Moving to another country--have you ever thought about it?

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A US citizen, I lived in Canada with my wife and children for a number of years. Great people, wonderful universal health care, solid and sane electoral system. Canadian parialment beats the US congress for responsiveness to the electorate hands down.

Matthew
 
I’ll hopefully be moving to Mexico next summer for a language immersion. Then, I’m hoping to join Peace Corps after college, God willing. Going to an info meeting tomorrow night! So excited:D
 
I’ll miss Sweden of course, after 12 yrs of it being my home away from home… especially the parental leave after a baby is born (485 days, paid…) is one thing I’ll miss… and the social healthcare, too!
 
Living in “other countries” is pretty much all I know. 🤷 My parents were (still are) Protestant missionaries. They moved from the US when I was 9. We lived in England for a few months for their training, Paris a year for their internship, and then Rome for three years. :rolleyes:

Then back to the US for a year while they worked through their transfer to their “permanent” posting: Japan. I lived in Japan from the time I was 14. That is 20 years ago now, and I am still here. I did my junior and senior years of college in the US, but after that moved back to Japan with my husband. We’ve been here ever since. All five of our children were born here. I have lived in Japan longer than any other country. So does it still count as “another country”? It’s all my children know, too.

I like Japan fine. It’s not my favorite place to live. (Rome would be!!!) But really anywhere is fine. 👍
 
It’s funny that you bumped this thread back up…we have been considering moving to Budapest (my husband is 1/2 hungarian), depending on what happens here with the new administration.
 
If i ever wanted to live in another country, I’d go to England. I loved the visits I made there in the 1980s and 1990s.

It would be cool living in a small village-but then, after seeing the recent heavy snows online-maybe not!
:o

I guess I have thoughts about it after watching a PBS adaptation of Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’ the last two Sundays…[ha ha]
 
Since you asked for replies from people who have actually moved abroad, and since I’m an American very happily (and I hope and pray permanently) living outside the US (17 years on January 13), I’ll weigh in.

First, I think that your reasons for moving are not good, as many people pointed out. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t ‘make it’ overseas; it just means that you are far more likely to bail out in a short time than if you had very strong reasons for leaving.

Most people who move abroad do so for the wrong reasons. (I have worked with many Americans who went to work abroad for a year or more, and I’ve seen it as well as studied cross-cultural adjustment, so I know whereof I speak.) MANY people move abroad because they are running away from something. Some are running away from a poor economy (can’t get a job at home; find themselves quite in demand somewhere else). Some are running away after a bad relationship has fallen apart. Some don’t realize they are running away: they don’t like themselves and their lives very much, and they have the idea that if they just move to somewhere else, they will change everything and they will be happy. Some - frankly - would be considered hopeless losers at home, unable to get a job, have a relationship, and live a normal life, but they go to a country that has lower standards (second or third-world) and they find themselves ‘glamorous foreigners’ who are given a lot of respect (and women throw themselves at them) just because they are from the rich and exotic west.

But we take ourselves with us wherever we go. Some move abroad because they visited a foreign country on a holiday and had a very real ‘honeymoon experience’ with that country - they loved it on holiday and they think, ‘I could live here forever.’ But when they move to the country, they turn out to fall into the category of people who bail out between 3-6 months (studies and statistics are behind that number of months). The person they were at home - unhappy, unlucky in love, kind of a jerk, depressed, suffering from a poor self-image, socially inept - is still who they are in sunny Italy. And within 3-6 months they find themselves not only as miserable as they were at home, but doubly so, because they are alone and friendless and unable to funtion well in this foreign place, where no one understand them, no one does things the RIGHT way (i.e., the way we do it back home), where you can’t even get a decent (fill in the blank with your favorite food) and where the people seem to be hell-bent on making their lives miserable. It’s that period when the ‘fascinating natives’ become ‘these horrible foreigners with their stupid habits’ when people get bitter and start hating where they are - and bail out and move on or move back home.
 
