And now for something completely different: I seem to have given the impression
that I spend all my time idling along the beach, but of course this is not
so. At most this takes up a
pleasant early morning hour but there are another twenty-three to fill and for
that you need to find a life. Now
there’s the rub for an expat – where and what is your life now? Of course, once you have arrived at
your new location you could spend days, weeks even, mulling over this
philosophical question but that generally leads to tears and horrendously large
telephone bills so the sooner you realize that this is already a done deal and
get on with things the happier you will be.
When we arrive in a new county to live I generally give myself
3 months to settle in. There is no
point in beating about the bush:
we are only staying temporarily so we need to hit the ground running. Three months is quite an arbitrary
length of time but I read this in some ‘Advice to Expats’ book and it is as good
a timeframe as any. When looking
for a new home I try to keep in mind that this is not going to be our lifelong
residence and good enough is good enough.
Fortunately ‘good enough’ in Florida has come with a swimming pool and
endless sunshine.
Once installed now comes the trickier part: finding
like-minded people to befriend. Over the years I have
developed a foolproof plan, which is to enroll the children into the nearest
international school and go along with them on the first day of term. In any international school there will
be up to a third of the pupils and attendant families starting afresh at the
beginning of each school year and hence a ready made group of friendly and
slightly desperate women to hook up with.
Except that on this occasion my children have inexplicably grown up and
are now independent young adults and what’s more they live in London, hardly
convenient as helpmates in finding friends in Florida. So that was my major challenge on
arriving in Vero Beach.
My first thought was to find a job, but this was quickly
dismissed for a variety of reasons, my love of holidays being uppermost
(American jobs come with very limited
time off) but also the slight inconvenience of not having a work visa. However what you can do here very
easily is work for free on a volunteer basis for a whole variety of interesting
organizations. This has a great many
benefits. You can pick your hours,
only do tasks that you love, go away for weeks at a time and not get fired, and
meet some very interesting people.
One thing you have to get used to when volunteering is being
told what a wonderful job you do.
Paid staff in an organization are genuinely grateful for any help they
can get and are always offering praise and this can be a tricky issue for those
of us from across the water. In
the UK we are often not good at accepting praise and generally hang our heads,
turn bright red and mutter something depreciating. We can also be a bit miserly in giving it too. Not so here
however where giving and receiving praise is done freely and frequently and I
am slowly learning that the correct response is to hold your head up, smile and
say thank you. But it doesn’t come easily.
Shortly after arriving I saw an advertisement for a
volunteering position with the American Red Cross (ARC) to help the Volunteer
Manager here in Vero Beach. I
applied and went along armed with my CV, which really wasn’t necessary. Help is help and new volunteers are
never turned away. That began what
has been a rewarding and stimulating experience. I have to confess that I was very ignorant of the ways of
the ARC when I first started. My
knowledge of the Red Cross in the UK has been limited to first aid and
bandages. Early on in the job I
overheard a conversation about a volunteer who didn’t want to help out on a
disaster and that perhaps a different organization would suit her better. Disaster? I listened further to discover that the primary role of the
organization here is to give frontline disaster relief and that in the event of
a hurricane we the volunteers are not expected to jump in our cars and drive
like the wind away from Florida.
No, we are expected to stand our ground, hunker down in a shelter with
half the population and help pick up the pieces after the event. Initially I found this very worrying as
any normal person would but I have gradually become accustomed to the idea and
taken many of the training courses run by the ARC so feel much more prepared
for the task. Promotion can come
quickly in a volunteering position if you show willing (after all no money is
involved) which makes the work all the more varied and allows you to take on new and amazing challenges.
A revelatory insight from seeing the wealth of volunteers
here is that I believe I now understand the great pre-election idea of our
Prime Minister and his Big Society. I will go further and suggest that I am
in fact the only Brit who understands
this abstract idea as goodness knows no one knew what he was on about at the
time. If anyone from the
Cabinet Office would like to contact me I am for hire at reasonable rates to
spread the good news. Travel and a
decent meal would have to be included.
Another great way to get to know some wonderful and friendly people is
to join a book group. You will immediately have something in common with the people you meet
and a pre designated topic of conversation to get you started on a
friendship. I have belonged to
several groups in my time and they all have food and/or drink in common so they
are about more than the reading. I
have been a member of a group that met in the evenings, after dinner, and wine
got the conversation flowing, although not always exclusively on the topic of
the book in question if I am honest.
I now belong to a group here in Vero that meets in the mornings and then
retires for lunch at a local restaurant for general chat, and the two types
came beautifully together in Belgium where we met over lunch and wine. A note of caution here though: decide how serious you are on the book
discussion before joining a particular group as I have found that the amount of intellectual discussion that takes place is inversely proportional to the
amount of wine consumed.
A final stroke of serendipity in our settling in process was
coming across our local Environmental Leaning Centre and finding that they were
about to start a series of classes on the local ecology. Anyone who has briefly visited Florida
will be struck by how overwhelmingly flat and – dare I say it – boring looking
the landscape is. We had also
heard rumors that it was inhabited by some nasty creepy crawlies, snakes,
alligators and the like so the opportunity to learn how to identify these
dangers and learn to love the environment we had ended up in seemed too good to
miss. As it happened the classes
were part of the Florida Master Naturalist program and over 2 years we have
taken all the courses offered. In the meantime we have come to love the scenery, including the
‘uplands’ of Florida, defined as any place where a plant’s roots do not
actually have to sit in water, and which rise to the dizzying heights of 300
feet. I have found a peaceful
affinity for the cypress swamps with their cool clear water and of course have
developed an obsession with turtles and all things beachy.
So that is my recipe for a successful move, be it to Manila
or the next town down the road.
Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there but also make sure that you
have a cozy home to retreat to in those early days when things may seem a bit
bewildering. A couple of Union
Jack cushions and the soft tones of BBC Radio Four on the internet can usually
get me back on track. And as Susan
Coolidge says in her poem New Every Morning:
Every day is a fresh beginning
Listen my soul to the glad refrain.
And, spite of old sorrows
And older sinning,
Troubles forecasted
And possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again
Catch you later
Carol
