The "Why" Question

I’m spending my last few vacation days in Maryland before finally taking the plane to Nicaragua. Astrid and Sophia have been happily experiencing Granada’s beauty since July 16. When I arrive on August 31 we’ll move into our third temporary location, and will have a permanent place in October. The plan is to stay in Nicaragua until July/August 2011, with a few trips back to Seattle in between. But every plan we have is flexible – we may come home sooner or later, and our definition of home might even change, who knows.

I’ve gotten the “why” question a lot in the last few months since we “suddenly” (it seemed) decided to become ex-pats. I’ll give my version of the answer to the why question; Astrid can share hers if she wants. They will most likely be different.

The first dozen times I was asked, I gave some background: we had a two year plan to move to another country, perhaps Germany to be closer to Astrid’s family. I tend to plan things out, Astrid tends to act, so we had trouble sync’ing our visions and there seemed to be no movement. Astrid hit a point where she was ripe for an immediate move out of corporate America (I had reached the same feeling a few years earlier but you know how us planners are). We had visited Nicaragua and loved it, had friends with homes there and had gotten to know a few ex-pats. Central America was better suited for me personally than Europe at this time in my life, because it was a very inexpensive place where I could take a year to work at a reduced wage in the areas that I wanted to explore: writing, marketing, and entrepreneuring.

I realized that whenever I gave the history of our move, it didn’t seem to satisfy anyone. So now I say: it’s beautiful, it’s inexpensive, the people are sweet, and it gives us a year to get out of the rat race and into living a more purposeful life.

Sophia is bubbling over with excitement every time I skype. So don’t worry about her, she’s doing fine. She was on board with the idea from the beginning. She’s looking forward to being home-schooled (if we don’t find other options) and loves swimming in the pool every day, searching for homeless kittens, watching her mother haggle in the marketplace, dreaming about raising chickens (“they’re so cute”) and perhaps a pig or goat. She doesn’t like the mosquitoes or the machoism (she rooted for the bulls at the Running of the Bulls festival, even when the humans were getting gored).

She and Astrid are the ones with all the stories to tell, so the next few blogs will be from them. We are going to miss our great friends; you all have an open invitation to come and see our new environment first hand. THANKS to everyone who helped: hand-holding, packing boxes, moving boxes, storing boxes, housing Gigi and Pumpkin (A and S will return with them in October), watching over our homes, letting us stay in your Granada homes, keeping the family-less Paul company, spending hours on hands and knees cleaning the Bryan house night before leaving, driving me to the airport, and for trying to understand where our heads are at without showing too much bewilderment.