continuing…

There is a ‘honeymoon period’ in the new country: the scenery is fresh and exciting, the customs and behavior of the natives is fascinating and you learn some cool, new thing every day. You may feel stronger bonds with your family (if you move with them) because you are all having this adventure together. It’s like a long vacation. But between 3-6 months the honeymoon phase begins to fade. The breadwinner can feel isolated at work (don’t go to Japan if you want to feel like part of the team at work- you aren’t and you won’t be). The others don’t ask him out or ask him to their homes; you don’t feel ready to entertain people from work, maybe because none of them has made the first move. Maybe the people at work are just in their ‘groove’ doing their jobs and going home to their families and leading their own lives, and no one really keeps an eye out for the new guy who has to learn not only his job but also all the office etiquette and politics - in another culture and another language. It can make for major stress at work.

Then there’s the wife, who often doesn’t work because her skills are not as transferable as the husband’s (or because they choose to have her home). There are no neighbors that you know and can wave to and shoot the breeze with. There’s no other mom you can talk to at the park or the check-out or after Mass about the stresses and joys of raising your kids. Maybe you can go online or phone home cheap, but all your best girlfriends and your sisters and mother and support network - which maybe you didn’t think about very much before the move - are far away, in another time zone, getting on with their lives, and you can’t just pick up the phone and call and ask for that recipe or that trick they do when one of the kids has a fever or just to chat, etc. You won’t be running into them at Little League or ballet practice anymore. Don’t underestimate how those casual acquaintances ‘lubricate’ your life and make things seem friendlier and a little more manageable, just through the normal, trivial chit-chat about your life’s little challenges. That will not exist in the new country and may not exist for many years to come.

The wife/mother also has her doubts and stresses: if one of the kids gets sick, will I be able to get to the hospital and talk to the doctor? If the kids have a hard time adjusting to a new teacher and school in another language, will the teacher understand and be patient? How will I cope with parent-teacher meetings? Will the teacher misunderstand my child’s adjustment difficulties to be an attitude problem? What about my child’s religious formation in the foreign language? What about my kids falling behind a year in school because of the language gap?

OK, so you homeschool. Is homeschooling popular, supported or even LEGAL in the chosen country? Is there a law that your child has to be educated in the language of the country, or pass exams in that country’s language? What about a support network for the isolated homeschooling mom and the kids who don’t have their various groups of homeschooled kids for those ‘extras’?

How will you deal with bureaucracy, like filing your taxes in a foreign language, getting your visa renewed, buying a house or (more likely) an apartment? Could you cope with living in much smaller quarters? How will you keep informed of regulations that you have to fulfill for yourselves and your children (like registering your car, getting the kids vaccinated, getting identification cards for your kids, registering for social benefits, etc.?)
 
continuing…

Depending on your children’s ages (especially if they are under puberty), they will pick up the native language MUCH faster than you will. Your children will relatively rapidly ‘become’ Hispanicized or Germanicized. They will bring home friends who speak a foreign language. They will very likely marry someone from the culture you choose, and your grandchildren will be brought up completely Australian or German or Brazilian, etc. How will you feel being an older person who may never really grasp the subtleties of the language and culture enough to fit in? Imagine the stereotyped ‘grandma from the old country’ who never really learned the language, who doesn’t have any friends in the new country except a few who speak her language, who doesn’t understand her children and grandchildren’s cultural references, their challenges and concerns, because THEY have become ‘natives’ of whatever place they live in, but their parents (or eventually grandparents) are still ‘immigrants from the old country.’

I know a family from South Africa who have come to the country I live in and they love it and their two young teen daughters seem to have made a happy adjustment, and they say that their family has drawn very much closer because of the move, since they had to: they are all in this adventure together. And they are determined to stay here permanently. But their girls have not grown up and started dating boys from this culture yet. They don’t have the reality of being ‘gradma and grandpa from the old country’ who can’t quite speak the language and aren’t up to speed with what’s going on in the culture around them. That will bring its own difficulties; one hopes that the strong family bonds they are forging now - and the parents’ willingness to enter into the culture more - will ease any tensions they have when they find that their children and grandchildren have ‘gone native’ and that future generations of their family will not be from the culture they left, but will be part of this culture. One hopes that as the girls start to date, they choose ‘nice’ boys from the right kinds of families. Because if their girls fall into the wrong crowd in this culture, the parents will find it very hard to pick up any cues that the kids their girls are hanging out with are a bad influence. They won’t be able to call up or socialize with their daughters’ friends and boyfriends’ parents, for example.

