Over thirteen-and-a-half years and half-a-dozen overseas postings on five different continents, we've lived through a lot of change. One thing that has remained constant throughout these many translocations is people's tendency to ask reflexively whether we are excited for the next move. Typically, we cycle through a kaleidoscope of emotions with every transition. Sure, there's excitement — and in this case, we are thrilled to be assigned to Ecuador, the country where the seeds of our relationship were planted so many years ago. But that excitement is oftentimes refracted through a prism of stress and sadness also. The truth is, what we mostly feel right now is exhaustion.
After some time off this summer, we returned to the rat race three weeks ago, leaving the kids with their grandparents for some more summer fun while we headed to Washington to prepare for the final segment of our multi-step post-to-post transfer between Costa Rica and Ecuador. Our transition checklist, which started off as a page-long shared document several months ago in San Jose had blossomed to the length of a short story, each crossed off task spawning several others in Medusa-like fashion. We hacked away at it on the margins of our work and training, waging bureaucratic battles between meetings and after happy hours with friends.
When one is in the thick of things, it's easy to lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel. It almost always comes as a surprise when the last few days roll around and the myriad challenges with which one has spent weeks wrestling all magically resolve. On Tuesday, around midnight, we received our visas — though only two of the four were approved initially, as our kids' applications became ensnared in the new e-visa system Ecuador rolled out a couple of weeks ago. On Wednesday, the movers came to pack and crate our belongings. That evening, thanks to a few well-placed emails, we extracted the missing visas for our children. On Thursday, after a final round of errands, we handed in our car for shipment to Quito and had a farewell dinner with D's family.
And so Friday dawns in relative peace, our transfer checklist back down to just one page, most of the remaining transition tasks to be completed after arrival in Ecuador. There's not much else we can do our final morning in the States except to pack our bags and head to the airport.
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