What's Wendy been up to?

So, what’s been happening in our edge of ordinary? A few things!

It's hydrangea season. We get to look at
this every day outside our lounge window.

School finished

I guess that qualifies as interesting news? Our middle son graduated on Friday, so for the first time in many years we’ll have just one child at school, and he’s only got two years left. Empty nesting is just around the corner!

Our middle son isn’t sure what’s next, so we’ve also walked into a period that holds a lot of uncertainty. Over the last several months we’ve agonised over this, but I think we’re at a place now that we’re a bit more comfortable with the uncertainty.

Being married to a teacher, also means that from now he starts to wind down. Our family holidays start in just under four weeks, so the next few weeks I’ll be busy preparing to walk away from work for that time (it’s especially tricky taking holidays when you’re involved in time-sensitive work like social media, but I’m committed to taking a break).

Uncertainty in Japan

We sit, not just with personal uncertainty at this point, but societal uncertainty. Tokyo (as well as several other prefectures) are still under a state of emergency, at least until June 20. Who knows if that will continue? We've been under SOE since the start of the year, barring three weeks in spring. Additionally, there is the uncertainty surrounding the Tokyo Olympics. 

The former mostly affects us in terms of making summer plans. We’d love to book a camping trip or two, but facilities in Tokyo are closed and facilities outside of Tokyo are closed to those coming from Tokyo! We've got a couple of leads for private arrangements that might be doable, so watch this space :-)

The Olympics doesn’t affect us much, though we do still hold Paralympic tickets. It was very sad, however, to hear that the director of the accounting department of the Japan Olympic Committee jumped in front of a train the other day in an apparent suicide. Holding the Olympics is a contentious issue in Japan and those charged with making it go ahead are sadly saddled with a lot of stress.

Editing a novel

Yep, I've been copy editing a novel over the last four months. The only way I could fit that into my life was to do it on Saturdays, which wasn't ideal, and meant it took a long time. I estimate at least 60 hours. It's my first time to edit a long work of fiction (actually the first time to edit any lengthy book), so it took a while to find my feet. But I really did enjoy it. The author is a close friend and his reason for writing is similar to my reason for writing on this blog: to explain to others a less-than-common life experience that we've each lived. 

I think I also enjoyed having a long-term project during this pandemic that I could look forward to doing on weekends. When the state of emergency stretched on interminably and there wasn't much to look forward to on weekends, having a spare-time occupation like this was very therapeutic.

In some respects it was a lot easier than editing short, non-fiction articles, like I do at work. Because facts aren't set in stone, but also because a short article has to have a pretty tight structure and be a complete unit in itself. So I was able to edit much of it a lot faster in the end. Oh, and I had a very appreciative author, that always makes work much more enjoyable.

What's next? I don't think I'll be taking on another extra-curricular editing job for a while, I don't have a lot of spare time and editing once a week does tend to disrupt the flow, making it not the most efficient way of editing a longer work. But if someone had a paying job, I might consider it! 

However, it does open out the possibility of supplementing our income some time in the future, as editing is something that can be done part-time and from my dining room, wherever that is. Also writing coach is something else that is a possibility. It is good to have this experience under my belt now, and know that the skills I have gained from short-article fiction editing do transfer quite well, especially to copy editing. Developmental editing might be a bit more difficult (think: story arc, character development etc.)

As for long-term weekend projects? I'm thinking about maybe picking up a sewing project. We'll see.

Looking at 2021

Each year I start with a blog post about the coming year. Most years we have some idea of what is coming up. We humans like predictability, we like to plan and to organise (or most of us do, to varying degrees). The missionary life seems to have more than the average amount of planning attached to it. We often tend to think in larger blocks of time. We have to answer questions like: When are we next going on home assignment? When does your visa expire? When will you next visit your family? Which country will your children go to school/university?

These are not small decisions and require planning ahead and often painfully detailed levels of negotiation and organisation, much more than just an ordinary family holiday a couple of hours drive away. Not to mention doing this on a small budget, so careful financial planning is also needed.

However, as we face up to 2021, we find ourselves with more questions than answers. In our case we've got a normal life-change (son graduating from high school) that is complicated by the fact that we don't live and work in our passport country and that he's not our youngest son. And that's even before you consider that it's an understatement to say that international travel is not easy at the moment. (Australia is reluctant, not just to let people in, but to let nationals out!)