I live in Poland, a wonderful, traditional Catholic country that is only recently beginning to discover consumerism and - in the universities - feminism. And I love it. I can’t imagine leaving it. God has given me such great blessings and my faith has deepened and grown to the degree that I can say (not to my family in the States, mind you) that the Church truly is my home, and the Church truly is my family. I cannot imagine leaving the dear priests I work with (at a pastoral center for English speakers) and my good spiritual father/confessor of more than 14 years. I have some wonderful, thoroughly Catholic friends and two godchildren (another soon to be adopted) and I am deeply committed to being as close as possible to them and helping their parents bring them up in the faith. I wouldn’t dream of leaving here, but it took several years to accustom myself to the fact that it was God’s will that I stay here (I had only planned to stay one year), and that I would gain much more by staying than I would by sticking with MY plan and leaving.
 
finishing…

If you really are thinking of leaving the country, consider a few things:
  1. Is GOD calling our family to another country? Have we truly placed our family in God’s hands, and we’re ready to go where he wants us to go, do what he wants us to do, give up what he wants us to give up?
  2. Pray to St. Joseph. He knows all about families moving from one country to another - not necessarily friendly - country, because they needed to flee a bad political situation.
  3. Ask yourself: what would we be losing that we don’t like? What would we be gaining that would help us be a better, more faithful, more loving, God-centered family?
  4. Do a mental experiment for the next month. Choose a country you think you’d like to move to. Do some research about it (homeschooling parents probably know how to get the kids to do most of the work on this!). What’s the time zone there? What are the typical foods? What language is spoken? When are the holidays? What are the rules of the road? Where are the Catholic churches in terms of distance from where you’d probably live? Practical stuff.
Once you have a pretty good picture of the culture, as you go through your days for a week or a month, try to put yourself imaginatively ‘in’ that other country.

Say you are grocery shopping. All the package labels are in Japanese, a lot of the foods are Japanese and you have no idea what they are; many of your favorite foods are not available at all, or you have to buy them in specialty shops for foreigners at higher prices. Your child has food allergies, perhaps: how do you know what to buy? You have a birthday coming up in the family: how will you make that person’s favorite food, if you had to buy the ingredients in Japan, with foods labelled in Japanese? You go to the check-out, and the clerk calls out the total to you in Japanese and you can’t see the digital read-out. How do you know how much to pay?

You go to the post-office. But now you’re in Japan. The people are lining up really close together, pushing against you. What’s with these people? You back up to give the right amount of room between you and the person ahead of you, and people cut in line ahead of you. What’s going on? Oh - they don’t think you’re in line because in Japan you are supposed to crowd really close together in line, but the guy behind you is breathing on your neck and looking over your shoulder as you look at the money in your wallet. How do you cope with what seems to you rude or even threatening behavior? Are you able to ‘go with the flow’ and ‘do as the natives do’? Or do you get upset?

So you get to the window and the clerk burbles something at you in Japanese and you shove your package over to her and she asks you something more, and you have no clue what she wants from you and you speak English and she can’t help you and - what do you do then? Could you conduct a simple post-office visit in a foreign language if they threw you a curve and informed you about a new postal regulation or some other information you weren’t prepared for?

Or you are in the bank in Spain, and everyone in front of you and behind you and the clerk at the counter are all puffing away at cigarettes, making you completely nauseated, and when they see that you don’t have a cigarette, they politely offer you one. Can you just accept that when you’re in Spain, you are going to have a whole lot of smoke blowing around you? Or would you get upset and think those people are rude?

