky. 

So the kids played for a little bit in the dark (not having electricity and having to use flashlights is not a chore for the kids.  Actually Savvy cried after an hour or so of the power going out because she didn’t “like it.”).

We tried to take their minds off of it though by reading a fun book called “Summer of the Monkeys” that we started recently and then put the kids to bed.
They all wanted to start out sleeping in our bed, so they did but they got hot all together without the air working.  Here’s Rhea all sweaty.  I have no idea how she sleeps with her hair all over her face!