Alright, so I know it’s been over 3 months since I wrote my last post. I’m going to blame that on French classes, which turned out to be a whole lot of work. I mean, I knew that learning another language would be hard, but having to spend 5 hours a day at school speaking French, plus 2-3 hours each night at home studying really does drain your energy.
In the end, I did not get my 3/3 on the first attempt, but instead got a 2+/3. And luckily, since I work for USAID and not the State Department, I only had to retake the speaking part of the exam. So, after another 4 weeks of training, I passed the speaking part last week! Hooray!
Now it’s on to preparations for moving…which is more complicated than I expected. To go overseas, you have to have book your tickets and schedule the movers to come pack up the 4 different shipments – Household effects (HHE) which take a month or more to arrive, Unaccompanied Air Baggage (UAB) which hypothetically arrives in a couple weeks, Consumables (food/toiletries/etc that are generally unavailable or too expensive at post), and Long-Term Storage.
BUT, before you can buy the tickets or get packed up, you need your Travel Authorization (TA). And, before you can get your TA, you need to have your Memorandum of Agreement with budget from post and complete a couple of trainings. BUT, before you can take the trainings, you need to pass your language test and get the scores over to USAID.
So anyway, I’m working on all that stuff for the next few weeks. I have our tickets tentatively booked for December 19th, and our stuff will tentatively get packed up on the 12th…everything in life is tentative right now. Except for our trip home for Thanksgiving – that will definitely happen and we’re looking forward to it.
Stay tuned for exciting updates now that life includes more than French again!
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