You pick up the phone to call your mother - oh, but you’re in Germany. Is she in bed in the US? What’s the time difference?

You need some information and you go online, but your internet provider is down. Who are you going to call?

Your child needs to go for a check-up - but the clinic is in Japan and you don’t drive yet in Japan. How long will it take you on public transport? And will you know how to ask directions on the street? And will you know how to answer the doctor’s or nurse’s questions? And have you had the children’s medical records translated in to Japanese? And what if the doctor tells you something’s wrong with your child, and gives you instructions? Will you feel secure that you can take care of your child?

And then there’s filling in your tax forms in Japanese…🙂

Just do the mental experiment of asking yourself, ‘If what I’m doing right now, I was trying to do in Japan, how would I cope?’

That should sober up a lot of people who are thinking of moving abroad.
 
Thank you for that really in-depth introduction to moving overseas, Pioro. I’ve been in Korea for over five years now, and I’m planning to move to another country this summer. (I may go home, which will be reverse culture shock getting back into Canadian culture, or I may go to another country, depending on my boyfriend’s visa status.) I’m psyching myself up for a big change - I wonder if the honeymoon period will be as romantic this time, if it’s my second time away from home. I don’t know if I’ll be going somewhere culturally familiar or very different.

We’ve discussed my living in the Philippines for a year or two. I have a feeling I’d really like it - I have a lot of Filipino friends, and my father’s family lived in Southeast Asia for ten years, so I tend to recognize some of the culture, lifestyle, and language. My boyfriend is Filipino, so I’d choose somewhere close to him and his family, to have a support network.

Then there’s Japan - it would be similar to Korea culturally, although the language will be a huge barrier. I don’t have any friends or family there, but my boyfriend has relatives there again, so I know they’d look out for us if we got married and lived there.

The Middle East used to be high on my list, but after doing some more reading I’m not so certain. I’d like to live somewhere warmer than Korea, but I’d like to be able to live somewhere where I don’t have to drive a car, and I’ve heard a white woman can’t really ride the bus or ride a bicycle there without it being frowned on. A few years ago, the pay used to be quite high, but from what I’ve read that may not be the case anymore. Also, my boyfriend and I aren’t married yet, and the laws are very strict there. We couldn’t go over to each other’s houses for fear of creating scandal, and we couldn’t hold hands in public because it’s illegal. I wouldn’t want to go there and not be allowed to reach out and touch my boyfriend’s hand until we’re married.

Europe would be easy for me to get into, because I’m eligible for British citizenship. Both my boyfriend and I have family and friends there, so a support network would be available. Unfortunately, as an English teacher, I’m not so sure I’d be in high demand. There are enough English speakers in Western Europe that they don’t need to recruit them from overseas.

Ah, the possibilities. It’s exciting!
 
whatevergirl said:
I won’t name the candidate name…but if a certain someone is elected as President of the USA in this upcoming election–my husband and I have strongly considered leaving the U.S. I know–sounds crazy, right? But, should it? My and my husband’s employer…are global–and there are offices in most countries. We discussed moving to Japan, if this candidate were to be elected. The thought of our tax dollars going to support this person’s (personal) agenda, is something that is really not sitting well with us. Now, the person has not won yet, but we are thinking of moving out of the country if it happens.

Are we insane? I suppose we would have to see if Japan’s government holds the values that we hold. My husband said that there are a lot of luxuries that he could see me missing–luxuries that are actually just basic everyday things to us here in this country–but are luxuries to others, in countries outside of the US. I haven’t thought that far.😛 Does not HAVE to be Japan, as we are also tossing around the idea of Australia.

What are your thoughts? I would be interested also in hearing from people on here who have moved from the US, to another country, and why, and how you did it–and are you happy you did it? Thank you.🙂
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Yeah…you’d have to change your citizenship to stop paying taxes to Uncle Sam. Mel Gibson’s father made that very decision when he moved his family to Australia, to ensure his sons wouldn’t get drafted and sent to Vietnam. Whenever I lived overseas in the military, I longed for home in the worst way. I felt as though my life had been put on hold the entire time I lived away. No…I’d never leave the U.S., no matter what.
 
