Winston wrote: ↑June 16th, 2020, 5:44 am
Check this out. Apparently some woman named Franziska Luxhøj is running a Happy Abroad website and selling summits and coaching and counseling so expats don't feel alone and frustrated. lol. WTF is this? Doesn't she know that outside of America in most countries, it's a lot easier to meet people and make friends so you don't feel isolated? In most other countries you meet people naturally, just like you see in the movies. So what is she offering exactly? Just common sense advice and cliched pep talk? I ought to do something like that too. See her links below.
https://behappyabroad.com/
https://behappyabroad.com/summit2020/
Here is what's at the top of her home page:
You moved abroad, but instead of creating a fantastic life with your loved ones, you find yourself alone, overwhelmed and frustrated.
https://behappyabroad.com/about/
You often feel alone, unsupported and misunderstood. By your partner, your environment, your friends back home.
Sometimes you don’t even feel like you’re real partners any more. You feel a growing disconnection.
Yes, you’re still a family and sharing a roof – but so often it’s just about the practicalities.
Where does she get that? I don't know any expats who feel that way, unless they move to the wrong country. If you're in the right country, don't things happen naturally? What is she smoking? What are her qualifications anyway?
I think the problem she is addressing is real and something she could probably make more money off of if she has a good service and finds the right clients. There might be more money in it than in the foreign romance/foreign dating type industry.
Why? A significant portion of expats return home before planned. (I saw the stats a few weeks ago, but can't remember them, and they are on my work laptop, which I don't feel like cracking open right now.) More US expats return home early than European. I think US expats outdo the Japanese for returning home early.
Family members not adjusting is one of the reasons. Imagine a reasonably high ranked oil company employee takes a white family out of the suburbs to bustling city in another country. I'll use Jakarta, Indonesia as an example because I live there.
First of all, everyone is jet lagged. They are probably excited about how new things are for a few weeks. But you might have that one teen kid who isn't because she left all her friends at home and walks around grumpy all the time. I knew an expat who lived in a small mansion provided by his company. He said that phone had a special plan on it to be able to call the US, maybe free per minute, so she could call her friends. Apparently that made the transition easier. I'm not saying any of his kids were grumpy, but throwing that out as a possible scenario.
Then the kids go to international school. The male employee, his wife, or the kids, during that first six months of culture shock might get stressed out. If his wife is stressed out, she might complain to him. If she is the loud, aggressive type, rather than the demure submissive type, this could be much worse. Stress could turn into arguing. If his kids have a bad attitude, that could also create problems as well.
I knew an Australian woman in Jakarta who worked for an expat-owned company whose job it was to give training to expatriates to help them adjust to the local environment. Part of that was cross-cultural training. I never took her course, but they may help them with practical issues. Some multi-nationals offer families language courses. Many of the larger US companies offer paying the children's international school tuition. Back in the day, the 'top' schools' charged about $20k her year (US). I have no idea what they charge now.
Some of these men are in pretty high positions and get paid a decent salary, a premium for working overseas and also housing. In Jakarta, it is fairly common they get access to a car and driver.
In my case, I finally got access to a car and driver-- actually an 8 passenger vehicle that was sort of like a short van-- but only during week days. We could run our driver around a little after office hours as long as we stayed within the 'budget', and we were never told what that was, so we'd do that maybe once or twice a week. It was good for my wife to have access to a car to take her grocery shopping.
I usually took the kids out to McDonald's or Pizza Hut for some American food on
My own kids are half white, but hadn't been to Indonesia, except two of them when they were really little. One was born there and couldn't remember it, unless she remembered a scene or two. She started speaking Indonesian as a baby, but doesn't know it. When we lived there when they were kids, they eventually adjusted. One of them occasionally asks to go live in that apartment we lived in and go to that school. It was a good apartment, smaller than where we live now. But the access to swimming pools, jacuzzis, fitness centers, and a dual purpose basketball and tennis court area and grocery store and food court in the complex made it a pretty nice place to live.
A word of warning for US persons who go live in foreign countries on these kind of deals. If the organization pays for international school, that is counted as cash income for US tax purposes. The exception is if you work at a school and every other employee's kids get free tuition. So if you read you get $105K or whatever earned income exemption and you make less than that, once you add in the tuition, your income may be higher, and you have to pay income tax at the normal rate over whatever that cutoff is. If you have lots of kids getting free tuition, your taxed income could be much greater than what you really made for tax purposes, and you may have to pay some taxes.
I spent many years in Indonesia and my wife is from there, so the chances of our having left over culture shock or the wife nagging me over not liking the country were not a big risk for my employer. Our kids aren't wild, either. That's another issue. I hear about people who sell alcohol serving kids who go to Jakarta International School. Alcohol is not a big part of the culture in Indonesia, but those who serve it may not mind selling it to just about anyone.
But I can see how the adjustment would be huge for a first-time white expatriate family. So a wife of an expat who comes across this woman's page might find it rather appealing and want what she is selling. A husband with an unhappy wife and kids, whose trying to get his work done and relax a bit when he gets home, and instead hears complaining, he may want it, too.