We'd hoped to take a family trip to Australia mid-year to visit family and close friends, but that may not happen. What will probably happen in the coming 13 months is that I'll travel with our middle son to Australia and spend time getting him settled there. We're anticipating that will be sometime between July this year and January next year. High school finishes for him in early June. What happens after that for him is a big unknown. If he goes on to university in Australia, that won't start until Feb 2022, so he's got some time there to fill. How? We don't know. Like many young men his age, he has no idea what he wants to do next. Like not so many young men his age, he has extra challenges, including the challenge of moving to a country he's rarely lived in, yet is a citizen of.

Our youngest son is currently in Year 10 and wants to graduate from his current school. We want that too. So the plan is that David and I, with our youngest son will continue to live and work in Japan until June 2023. After that, home assignment and probably returning to Japan just as a couple a year later!

Those are the big rocks of 2021. Many smaller things that make up the year are also hard to see. Although, I think I can fairly safely say that work-wise I will:

• continue as the managing editor of Japan Harvest magazine
• continue as the social media manager for OMF Japan (after January)
• in January I'm focussing on a new role: facilitator for an OMF workshop called Pre Home Assignment Workshop
• I've been invited to teach a session in March at an online writing workshop for OMF missionaries (first time to do this at an OMF International-run workshop, I've run and taught at several writing retreats here in Japan)

What else the year will hold for work, I have no idea! Though I do know that, for us, there are no OMF Japan conferences planned and no in-person international meetings/conferences/trainings. We've learnt from this year that these need to go online, or on hold! One of our international leaders, who's also a talented writer, wrote about 2020 here. He's dubbed it the year of the eraser! I would concur. Anything for this year is going on my physical calendars in pencil.

On the personal front, we're planning to camp in the last week of March with friends again. Details yet to be sorted out. As for mid-year holidays, that depends on whether we can get to Australia as a family or not. We'd really love to see our eldest son again (by then, it will be two years since we have), but at the moment, with compulsory hotel quarantine stay paid by us, that would cost us a lot more than we've got budgeted, and there's no guarantee we'd be able to get back to Japan in good time. That's not so much a problem for me (I can do my work from anywhere), but for a teacher and a Yr 11 student, that's a definite problem.  But who knows how things are going to change. Hotel quarantine might change, vaccines might change things, and goodness knows what else might change.

Of course we don't know what the future holds, we've never known that. Things could get much worse or another disaster land on top of us (but catastrophizing isn't a good path to take). But at this point it seems like our daily life in suburban Tokyo will not change much, even though the number of new cases of COVID-19 are increasing daily. We're personally living a pretty quiet life already, with limited time with other people, limited travel, and we're wearing masks whenever we are in close contact with others. The government has no powers to make us adhere to curfew-type rules like they did in Melbourne and other places around the world. It seems that CAJ will probably continue to meet in person unless the government tells them not to, but I think the government figured out last year that even in schools that are set up fairly well for distance learning, kids suffer (and most Japanese-based schools are not well set up for distance learning).

But of course, as we saw from 2020, things can change vastly from what we'd imagined, though negotiating our way through this particular pandemic is getting slightly easier in terms of what we know. The big changes that happened last year were largely because we didn't know much about the new disease (back in February we didn't know much about it all, like, "How long is its incubation period?" "Are masks effective in preventing it?" and "How easily is it passed on via things we touch?"). And, for example, school administrators also didn't know much about how to run a school in a pandemic. 

We've since learned a lot, globally, about what things can be done online and what is harder to do in that fashion. We've learned a lot about thinking outside the box, about finding different ways to do things, ways that seemed too hard because we'd never done them before. These are good things. 

But the huge move to being online has marginalised even more people. Those who can't afford "unlimited" internet access, those who can't afford electronic devices at all, and those who have intellectual limitations that don't allow them to function well online. Not to mention those who are functionally illiterate. All these people have even less of a voice now than they once did. That's a great tragedy. It's also a tragedy that millions have lost their jobs or their source of steady income, not to mention the millions who have lost their lives (yes, the current number who've died worldwide is creeping close to two million) and the many millions who have lost loved ones. Pausing a moment to remember this...

But I digress from my stated theme.

