We didn't quite know when we left the Wisconsin education system that teaching abroad was the best kept secret. However, once we were in the international teaching system everyone we worked with said the same thing, "I wish I had known about this earlier." Why was that?
In my experience, working at KIS and HKIS has meant better pay, better benefits, and less stress. We continue to have great gratitude that our employment has afforded us enough money to travel all over Asia, live well where we are, and save far more money than if we had stayed in Wisconsin as educators.
The lifestyle here has meant no mortgage, no monthly car payments - money in the pocket. We have had solid health care. We have had amazing retirement programs. And we have been provided travel home each summer for our entire family.
Thank you for the abundance that this lifestyle abroad has provided. Thank you, Asia.
Hong Kong is one of the strictest places to be in the world right now, as far as Covid-19 measures are concerned. While at times frustrating and inconvenient, by and large I am very grateful for living in Hong Kong during this pandemic. Yes, our restrictions and self-isolation (and run on toilet paper) started about six weeks earlier than that of the US, but here nothing was politicized.
I am grateful for the memory of SARS kicking in here; it meant that over 48 hours everyone (except us expats) went from few masks to all masks just. like. that. Conscious awareness of community needs and greater good meant that being compliant with social distancing and government measures just happened. Yes, people complained - but they did it.
Yes, we have had long stretches of school online. We have had no beaches available since a few weeks into last summer. We have had almost all forms of recreation closed as well as no dining after 6 pm and no bars open for months and months. And yes, even now, any resident returning to Hong Kong must self-isolate in government-selected hotel for THREE WEEKS. But, we also have had .0001 percent of the population get infected and fewer than 200 deaths in the 13 months Covid has been raging in Asia and worldwide (population 7.5 million).
And today I got my first "jab," as the Brits say. In three weeks I will return for the second. I got in pretty early in the vaccination process because I am a teacher and they prioritized us quite early. Thank you, Hong Kong.
This is Mhel. She is our domestic helper. She lives in the room Adam once occupied. Mhel is like our Alice from the Brady Bunch. Mhel began working for us in July 2020. She is amazing. She cooks dinner for us, sees that fridge is stocked, takes care of Jigs our cat, cleans our flat, does laundry, and runs strange errands for us every now and then (like dropping off our spit when we were in quarantine so we could be tested for Covid-19 as required by the government). Mhel will be sorely missed when we land back in Wisconsin! She is a great-grandmother and hails originally from the Philippines but has been living in Hong Kong for decades and working for various HKIS families over that time. She supports both herself and her family back home.
Mhel is not our first helper. We had domestic help even in Korea. There we began with having help cleaning and doing laundry 4 hours per week. Then 8 hours per week. When we moved to Hong Kong that pattern continued with other helpers over the years. Marissa used to find herself comforting Rigby during a storm. She would finish cleaning our flat and then move to the third floor to clean. On a stormy day, Rigby would escape our apartment and go find her!
In Hong Kong the helpers often come from the Philippines or Indonesia. They don't have the same rights as expats, unfortunately. And far too often there are cases of abuse of these women. The year we arrived in Hong Kong was the first year the government created a law saying that Sundays off were obligatory. Before that, many were working 7 days a week with no recourse or rest. They are also supposed to live with their employers and often with very little space provided.
I am so very grateful to the women who have helped us keep the household running over these past eleven years, Peach Rose, Say, Marissa, and Mhel! They are strong, courageous women who give so much of themselves to their own families while giving to our family, too.
Since living in Asia I have engaged in more service than I even understood myself until creating this blog. It began with KIS students collectively supporting an orphanage in Luang Prabang, Lao. I organized some fundraisers for "Support Lao Children" for a few years. And then when we left Korea I continued personally supporting a student, Sommon, to attend law college for four years after he had graduated from the orphanage school.
A letter from Sommon
Also while in Korea, we first read a book by Jackson Kaguri and then had Jackson come to our school. He wrote A School for my Village after starting a school in his village in Uganda for all of the children orphaned by AIDS. (See more at the link to Nyaka). Our family's partnership with Nyaka continued even as we moved to Hong Kong and in March 2020 Brent was all set to take an interim trip to Nyaka with HKIS students for one week; unfortunately the pandemic had other ideas. We would still like to volunteer at Nyaka one day.
My final two years in Korea I worked with my church to teach English to North Korean Refugee Women. This was a transformative experience that I have written about in a prior blog. However, it set the stage for some of the service I would do later.