Hi WG,

Unless you intend to give up your citzenship I am sure you will have to continue to pay your tax dollars. I write from Singapore and know many US citzens who have been posted to Singapore to work.

The grass is always greener on the other side 😉 I have lived in the mid-west for over 2 years and spend time in NYC and Miami for work. After a while nothing beats being at home. But if there is any Asian country to live, I would say Singapore. It is very easy to adapt to Singapore living, that doesn’t mean we don’t have our own problems with the Government. There is just no perfect world 🤷 There is another thread that brought up the idea of offering Mass for our leaders. If you stay where you are, you by living your Catholic beliefs can change the way things are. But if you move, you don’t change anything… food for thought
 
We lived in Australia from 2001 to 2004. It was the best three years of our lives. The people are unbelievably genuine and friendly. Our kids easily made friends because they spoke the same language and attended Aussie schools (as opposed to International schools in other countries). They are all dying to go back. I would move back in a heartbeat, but my husband’s job is here now. Pope JPII said, “Be not afraid.” I’d say go for it. As a side note, you as a US cit will still have to pay taxes and may have to pay taxes to the country you live in depending on where the company your husband works for is HQed.
 
I have lived in Germany and traveled a lot in Europe. The question is: If you are going to move to another country, where you gonna go?
Many European countries are very accepting of living together before marriage, abortion, contraception, euthanasia, drug use, prostitution, etc.
Would you really want to live in a third world nation in Asia, South America, or Africa?
Japan is shockingly expensive and crowded. Although I admit, I know very little about it other than that.
I would say, stay here and work to make the USA the country it should be.
 
knitwit said:
I have lived in Germany and traveled a lot in Europe. The question is: If you are going to move to another country, where you gonna go?
Many European countries are very accepting of living together before marriage, abortion, contraception, euthanasia, drug use, prostitution, etc.
Would you really want to live in a third world nation in Asia, South America, or Africa?
Japan is shockingly expensive and crowded. Although I admit, I know very little about it other than that.
I would say, stay here and work to make the USA the country it should be.
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I have lived in Japan for 20 years. I grew up here from 14 on. It is not an easy place to live, especially for a girl. Japanese girls are very, VERY “easy” (to use polite terminology), and they are considered among the most attractive women in the world. 😦 It can wreak havoc on a young girl. Both of my sisters developed eating disorders from growing up here.

That said, I have five daughters, and we are still living in Japan. (However, they are GORGEOUS, so that should help.)

Japanese society has many bad elements, but we are protected from the worst of them by not being Japanese. The fact that we are never fully accepted has its up-side. Japanese society has many good elements, too, and we can expose our daughters to those.

Having lived in five countries, I can safely say that each one has its own problems. Moving does not solve them; you only exchange one set for a different one. 🤷
 
ack said:
Japan? Personally, I wouldn’t want to move to a country where only 0.7% of the population is Christian (and probably far fewer are Catholic!)

I agree. If I were to move, which I never thought I would but think more and more that I will, especially years down the road when I retire, it would be to a “Catholic” country, so-to-speak, probably a Central American country. Costa Rica, etc.
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I am Scottish and live in Scotland 😛 Funny how that works.
But to get to the point, I think most ppl, espescially Catholics, are trying to run away from the problems each of our societies is throwing at us. Scotland at one time was a hotbed of anti-Catholicism, it still is in some places, espescially the west coast. I have often thought of moving away just because of it but never did. And since it seems to be dying down and Scotland is becoming more secularised, we see bigger problems that are effecting all peoples and not just Scottish Catholics[we are a tad paranoid]😃 The problems Catholics face today is worldwide not regional So, now I have realised that there is no place to run, I may aswell stay and fight my corner.
So, my answer is NO! dont leave, stay and fight the good fight. 👍
 
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