So, what are my plans for 2021? I plan to continue doing much of what I have been:

• looking after myself and my household as best I can,
• taking care to look out for others who are within my circle of influence—keeping my eyes open for opportunities to serve them and others further afield, and
• working to the best of my ability in all the tasks that are mine to do.

Always keeping this in mind: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters" (Colossians, 3:23 NIV).

Can you serve overseas when your family isn't 100% healthy?

Last year an article arrived in my inbox about thriving overseas when your child has special needs. We know missionaries with kids with special needs and, without invading my own family's privacy, there's been times that we've also had to access the care of professionals. 

I took this photo on our last camping trip in Japan: October 2017. It's
been too long! But we're going camping again next week for a couple
of nights. Stay tuned all you virtual campers :-)

The article above is about a family whose son was diagnosed with diabetes and has managed, nonetheless, to transition to life in Russia. That was a bit close to home when we saw a child in our boys' school here diagnosed with diabetes just last month.

The instant assumption you can make is that you need to be 100% healthy and have 0% special needs to serve overseas, but that is quite untrue. Of course it does depend on where you are working and what support you have around you. When we first came to Japan we met a couple who were going to Cambodia. The situation at the time was pretty much evacuation if you had anything barring a simple cold. Medical treatment was not available in-country. That's a completely different scenario to Japan and many other countries where missionaries serve.

We're thankful to be in the capital city of a country that has good medical care and to be a part of a large mission that provides a lot of support. Just in the last few weeks, two members of our family have had phone conversations with our in-country medical advisor and I emailed him this morning about a third matter. The two of these matters weren't large ones, but the third is going to have an impact on our lives in the years to come.

We're also thankful that our boys can be educated at a supportive Christian international school. I can't say enough about the way we've been supported through various struggles our boys have experienced.

Whether or not you can serve overseas does also depend on the nature of your ill health or special needs. For example, intellectual disability is something that is much more difficult to accommodate, though we have a couple of expat friends who have experienced good things with Japanese special education.

We've seen several colleagues and their kids treated for serious illnesses like cancer in Japan, and numerous other diseases and injuries. One of our boys was born here and two boys have been in hospital here for infections. I regularly see a doctor to treat my asthma.

In the above mentioned article, the author lists some important questions to ask, if you are heading overseas with special needs—but also points us to God, reminding us that he provides what we need. Sometimes the way he does that is in our home country, at other times it is in our country of service. 

She also has this advice: give your child and yourself grace. This is what I'm trying to do at the moment, give myself grace to relax a bit. Turns out what happened last Monday (see here) was more a stress reaction than just a headache. I've been keeping a lot of balls in the air and I need to give myself (and my family) grace.

Missionaries plan relentlessly

We've found that the missionary life involves much more long-term planning than most people in our home country seems to have to deal with. And probably missionary families probably have to do more than those without children.

This was a farewell picnic (winter in Queensland!) in 2015, where we
were saying, "See you in three years."

For example, one day I talked with John* about his three children and their various educational needs. At the time he and his wife were trying to look ahead 2 ½ years and seeking to predict what the best plan for the education of their three children will be then.

Another day this year I talked with Rose* about her two children and she too was thinking about the future, and especially 2021 and the several months they were planning to spend in their passport country. Where would they send their children to school? What would be best for each? What would the government regulations permit? What would they require to have done, if they were to send their children on to tertiary education in that same country?

These are not uncommon discussions in missionary families. We've been asked for years by people about where our kids will go to uni and how that will work with an American, international school education. Even this year we've been asked what our longer-range plan is: when will we be back in Australia next time for a longer stretch (answer is: we're not sure).

We ourselves are currently planning the latter six-months of this year, which we will spend in Australia. We've just this week been working on booking flights for November and meetings in Perth at that time.  Most of our Sundays for those six months are already accounted for. We've had to tell the school here when we'll be back. We had to tell our mission when we plan to return too. And way back in 2014, we were already telling people in Australia that we were planning to be back there in 2018! We've been budgeting for this home assignment since 2015 too.

Long-term planning. Not that everything that we've planned comes to be. For example, up until the middle of last year we'd been planning on spending 12 months in Australia from this July, but for various reasons we changed that plan. Many of our expat friends have had to move or return to their home countries when they weren't expecting to do so. So while missionaries make long-term plans, we also have to be flexible to change them.

