Settling In and Getting Going

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