Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Sunday started like any other day under a Restricted Movement Order in a barely-familiar foreign country. There was breakfast and screen time and generally low expectations. Then we heard about Peru. The news reported that Americans (and others) in Peru were effectively stranded. There were no commercial flights available for them to depart and due to “optics,” according to the stories, the US government did not want to send in a military plane to evacuate them. Then we heard about Singapore. Several sources informed us that Singapore had revised its COVID measures and would prohibit even transiting (connecting) between flights for foreigners. Our main exit strategy had been eliminated. We had decided on Friday (March 20) that we would give ourselves a break for deliberating on our plans until Monday (March 23) but here we were on Sunday back at it. It's eerie to read the posts from Friday and Saturday in light of what's transpired since. What if Malaysia extends the RMO...

Can you tell that we're smiling? We went on a date to a store (Tesco) that resembled Target in its scope. I'm not very good at adapting. I think I've written before about the fact that when I have a plan in mind, it's very hard for me to let go. Professionally, it's taken me a long time and a lot of effort to learn to understand that my own ideas aren't the only and certainly not necessarily best way to go about something. I wasn't a very good or valuable colleague until I figured that out. The same is basically true for me as a spouse/partner. I have concrete memories of fights from previous relationships that centered on the fact that I believed I had the right to say "no" definitively and end the conversation there. I had a lot of growth ahead of me in those moments. Approaching this trip, I knew I was going to struggle with this issue. I knew things were going to go wrong or at least awry. I knew that it was my number one goal to demonstr...

00.36 - Elise has found me sitting at the kitchen table eating ice cream from the tub. I haven't slept yet, mostly because yesterday ended with an epic fight with my son and I'm confronting my shortcomings as a parent. Also, living in pseudo-lockdown is hard. A friend has sent us a link to a news story reporting that the State Department is about to set a worldwide Level 4 warning, recommending all US Citizens return to the States or prepare to "shelter in place indefinitely." Awesome. 03.30 - After hours of talking at the kitchen table, we're finally laying on a bed in a dark room. The pace of conversation is slowing. Soon we'll give up and fall asleep. 05.30 - Cate appears bedside, having had a nightmare. After a attempting to sleep with three in the bed, Elise gives up and moves to the living room. For those of you keeping score, that was about 3 hours of sleep in the early evening and about two in the early morning. Yay! 09.00 - I get out of bed and ...

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...

Tonight, as a family, we watched a movie. It's been a long time since we did something as a family. Of course, that's not really true. We do things as a family all the time but the outcome of a family movie night is quite different from visiting a temple or Legoland (a different kind of temple, I guess). As we were watching the movie tonight, I had two thoughts: first, I should capture this moment of peace and contentment; second, I should record the things that the kids have enjoyed watching on this trip. Some shows might not even be available back in the States when we return but also, as much as a photo-op, this might be the kind of thing we will enjoy remembering years from now. The movie we watched tonight was Arriety, based on The Borrowers. This is anime and we chose to watch it in English (dubbed), which created a juxtaposition between the Japanese setting and the British accents. Family movie night (Arriety) Yesterday we went to the movie theater with our ne...