It's ultimately it is up to God whether those things come to pass.

In their hearts humans plan their course,
    but the Lord establishes their steps. Proverbs 16:9 NIV

But, back to what I started with: I think many missionary families end up doing more long-term planning than many people in our home countries. It's forced upon us as we frequently move between countries and have to take more factors into consideration when making decisions about our children's education. What do you think?

*Names changed for privacy.

He sat the SAT

Following on from yesterday's post, this morning our eldest son did an American test called the SAT. It is a test needed to standardize his non-Australian high school results for application to the tertiary system in Australia. This is not a school-based test, though CAJ hosts them and facilitates kids preparing for them. Hence neither I nor my school teacher husband know much about it at all. Makes me feel a little embarrassed, but I'm not sure that me knowing a lot about it would help him. 

Anyway, we paid for him to take this three-hour test this morning. Hopefully he'll do well enough that getting into uni won't be a big issue next year. And he does have more opportunities to do the test if he wishes, because these are held seven times a year and he doesn't have to apply for university in Australia till September next year (2017). 

Here's a bit of what Wikipedia has to say about this test (it also says that over 1.69 million high school graduates in 2015 took the test):

The SAT is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. It was first introduced in 1926. ...The SAT is owned and published by the College Board, a private, nonprofit organization in the United States. . . . The test is intended to assess a student's readiness for college. It is designed to not be aligned to high school curriculum. 

The College Board states that the SAT measures literacy and writing skills that are needed for academic success in college. They state that the SAT assesses how well the test takers analyze and solve problems—skills they learned in school that they will need in college. However, the test is administered under a tight time limit (speeded) to help produce a range of scores. 

The College Board also states that use of the SAT in combination with high school grade point average (GPA) provides a better indicator of success in college than high school grades alone, as measured by college freshman GPA. 

I also learned that you can get a score between 200 and 1,600, 1,600 being perfect. The scores are in 10-point increments.

I didn't expect to have so many challenges in sending my kids to an English-speaking school. You simply don't expect that there's going to be a third or fourth culture to encounter when the second culture you're dealing with in your host country is such a challenge in itself. I think that because it is in the language that you grew up speaking, you expect it to be easier. But it isn't necessarily and it certainly keeps us on our toes!

Yesterday there were a few comments on my FB post where I shared my blog post. Some great comments that I wanted to share here today, especially because they celebrate the positives of the challenges:

A missionary friend in Japan wrote: 

What wonderful opportunities we all have to experience various cultures. This missionary life is an incredibly blessed life. We are in the Japanese school system and enjoying getting to know people from Pakistan, Tanzania, the Philippines and other countries -- not anywhere close to the incredible cultural diversity that CAJ families get to experience. But even so, we are blessed and thankful.

 Another missionary friend who grew up as in Japan and also brought her kids up in Japan wrote this:

Aren't cultures so fun! I lived with varying cultures all my life!

As a post-script to yesterday's post I want to add this comment from teacher at CAJ:

Actually I found all but a couple of these terms in the Acronym and Term directory found in all the CAJ student handbooks, and I'd be glad to add the others. (I think AST is ACT). http://www.caj.or.jp/.../index.../Acronym_and_Term_Directory Inside/exclusive language is a challenge in many, if not most, organizations including missions and churches. And of course a definition is far from understanding the why and the implications but it is a start. I'm working on learning a new set of acronyms and terms for our new school next year and thankful I'm not switching to an IB (international baccalaureate) school as their acronym pool is much bigger than any other educational system I've seen. 

Differences between higher education systems US vs UK

I came across this interesting webpage, it's aimed at people looking at higher education in the UK and USA and comes up with some enlightening differences that I've summarised below (understanding that I've not experienced either system personally). 

Not directly related to the article, but fun anyway. Our
eldest will turn 17 this month. That was a huge year
for me—the year that I finished high school,
got my licence, moved out of home, and started
uni. This photo was taken later in the year I started uni,
my first car! I can't believe, though, that I'll soon have a
17 year old in my house!

Length of time to finish a degree
US takes generally a year longer than in the UK (barring Scotland where a bachelor degree is four years). "Courses are shorter in the UK because the course programs are generally much more focused than in the US." The same would go for Australia. US degrees include a lot of general stuff not specific to the degree you end up with. They believe in a well-rounded education. 

