A friend once told me: " Second after a divorce, the most stressful strain on a family is a house move"...Well, I'll confirm one point here: a house move and especially a move with a family towards a country located very far away physically and "culturally" from what you are used to, and offering less 'comfort' than what you've been having so far...is certainly a challenge.
Another friend told me: "The most beautiful clay pots have to go through fire. What your family is experiencing now is the fire. After that, it will be beautiful."
Well, to be honest, thinking back about the motivations that have led us here, we were starting to feel a bit too 'comfortable' and wanted to experience a challenge. The result is achieved. We do experience this challenge.
Barbados itself, to be fair, offers to a tourist coming here on holidays, the eternal and guaranteed sunshine and heat all over the year, the certainty that you will have an accessible beach from any point on the island, a good range of extra activities such as diving, snorkelling, surfing, 'yachting', watching a polo or a cricket match, or simply relaxing which is what most people seem to do here...partly per pure choice or partly because the heat does not allow much efforts or movements to be made around mid day unless you are in an air conditioned hotel or car...
Now, living here, is a different story..."Living" but not "holidaying" implies in my sense that you want to be active and do things. Living implies that you have to fit in the society, that you have to deal with different administrative bodies for sorting out your paperwork, ID issues, bills, post, banks, relationships with your employer...then, add to this living here while pregnant and about to give birth...means you have to add the health cover issues and rapports with doctors, nurses, midwives, hospitals...As you see, we decided to make our challenge a very interesting one!;-)
I'll pass the full details of our issues with:
- Work permit and visas being delayed and still not sorted after 6 months after the date where they should have been sorted,
- Post partially not delivered and some delivered randomly after more than a month that it had arrived on the island,
- Employer not answering our requests or answering vaguely or wrongly and letting us finding out that we actually do not have any health cover for pregnancy once we arrived here or doing the same with the house hunt issue or the car hunt issue...not to mention the numbers of CVs from me that have been lost and the promises to hire me as a guest lecturer or as permanent staff that have kept going on for more than 3 months without a single progress...
- People do not like emails - you need to talk face to face - emails are rarely answered.
- There is a particular way to communicate - if you show any tension...it will just delay everything a lot longer.
- At the end of the day, a lot holds in your own attitude...
