Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

The purpose of writing this post is personal and selfish. I just want to record the details of a day that felt like a big deal before, during and after. The Prime Minister of Malaysia held a press conference last night at 10pm and announced a series of measures to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. We already knew Singapore was closing its borders in a significant way. Now Malaysia announced that nonessential activities (not just travel) would be restricted starting 26 hours later. Among other things this means Legoland is closing for at least 14 days, which is a major change in our expectations for our time here! As far as we could understand immediately, the only things open were going to be grocery stores and maybe banks. My first action was to rent a car. I had a fear that the taxi services (we use Grab) would be suspended and we'd be really stuck. Then we started a shopping list. It felt like preparing for a hurricane, which is exactly how some of our Floridian tribe-ma...

Now is as good a time as ever to get back to the basics. By now, as you may have heard, there's a global pandemic endangering the lives of people with compromised respiratory systems (like my 99.5 year old grandfather and our nearly-six year old nephew) and the economies of, well, basically everywhere. To date, our experience has been very different than most of our peers in America. When we arrived in Singapore in mid-February the country was already mobilized to contain the risks, mainly through personal hygiene but also social distancing. In Cambodia and Vietnam, where many people wear masks on a daily basis because of pollution, our guides told us that the biggest change was that tourism was way down, mostly because the Chinese were barred from traveling. So over the last two months, this has been an everyday concern for us as we have traveled between and within countries in Asia. Our kids have gotten used to washing their hands many, many times a day and occasionally ...

Happy Pi Day! We've been in Malaysia for almost a week and I need to start by recording some context because this is so different from all of our previous stops. This might be a boring paragraph so feel free to skip it. First, "worldschooling" is the term we use to describe what we are doing, somewhat in contrast to "homeschooling." Our impression, though, is that a majority of people who identify as worldschoolers are on more indefinite adventures, whereas ours is a finite "gap year" from our life in Oregon. Second, in early January we learned that there is a vast and sophisticated online community of worldschoolers (there are even factions!) and that there are in-person "meetups" of varying lengths and very diverse styles. Third, we decided that we would adjust our itinerary to join a worldschooling community in Asia instead of heading to Africa in early March, as planned. Pretty easily we found the facebook group for a meetup at Le...