A similarly powerful day of service was meeting some of the living Comfort Women remaining in Korea. These were Korean women who were forced to be sex slaves to Japanese occupiers during WWII. These women were being cared for by an NGO who gathered the ageing women together to be taken care of in community. A group of us visited with the women and sang songs and ate with them. Admittedly, they were doing more service for us than we were to them. Yet it was a powerful and memorable day. To this day, Japan has not yet fully taken responsibility for these atrocities.
Once in Hong Kong I found my first few years of Interim weeks to be with the Social Awareness group. We met with an NGO begun by one of our alumni, "Mother's Choice." This organization helps care for pregnant young ladies and walks them through creating adoptions plans as needed. It also provides sex education to schools. We also worked with the students at the Chi Lin Nunnery School exchanging fun games and stories with 13-17 year old developmentally challenged students.
Presently, Brent and I sponsor a teacher with the Garuna Foundation by paying her salary for a year. The Garuna Foundation works in SE Asia and its mission is to "support and encourage the proclamation of grace, mercy, and compassion of Jesus Christ to the people of Thailand and Cambodia and surrounding countries." (You can learn more here at Garuna.org.)
While in middle school, Adam was required to do some service. He chose to work with the Missionaries of Charity in Hong Kong. The sisters provide a soup kitchen called "Home of Love" in the Sham Shui Po district where there is a high population of homeless. We returned several times to work with them on Sunday mornings. I was surprised to learn how many of volunteers were helpers taking their only free day of the week to serve the poor in this way. Most of the time we helped prep the food, peeling or cutting vegetables.
And then, in 2018 and 2019, I had the privilege of leading the Children of Kolkata Interim trip with students from HKIS. I have already written about experiences of volunteering with the Missionaries of Charity there. It was extraordinary and transformative. Additionally, our school has had long-standing relationships with two other organizations, Future Hope and Anondo Trust. The Future Hope organization houses and educates slum children and street children from Kolkata. (You can learn more here at futurehope.net) Set up in 2006, Anondo Trust is a registered charitable trust working with disadvantaged children in Kolkata, West Bengal.
Future Hope and HKIS kids played on the Meidan for hours
Our 2018 Children of Kolkata Interim group
Finally, also in April 2018, just a month after completing my interim trip to Kolkata, I volunteered with my Church of All Nations group to go to Cambodia where we worked with Concordia Welfare and Education Foundation (CWEF). With CWEF's help, we worked with school children at Bos Plu, this time teaching a bit of English and connecting with them through play. More importantly, we brought education about the importance of drinking clean water and hand washing using a puppet show. I have a full blog post from that time you are welcome to read. (You can learn more about CWEF here.)
At the pastor's house with so many children. So dusty.
At the Bos Plu school, the school building in the background
What's next? I don't know. But I trust I will continue to find ways to serve my community and world.
Last night Brent and I were treated to a lovely evening on a 40' sailboat of friends of ours, the Orrin Blue. (Thanks, Catriona and Bob!) It turns out they hadn't sailed in Tai Tam Bay for 30 years, but they happened to be just off the pier which is literally a five-minute walk from where we live. A few weeks earlier Catriona had heard one of my bucket list wishes - to be on a boat at Tai Tam. The stars aligned! And so here I sit on the heels of the high of being delivered to their boat on a tiny dinghy, hanging out with good people on a lovely boat as the sun set over the mountains behind our home of another 79 days. What a lovely view of our school and apartment from the bay down there. We saw the local fishermen up close as after dark they cast their nets, pounded on a drum to scare fish, and pulled up the near-empty nets.
Catriona and Brenda
The view over the bow.
Night fishermen scaring the fish into the nets
All of this to say I am now reflecting on the many types of boats and boat rides we have encountered these past 11 years in Asia.
In Hong Kong you can't visit or live here without a trip on the Star Ferry which goes endlessly from Mainland Hong Kong at Kowloon Peninsula to Hong Kong Island and back again across Victoria Harbour. And it is cheap. About 33 cents for adults one way.
A ferry to Lamma Island (maybe)
On a Star Ferry with MaryEllen and friends
Also in Hong Kong there are junk boats you can hire for a day on the water with friends. According to the South China Morning Post, these wooden workhorse boats date back to the Han Dynasty and were commonly used for trade in China and other parts of Southeast Asia. As Brent isn't a huge fan of seasickness, our partying on junk boats has been limited to a few key birthday parties and such.
A very traditional junk (Aqua Luna) in Victoria Harbour
Lovely ladies (Teresa, Teresa, Lauren) enjoying the junk cruise.
Celebrating Dana's birthday on a junk boat.
I even jumped off to swim!
