Back
in late August my wife and I made a decision to move to Colorado. I had decided to take the year off from
teaching and stay at home with our daughter Neyla. This decision just made the most sense for our family, I worked
35 miles away from our home and Janae worked 2 el stops away (about a 7 minute
train ride for you non-Chicagoans).
However, Janae’s company had just allowed her to work from home and we
thought, “This means we could live anywhere.” We knew that this job of Janae’s wasn’t going to last
forever, so we thought about moving and we very quickly decided that moving to
Copper Mountain, CO would be a great temporary decision. When I say temporary, I mean to say
that it would be less than a year, but there was no telling where we would be
after a year.
We
moved to Colorado in mid-September and Janae’s job wasn’t going too well. There’s not much market anymore for the
type of product Janae sells and she was beginning to become disheartened and
was thinking of looking for a new job here in Colorado. She went on interviews and looked
extensively, but strangely for someone so intelligent and qualified, nothing
seemed to work out. One night
Janae and I were eating dinner and she said, “I’ve tried to find a good new
job, it’s not working. You need to
start looking.” I tried to calm
her down and tell her I would, but the problem is for teachers it is virtually
impossible to find a job in the middle of the school year, one would need a
minor miracle for this to happen.
So….
I woke up the next morning and while drinking a cup of coffee I started on
Craigslist, never expecting to find anything, but I thought I’d try. I looked in the education, writing and
non-profit sections in Denver and Boulder, but did not really find much. There were a few ads that I responded
to, but they were either part time jobs or sketchy postings. Around this time Janae had joined me
eating breakfast and drinking coffee and I notified her that me finding a job
wasn’t looking too good. Then I
clicked on the Ft. Collins, CO craigslist, even though we lived about 3 hours
away from there. I had been there
once during college and really liked it and thought that we could move there if
they had a good job opening. I
didn’t find much, but I did find an ad for an 8th grade teacher in
“Majuro, Marshall Islands.” I
clicked on it curiously, looked at Janae and said, “Hey, here’s a job in
January. Do you want to move to
the Marshall Islands?” She asked
me where that was and when I told her it was about halfway between Hawai’i and
Australia she said, “that sounds amazing.” So on Nov. 9 at about 9:00 am, I responded to the post never
thinking I would ever hear back.
A
few hours later I received a reply to my email. It was a quite extensive email from the K-8 principal at
Majuro Cooperative School giving me all sorts of details on the available
position and the school. The
principal ended the email by saying that if I was still interested I should
send her a resume, cover letter and letter of recommendation. I quickly told Janae about the email
and we began getting really excited.
Ever since we had started dating one of our dreams was to live abroad
together. When I told her 2 years
ago about how it’s not terribly difficult for a good teacher to find a job
abroad, she said that is was something we needed to do. We thought the chance that I would get
this job would be very low, since I’ve never taught Middle School, but I took
the next two hours and got all of my documents together and carefully crafted a
response email. I still didn’t
think I’d have a real shot.
(Majuro Coop School)
Later
that day I decided to go skiing for a few hours. When I got back I had yet another long email from the
Principal, and after reading this we started to entertain the possibility that
they may actually be interested in hiring me. She sounded very positive after reading through my documents
and wanted to schedule an interview via Skype ASAP. By the end of that day we had a Skype interview scheduled
and Janae and I were both extremely excited, but we didn’t want to get too
excited.
That
next weekend I was visiting friends in Chicago and had to go to a coffee shop
to do the interview via Skype. After
chatting with the Principal for about an hour I knew that this was definitely
something that I wanted to do and theory went from reality pretty quickly. In theory, Janae and I always wanted to
live abroad and I always wanted to teach abroad, but now it was seemingly
becoming more realistic to move to this small Island nation in Micronesia. We slowly started telling our close
friends and family about this opportunity and so many people were so excited
for us. Of course, they were going
to miss us and we them, but this was the opportunity of a lifetime and our
close friends knew that and that we had always wanted to do this.
Within
a few weeks we had relocated from our beloved Chicago to the mountains of Colorado
and now within a few short days we had gone from thinking about where in
Colorado we wanted to live and work to realizing the next year and a half of
our lives could be spent in Majuro, Marshall Islands. A week after my first Skype interview I had another Skype
interview with the Principal and two other teachers with whom I would teach. It was very casual and again I
perceived it to go very well, and now we had to wait for either an offer or
not.
(Majuro Atoll from above, yes it's small)
The
next morning I woke to an email offering me the 8th grade-teaching
job at Majuro Cooperative School.
I was elated. It seemed
that this was something that Janae and I were destined to do. Too many strange things had occurred
over the past 3 to 4 months that seemed to conspire to this amazing outcome. Janae had been trying now for almost 9
months to find a new job, and nothing worked out. We went to our pediatrician and amazingly she had lived in
Micronesia for 20 years and told us we would love it. And I apply for one job via Craigslist and it works out
amazingly. The only thing Janae
and I could conclude was that this job and Majuro were where we are supposed to
be now. I accepted the job and all
of a sudden we were moving halfway around the world within the next 6 weeks. Excited does not begin to describe how
we felt. This is not to say that
we are not going to miss our friends and family, but we are supposed to be
there. I’m not the type of person
to make plans. I try and let
things in life happen. I love that
quote, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” We live in a society hell bent on
making plans and controlling things.
The problem is that when you do this you close off so many chances and
opportunities that maybe you should take.
This
opportunity has presented itself to us and we are going to latch onto it
whole-heartedly. We can’t wait to
start our new life in Majuro.
(Marshall Islands Int'l Airport, no that's not photoshopped)
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