Assignment Extension

Kids,

After two years in Mumbai, we’ve had the opportunity to do some pretty incredible things. We’ve experienced first hand another culture by living in India, created friendships with some absolutely amazing people, and traveled to Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. We’ve also gotten to see several destinations in India.

These friends, trips, and experiences have changed us forever and we are already seeing how being global has molded all three of you into some really amazing kids.

As we entered the last half of our assignment your mother and I spent a lot of time talking about the future. Do I need to ramp up the search for my replacement? Where would we prefer to move back to? What would my transition at work look like? But it all boiled down to a single question…are we done here in India?

Shortly after landing in Mumbai we were told by other global nomads that people usually take 18 months to figure out how well they can adapt to a new culture. So as we approached 2019, 18 months from our move, this information drove much of the thoughts and discussions.

The experiences we’ve had were both frustrating, educational, thrilling, and emotional. For us, living in India was not easy, per se, although the support of Winnie, Ajay, ASB, friend, and the people at my company made it much better. By now we have a good idea of how things worked, and what was required to get certain daily items accomplished.

With the duration required to find my replacement at work, we really felt that we had to decide if we would leave or if we would volunteer to stay longer in early 2019. It’s been so long since we made the decision to move to the other side of the world that we forgot how hard the decision really was, this was our life now.

In the end we decided that we weren’t done just yet. Work was going great with so much more left to do, the school you attended was truly top notch, one of the major benefits of the assignment, and the travel was amazing.

So early in 2019 we officially extended our assignment duration by an additional 2 years. Although we can’t foresee the future, we saw so many more great opportunities and adventures ahead of us. We believe that this decision was the best for our family, and we hope you three look back at our assignment with the same beliefs.

Love,

Mom & Dad