Friday, January 12, 2018

Family Internationalization - 2018 Update

Eleven and a half years ago in 2006, I documented our family's "internationalization" on the blog when my brother moved to China and K's uncle to South Africa. I think that a more catchy title would have been "Our Family Goes Global!"

A year later, in May 2017, I added part 2, about Klebert's second brother K3 (third out of four) moving from TX to Turkey to teach in an International School. In Feb. 2008, while we and K2 were in the process to get our residency, we found out K4, the youngest brother would be emigrating to Canada and a month later it was confirmed that my brother was moving from China to New Zealand! (we never got to visit either place, but in three years my brother may be back in NZ for good).

I only blogged this briefly and in retrospect, but in 2009, the year K4 moved from Brazil to Canada, my in-laws were forced by circumstances to move back from the U.S. to Brazil (long frustrating story). Fortunately, in the same year K3 moved from Turkey to Brazil to teach in an international school and there he remained until 2014 --  it was very nice for my in-laws to have a son and his family, particularly the young grandchildren, close by. (I don't know the exact years, but K's uncle moved from South Africa to Mozambique for a few years, then came back to the U.S.).

In August 2013, to the great joy of my parents, my brother moved back from NZ to Brazil with my 1.5 year old nephew and 3 month old newborn daughter. Then, in March 2014, K2 and his family moved to Egypt (they moved back to the U.S. last year in August, not because they wanted to, but because of my BIL's reoccurring cancer) and not too long after their uncle moved to Tunisia.

In 2015 I wrote a quick post to report about the uncle and say that my brother had gone back to Brazil, but I think I never mentioned in the blog that in August of that year, K3 and his family moved from Brazil to Qatar to continue teaching at an international school. (I did say that back in October '17 when I blogged about our thwarted travel plans  and the events that didn't allow us to spend Christmas with them in the Middle East this year).

All this to share two very exciting pieces of news:
  • My brother (it's his 44th birthday today!!) and his family JUST MOVED to Indonesia! They left Brazil a week ago today and have been in their new house for two days only. He is going to work for a large paper company named April
  • This summer, K's brother K3 and family will relocate from Qatar to South Korea and they are very excited to work at an amazing school there.  
My parents are understandably broken-hearted, particularly because my nephew and niece are only 5 and 3 years old and they lived in Brazil for the past 4.5 years. I am quite worried about my parents, but that's the subject for another post. Maybe we'll visit my brother in Indonesia and we are really excited about the prospect of visiting South Korea! Maybe I should create a tag/label for all these posts and call it Global Family or something. ;-)

1 comment:

What Now? said...

Wow -- I can't believe how international your family is! In contrast, I've always been the traveler in my family because I've lived in different states and now live 500 miles away, whereas the rest of my family has all settled back in the state I grew up in. I can't imagine having my family so far away from me, and also I can't imagine having such cool places to visit!