Hurry up and wait

I've always heard people say that in the military everything is "hurry up and wait". Well let me tell you...the military has nothin' on teaching abroad when it comes to that!

One of the hardest parts of teaching overseas is all the paperwork that has to be submitted. The average person has no idea how many hoops people have to jump through to travel to, much less live and work in, a foreign country.

The most obvious thing you have to do is get a passport. My husband and I already had ours because we'd been on cruises in the past. Now we needed to get them for our children. In the city we lived in (a rather large one), we had to make an appointment and it was several weeks before we could even get in. Then once you've submitted the applications, it's another 4-6 weeks to get them back (if you're lucky!).

I also had to get fingerprints done. That is another separate blog post!

The thing that was the biggest pain and cost the most money was getting documents authenticated. Most people just have to do their highest college degree and their teaching certificate, but because I was bringing my family, I had to also do each of my kids' birth certificates and my marriage certificate. This required me to drive to my state capital and pay $10 per document (plus $40 additional because our original marriage certificate was with the passport applications so we needed a new real copy), then pay a company $150 to take them to the Department of State in DC ($8 per document) to get a stamp and then over the the UAE Embassy to pay $30 per document for another stamp. *People in foreign countries LOVE stamps* This process not only cost a lot, but it took 2 weeks to get my documents back! Even though it cost more to have a company do it, I would definitely use them again. Trust me...I actually had to get 2 additional documents done later and I did it myself...such a headache! Definitely worth $150 for them to do it!

Now that I'm here, I am realizing that I have more paperwork to do to make my family official and I am NOT looking forward to it. I will write more about that once I figure out what I have to do.

But after we got our paperwork turned in (in late June), we had a lot to do to get ready to move! And then we began the waiting process. See, when you work for ADEC, you don't get a definite moving date. It's not like with private schools when they say "here's your plane ticket (to fly in a month) and we will have your apartment waiting for you and you know what school you're going to be at". Oh no...it gets crazy. You are constantly checking your email and Facebook groups to see if there's any indication of when you will be leaving. You are busy getting rid of basically everything you own and trying to save money for the trip. You worry that maybe this isn't real...that you imagined the whole thing and have quit your job and sold your house for nothing.

We vacated our house at the end of July and then went to Florida to stay with my best friend for a few days. Then we drove up north to stay with family for a week. My husband thought we should go ahead and head back south in case we got our golden email...and thank God we did because the email came as we were driving! We had just 24 hours until our flight would leave! We literally said goodbye to my husband's family in the airport :(

What a whirlwind!