Moving on

I came back from Burma long enough to go to court (a dodgy travel agent ran away with 3000$US. Yes, I won!) and to prepare my resume: I finally made it into the Bangkok recruitment fair. This is the best fair to attend if one wants to stay in Asia. I was undecided: South America would be a new adventure for me and a great opportunity to learn Spanish, but Asia now feels like home---or maybe that's just Singapore! Anyway, I figured by signing up for the Bangkok AND Boston fair (the latter being a more world-wide fair), I could afford to be picky about saying no to any job offer that didn't fit me to a T. If I found nothing interesting in Bangkok, I could go to Boston. If still not satisfied, I could always teach scuba diving in Asia for a year, relax and travel.

I was hot stuff at the fair. It felt good for a change to have schools chasing me, instead of the other way around. Hey, I am entitled to ride on my school's reputation, no? I've paid my dues, no? First Jakarta, with the scariest, most incompetent colleagues I've ever had (drugs, prostitutes, the works!). Then to Beirut, with PE colleagues that were a bit more qualified, but didn't believe that they could make a difference in these students' lives. They didn't care; this was a pay check, that's it. SAS has been wonderful, challenging me in a positive way, working with an exceptional group of teachers (we have about 20 PE teachers here) that really believe that all of us are life-long learners, that we will achieve great things if we work together and share our victories and our mistakes. Too bad my boss didn't see it that way. It was better for me to resign and I was confident I would find a school that was an even better match for me.

At the fair, before ever handing out my resume, I had over 1o requests for interviews. I only said no to the ones looking for an elementary PE teacher. I don't care how cool the countries or the schools are, I just can't be happy working ONLY with the little ones. I can handle a range of different ages (K-12) if it's a great offer, but if not, count me out! I had interviews with Dubai and Kuwait first, figuring these would be my "warm-up interviews", as I don't think I'd go back to the Middle East (never say never, though!). The others were from a variety of different places and the sizes of the schools were also very different from one offer to another: Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Chiang Mai and Bangkok, etc. Where would you have gone??? My first two choices: Shanghai American School, teaching full-time MS health education (yes, that includes sex ed!) and Jakarta International School, teaching MS dance (and a bit of PE).

People that have known me a long time would think "NO WAY IN HELL would Cat ever go back to Jakarta!!!" Well, as I said to my sister Colette when I finally left at the end of my first year overseas, "I would only consider returning here if I could work at JIS". Well, it happened: JIS made me a great offer and Shanghai wanted to interview other people before making a possible offer. Should I have just held out for the Boston fair? No freakin' way! Yes, Jakarta will still be polluted in every sense of the word, but I will be working in a school with a great reputation (same type as SAS), I will be moving to a place with lovely, friendly people and to a country where I already hold my own when it comes to the language. Even my Indonesian maid in Singapore wants to follow me to Jakarta. Imagine that!

It will be so hard to leave Singapore. It breaks my heart every time I think about it. I thought I'd be here for the next 10 years. I have great friends at work, in the lindy community and the dragon boat team. I will miss all of it, but all of this will be a 2-hour flight away. Life throws weird things at us, and I've learned that whenever a door closes behind me, there are always a couple of others that are just ready for me to jump through...