The curriculum of many undergraduate programs is based on a “liberal arts” philosophy in which students are required to study courses from a range of subjects to form a broad educational foundation. These general education courses include study in English composition, social sciences, humanities, history, mathematics and natural or physical sciences. (from here)

I, for example, did a Bachelor of Occupational Therapy. From day one we were studying anatomy, psychology, human development etc., not history or English. The only maths we did was statistics in psychology.

Academic term
The calendars are different. The UK system is not as standardised across the country and of course doesn't have a Thanksgiving holiday. Australia is different again, starting in February and ending in November, generally using a two-semester system, sometimes including a third semester during the summer for those who want to get ahead.

University organisation
This relates to depth (UK) vs breath (US), but also how you apply to get into a university. I'll leave you to read the article if you're interested.

Cost
US is generally higher even for locals. The government has some control over the ceiling of fees in the UK, but in the US it's much more varied.

Accommodation
Both countries provide residence halls in which to live. They are similar, except that in the UK students generally have a bedroom themselves (that was my experience in Australia) but in the US it is common to have at least one other person you share with. There are apparently differences in catering too. It seems to me that the ratio of students living in residential situations in Australia is quite low compared to the UK and US (though I have no stats to compare). 

Homework
This is a big difference I see between Australia and the US system. The US has constant assignments, whereas the UK might have a couple or none at all, just an exam at the end.

Grades
US based on overall performance on everything, UK based mostly on the final exam.

We're not intending that any of our kids go to either country for higher education, at least not first-up. If they decide to go there later, that's their choice. But this is interesting to me because our kids are in an American-style school where many if not more of their peers will end up in the US tertiary education system. The Australian tertiary system is closer to the UK system than the US system, though, from what I understand, quite different from both in the high school years.

I occasionally hear people who've never moved out of their passport culture complain about education choices and how hard it is. I generally restrain myself from telling them of how challenging it can be if you live cross-culturally! There are many more factors to consider and sometimes less choice isn't necessarily good.
edu

It's a complicated life

Yesterday I witnessed and signed some papers for some friends. They're returning to their home country for an unspecified period of time from next June. They've sold their little "starter" house back home and bought something bigger in order to accommodate their older (and larger) family. The papers I signed were related to that.

Our post office.

They've done this remotely. Choosing a rental is difficult enough at a distance, I can't imagine what buying a house would be like. After I'd signed my name a few times they explained how even though this was a hard way to buy a house, waiting till they got home would have been harder. It would have meant, in the midst of adjusting to being in their passport culture again, moving into their little house, and trying to sell that while living there. Then trying to find a new place, perhaps having to rent in the meantime. Doing it now means they can move straight into their new place when they get back. Much less fuss.

It was a reminder that many things in life become more complicated by our lifestyle as expats. My friend apologised for inconveniencing me (he wasn't really) and thanked me several times. I countered with that it really wasn't a big deal, not like trying to do something like fill out a form in Japanese or go to an unknown Japanese hospital.

Small things become complicated, like: Which one is the low fat milk? Or, Where do I buy nutmeg? Thankfully some of those things get sorted out early. But other things that seem small, like visiting a new doctor or filling out a form, still aren't as easy as they might be in Australia.

Education is another example. There's no doubt that education is more complicated when you're living outside your home country. It's complicated enough when you live in rural or remote areas in Australia, but in another country all together, that's messy. We're thankful that we've had the benefit of a nearby affordable school (courtesy of David being a teacher there). 

Tertiary education is another level of complicated altogether when you don't live in the country where your child is expecting to go to university!

I wrote earlier this year about tentative plans for our eldest son after high school (prompted by many, many questions throughout our home assignment). That proposed plan is complicated and fraught with difficulties and potential difficulties. I'm thankful that just this week we've been talking about it again and come up with a couple of significant ways to make it less difficult. I'm feeling less concerned than I was, about how we and our son were going to manage that huge transition.

But there are some things that are simpler, just a few. One is what I'm about to do now: go and ask for our mail to be stopped for the next week. Even though I'm doing this in Japanese, I love the system here—it costs nothing and then they'll deliver it all to us when we get back! And I don't even need to pay for any petrol to get there, I'm going to ride my bike for free. I'll be back in only a few minutes too. Simple.