My family is new to the international teaching scene, but we are very excited to explore all the opportunities it has to offer.
We are in year two of our Odyssey and the experience to date has been evrything we wished for.
This blog chronicles our entire experience.
Well the move is going very well. We have found a home for all our furniture. We have our final garage sale this coming weekend. We have 10 days left. Its time to cancel subscriptions and all those automatic withdrawls. We are down to one car, the van went to its new home last week. We are hoping to see our dog one last time this week. The movers collected everything we wanted to take to Doha last week. We were hoping to stay around 120 cu ft. of goods but it looks like we'll be closer to 140 cu. ft. I am hoping the bill will be south of 7500$ cdn, fingers are crossed.
One thing we're not too sure about are the DVDs we are sending over. Some are rated 18A and we are hoping they get through, but we are unclear as to how strict everthing is. I am guessing that if you can purchase beer and wine you can watch DVDs while you drink 'em. We fly out of Kelowna on the 29th of July and we have a week to explore Washington DC. This is obviously one of the perks to travelling overseas. We asked for a lay over in Washington, and although it costs you a little bit to make it happen, its worth it. I will include some pictures of our trip to Qatar in the next entry and talk about how it went getting into the country.
One thing we noticed was that the benefit package is not as good as what we have over here. As such Lenore had her eyes lasered, we had Breana's wisdom teeth removed, I had fillings replaced and crowns put in .... There is no dental plan in our package. Any elective surgery I would get done before I left. I have no idea what the general quality of health care over there. I am sure if you are the Emir the care is probably pretty good. We opened an offshore account where we hope to deposit Lenore's paycheck. That should be enough to cover our pension payments. The school contributes 8% of my salary to pension but that is significantly less than what my contributions were at the school district. As well, we had to pay out our kids RESPs. You can't make contribtions while you are overseas, so we had to pay them out in full before we left. Fortunately our kids are older and we only had another couple years of contributions left.
I knew going into my interview with ASD that the school would provide rent free accomodation. We just weren't too sure what to expect. We were really pleased when the school forwarded pictures. This gave us piece of mind. The villa we are being given is 5 bedroom and a 5 minute walk from the school. There is no furnace and no ducting. There are wall air conditioners mounted through out the villa. The furniture is nice and the beds include 1 king , 1 queen and two doubles. We purchased egg carton foam as the matressses over ther are apparently quite hard.
this little hut is.... wait for it .... The maid's quarters! Lenore Insists we fill it! We were also able to buy a new vehicle from a family that was heading back to the US. Infact we purchased a TV, vacuum cleaner, blender... This is a good thing to do as all the voltage outlets over there run on 210 V and you need a transformer to run any N. Amer appliances.
The local mall is pretty cool its called the Villagio
Yes that is a canal with gondolas, I'm not sure if the gondoliers are Venetian or not... but it wouldn't surprise me if they were. Doha Scenery...
You can Golf... If you can afford it Natural Sand traps I believe...
There are several stages to this whole adventure. There's the commitment to a search organization and then researching the schools you are interested in and then prepping for the fair and then attending the fair. Then you get the job and its like an explosion of emotion and excitement. You go home, go back to work and then about a week later you think OMG this is insane! Don't get me wrong, it's still exciting, you just start thinking about all the stuff that has to happen in the next 6 months.
We played with the idea of renting the house but the more we talked about this opportunity, the more it made sense to jump in with both feet! So with a couple of weeks we made the decision to sell everything along with the house! We sold our vehicles and all our furniture. We are keeping basically picture albums finishing rods, winter clothes ... that's about it. My principal is a real sweetheart, she has agreed to house our bedroom suite for us, in case we decide to come back.
The school I am going to ASD ( the American School of Doha ) gives a certain amount of money for shipping your stuff. No problem, its very generous. But here's where the "education" began. In order to ship by sea you need to rent a container. The smallest container is 20 ft long. Now, if you fill the container or if you only put a shoebox in the container the price is the same and that price is $13000. Which as you might expect is slightly more ( double) what the school was providing. So we thought we might bring bikes and our bedroom suite but 13 Gs was just a little too steep. So we opted for what was behind curtain #2. Air shipment! Wayyyyy!!!! more expensive but you can ship the shoe box and end up only paying for the shoebox and not the emty space around the shoebox. So we decided that we could afford to ship about 125 cu. ft of stuff. Mainly family portraits, clothes, books, guitars, hockey equipement (2 olympic size ice sheets in Doha), golf clubs.... you know, the important stuff. Then there was our dog. Finding a home for Rosie was hard. We knew that Doha would have been simply too hot for her. But after several months, we were finally contacted by a lovely woman who was looking for a mature dog. She fell in love with Rosie and the whole family was feeling pretty good about Rosie's new home.
It was strange the way everything simply came together. We sold our tent trailer in April, van and house in June. I really started believing in that old addage that " There is a buyer out there if you are simply patient enough to wait for them to find you and knock on your door. " There is also the other thing about asking a fair price and being open to settle for maybe a little less than yoou had anticipated..
OK Where was I? Sorry for the interruption, 3 months, but as they say "Life Happens" The Saturday of the fair, for me, was all about waiting. Schools use this day for second interviews. I had one interview in the morning and then I just sat on pins and needles for 12 hours. At 5 pm that evening I was called in and I received my offer from Doha. It was an awesome offer and I accepted on the spot.
Signing the Contract... ME and myNew Boss
When I emailed my wife there was a little bit of confusion. I was fairly confident about an offer from Taiwan and so when I told her I got the job she thought we were going to Kaoshiang. It took several minutes of disjointed conversation before we realized that we were simultaneously imagining living oversease in 2 completely different locations.... " I don't know if I will get used to all the sand... " - "There's alot of sand there? What about learning how to speak Chinese? ".... - " Why would you want to learn how to speak Chinese ??? You'll have to learn Arabic!" ... - " Arabic???"... -" Hun??" .... - "What??" ... I imagine you get the idea. Anyway after several minutes we managed to get onto the same page, or rather, the same continent. Shortly thereafeter most candidates met in the bar. It was a hoot to hear where everyone was going and at the same time sad for those who did not get offers or offers they desired. My roommate Jim was being courted by a school in Zimbabwe. It pays to do your homework and know the geopolotical situation of any school you get an offer from. The more we discussed the recent goings on in Zimbabwe the less appealing the offer became. Many of the people who received jobs that night were transferring from other international schools. It became apparent to me that once you are in the family you can go wherever you like..! The next day was all about sigining contracts. I needed the passport numbers of everyone that was coming with me to Doha, birthdates...etc.. Oh Yeah, read for typos in the contract... My son ended up being born on April 19, 1794 instead of April 17 1994... Oh well ... Say HI to Napoleon for me! The flight home was uneventful and thank God there was a professional Day the next day, " No preparation required!" Phew! Two days after the conference I received another offer from the school in India... The most fun I had was sharing my experiences with my colleagues at Kidston Elementary. Everyone was so happy for me and just repeating all the stories was a gas!! I really found it amazing that many of the people that I work with have either taught over seas or are really keen to do it!