Another Hong Kong tradition is dragonboat racing. Generally teams train for months before competing in May and June. Brent even tried being on a team for a season and can tell you all about it. Of course dragonboat racing happens in the US too but I never heard of it until living in Hong Kong. Fortunately for us, Tai Tam village holds its own annual dragon boat races right below our window! We certainly missed them last year during Covid cancellations.
Dragonboat races near Lunar New Year in Tai Tam Bay
Statuary of a dragonboat in Aberdeen (the original Hong Kong)
The locals in Aberdeen and Sai Kung still use their sampan boats with the oar at the stern to ferry people out to islands. I have yet to get on one.
small craft and sampans at Sai Kung
And then there are the more unusual kinds of boats we have run across, such as the "this boat disguises as a gigantic rice bowl" boat in Vietnam. Brent and the kids navigated just fine, but I couldn't make the boat do what I wanted and ended up needing the very old owner of the boat (80-something) to come and rescue me!
To avoid boat taxation by the French during the Colonial Era the indigenous
Vietnamese devised basket boats that doubled as rice containers.
Brent in a basket boat in Vietnam
My earliest memory of any boat in Asia was of a catamaran on our trip to Boracay, Phillipines at Christmas in 2010. It was our first Christmas abroad and we decided on a week-long trip to beautiful Boracay (the place with the whitest, softest sand). It took a lot of courage to book a vacation that called for first a plane ride from Korea to Cebu, then a local plane (everyone and everything on the plane had to be weighed individually!), then a catamaran, then a van to arrive at our destination. Enjoy the video here which begins with the catamaran ride.
Highlight video from Boracay, Phillipines 2010
Catamarans arriving in Boracay
Photo Credit Susan Taylor
We have been on so many boats for various reasons these past eleven years, perhaps that is one of the reasons we now love water so much. We look forward to the sailing, boating, and pontoon boating that awaits us.
In six months Alec will return to the school system from which he began his career in kindergarten. It is possible, even likely, that he will re-meet students who were in his class twelve years prior. How has his road diverged from theirs?
Alec and Adam are now third culture kids (TCK). That is, their lives have been shaped by living outside of their passport country. In other words, they have lived away from home. What is the impact of this on those of similar stories? I invite you to read Third Culture Kids by David C. Pollack to learn more. I first read the book our first year abroad in 2010-11. At that point I was simply becoming informed of what my children might experience in life. In short, TCKs are on the whole more worldly, more flexible, adaptable, and able to make friends easily. They also tend to have more difficulties staying in relationships for the long haul or staying in one place for long. Army kids have a similar profile.
Alec with school friends from KIS.
First, living in Korea and Hong Kong has afforded our students access to very different cultures than that of their parents who grew up in the Midwestern States of the US. For example, the ever-present Christian culture of Wisconsin has not been present for them. Instead, our children have been exposed to Buddhism, Hinduism, and local culture of sea gods and goddesses. They have passed by multitudes of temples or even individual alters burning incense and offering fruits.
Thailand Monastery
Alec at AMIS (Association in Music for International Schools) in middle school.
They have encountered classmates and their families hailing from SE Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. They have walked down streets hearing Korean or Cantonese or Mandarin or French or English. They have been afforded American-style educations, but from teachers hailing from Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Spain.
Alec concluding 8th grade.
We are incredibly blessed to have had the opportunity of living and traveling abroad. (More about the travels later.) Yes, our kids have experienced life far differently than we did at their age. They are now TCKs. Thank you, Asia, for bringing richness and experiences to their lives that are beyond measure.
It is a phrase I have used for seven years. I never cease to be amazed at the abundance of butterflies in Hong Kong. I love walking on the trails near our home and seeing so many butterflies, at least one every day.
At one point I counted twelve different butterfly neighborhoods while on my walk. That is to say, while on the walk I passed through a section with one species of butterfly only to walk a bit farther and pass through an area with another species. Over the course of my 40 minute walk I encountered twelve different "neighborhoods." See the video here for a glimpse of one such place. I simply sat under a tree and filmed.
We even have butterflies on our campus. Mostly big black ones with some brilliant white and blue on their wings. Unfortunately, they often die there too, so that students and teachers alike must step over them on the steps and walkways.
While on a trip to Thailand, my friend Helen and I came across a butterfly garden with some of the largest species in the world! Amazing.
My favorite memory is walking with the family along the catchment to Stanley accompanied by a butterfly who seemed to want to show us the way. Thank you, Asia, for the beautiful butterflies each day.
And just for good measure, here is a moth! Photo credit: Adam Mitchel
