We will happily talk about all of those financial benefits all day long. What is harder to talk about, however, is the disparity between the haves and have-nots in Colombia and our categorization into the haves.
It's really hard to tout the benefits of living in South America, Colombia in particular, without talking about how cheap it is to live there. Barring real estate, rent, or buying a car, most everything else is cheaper South of the Border. This is part of the reason why we can afford to travel from place to place: it really is cheaper for us than living in the US. Had I given birth to Roman in the US, we still would have been making monthly payments on the hospital bill (not to mention the fact that we probably would not have been covered since my pregnancy would have been considered a preexisting condition when we came back from Europe). In Bogota, the grand total of all of my prenatal care (month 6 and beyond) plus the cost of the birth was a little under $2000 USD. Pediatric care for Roman (we saw the pediatrician 5 times) was less than 1k, including out-of-pocket costs for vaccines (although Colombia provides free vaccines for its residents, we decided to pay for the vaccines the pediatrician had because they were a type that touted less side effects like pain or fever).
We will happily talk about all of those financial benefits all day long. What is harder to talk about, however, is the disparity between the haves and have-nots in Colombia and our categorization into the haves.
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We ended up extending our stay in Colombia for 2 more months, since we were able to get Billy a resident visa and our kiddos citizenship. We really loved spending 8 months there and were immensely sad to be leaving our lifestyle, our apartment, the people we met, Desmond's school, and my family. We plan to come back in 2017 and stay for an entire year so that the kids (and Billy) can be immersed in Spanish again. I hate that there is such a negative perception of Colombia. Yes, I will be the first to admit that there is a reason for its notoriety: in the 80s and 90s, Colombia was indeed a not-so-safe place to visit. And yes, Colombia is a major exporter of cocaine (the USA is its #1 consumer), which leads to tension and strife in drug-growing areas, which are not near the major cities. I have been visiting Colombia 1-2 times a year for the last 13 years and have never once been mugged or have witnessed any drug-related violence or have been kidnapped. Ha! Seriously, though. It is a damn gorgeous country and the natural beauty it has to offer is stunning. The cities are fantastic and safe, the food is great, the people are so nice...As the slogan for Colombian tourism says, the only risk in coming to Colombia is wanting to stay. Here are the things we found most surprising about living in Bogota:
I was so sad to leave Amsterdam. The Vondel Park, the Van Gogh Museum (where we learned that it was not pronounced "Van Go," but "Van Huh," with a drawn out, guttural "h" at the end), the Indonesian food. I really, really enjoyed my time there. However, Bill had a few meetings scheduled in Germany, so off we went to Berlin. I have never been enamored with Germany. It must have been all of those WWII units in middle school and high school that soured my taste for anything Teutonic. But, I have to admit, I was actually excited to go because my wonderful father-in-law's family emigrated to the States from Germany and Bill's older sister, Kseniya, lived there after college to study at the Guttenberg Museum in Mainz.
Regardless of my enthusiasm, I experienced nausea and deep-down-in-my-bones-exhaustion every hour of every day that we were in Berlin. By far, the most common question we get when we talk about our lives is "So, what are you going to do about school for the kids?" Des just turned 4, so "school" is the topic of choice among our parent friends, especially as "back to school" craze is in full swing right now.
A bit of background, while I was pregnant with Desmond, I read as much as I could about pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. I came across a series of articles, written by Dr. Peter Gray, in Psychology Today that emphasized the "roles of play and curiosity as a foundation of learning." He is a big proponent of unschooling, which is a subset of homeschooling where children learn by playing and by real-world experiences, instead of through workbooks and textbooks. I forwarded as many articles as I could to Billy (who, at this point, was very pro-traditional schooling). Eventually, he began to see the merits of homeschooling our kids and the freedom it would allow us to live as a family. (Disclaimer: we are not religious nor did we choose to homeschool because we disagree with what is being taught in schools. Just in case you were already labeling as "wackos" and "extremists" in your head). Already deciding to homeschool made it easier for us to commit to traveling full time. What we didn't anticipate, and what was a major concern for many of the people who questioned our decision to homeschool, was that traveling from place to place every few months didn't allow for a lot of time for Des to build relationships with kids. Sure, we would go to the park and he would sometimes play with the kids there, but it wasn't enough to build friendships. We found out I was pregnant one morning in Rome. It sounds more romantic than it actually is because we were staying in a room, in a crappy hotel, that smelled like mothballs and was making me even more nauseous than normal. When we got back to Hungary, I emailed my midwife from my first pregnancy and asked her if it was OK to wait until the start of the second trimester in order to seek prenatal care. I knew that we were going to be traveling for the next 6 weeks and trying to find an OBGYN was something I didn't really want to do if I didn't have to. Since I basically had a normal pregnancy last time and felt fine this time, she said it was up to me to wait. So, I did. I didn't see a midwife until we came back to the states in October. I was 13 weeks along.
We moved to Bogota when I was around 28 weeks along. I was kind of scared to give birth here in Colombia: not because I doubted the quality of care that I would be receiving (unlike the advice that I got from several non-Colombian family members who had never been to Colombia, at least not in the last few decades) but because I was worried about the high C-section rate prevalent among private hospitals. We decided that we would meet with the OBGYN, Dr. Alfredo Ruiz Rivadeneira, that my cousin had recommended to see if he seemed like the pushy doctor who valued his time more than my and my baby's health. |
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March 2016
AuthorJust a girl living her dream: traveling this amazing world with her husband and her two awesome sons. Categories
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