Five years as expatriates

Here's a bit of a personal note to ourselves about today, but something that I'll share with the rest of you – my reflections on what the day means to us. This day on our household's calendar used to be marked as our "Geneva anniversary," the day we arrived in Geneva in 2003, having sold our house and car and left our friends and family behind, as well as most of our possessions. We had left our home and country, but we had set out on a great European adventure. Neither Sarah nor I had really taken the requisite backpacking tour through Europe as a young person, but we ended up becoming residents for several years and adopting and liking many customs there. We were still young and enjoyed those years immensely. I often thought of our move there, essentially leaving my country for work and economic opportunities, as doing the opposite of – and even undoing – the work of my great-grandfathers, who had left a poor part of Europe more than a century before. What would they have said if they knew that one of their great-grandsons had returned to a very prosperous Europe and to opportune locales?

Of course, "Geneva anniversary" isn’t what's on our calendar anymore now that we live in Nairobi. Today has become our "living out of the country anniversary." It has been five years now. I'm very pleased to think of that period as most of the years in the George W. Bush administration (however, having to represent him abroad as our president has been a real burden), and I'm pleased to remember that we haven't paid one single cent in U.S. federal taxes in all those years (thus not financing an unjustified war in Iraq). We are thinking about our return to the U.S. now. It will happen sometime in 2009, and we're ready to be back where we came from. We would like to say that we can come back because Bush won't be president anymore, and we'd like it even more to say we're returning because Obama will be president. But really it is our decision. Living abroad has been fun, and there are certain advantages that we do not have in the U.S. Just to name a few, the weather is great (warm and sunny) for longer periods of the year in Nairobi, we have a nanny/housekeeper, and we feel like tourists constantly because there are always so many new things to see. So we appreciate all that we’ve done and gained in the last five years.