When we tell people we’re moving our family 5 to Medellín, Colombia, they usually have a number of follow-up questions, including, Why an international move? Why Medellín? When will you come back? What are you doing with your stuff? Among others.
So I thought I’d start off our blog by answering these questions.
Why are you moving internationally?
We’ve long thought and prayed about living internationally as a family. We love to travel and explore new cultures (and cuisines!), and every time we do so, we think about how incredible it would be to do it… longer. Not just travel and visit, but really live in, deeply experience, and contribute to another country, culture, and context. While multiple opportunities have come up over the last few years, nothing has felt quite right. Until we started pondering a move to South America to learn Spanish… then it all started to click.
As our thinking and planning solidified, we kept coming back to a few key themes about our hopes and dreams for the move.
Our primary goals are:
- Learn a second language – the hope is that we could all reach high proficiency in Spanish. While Spencer and I both have studied and partially learned several languages, neither of us have achieved conversational proficiency in any language other than our native English. We both love learning language, and would love to *really* dig in and work towards fluency. Further, we strongly believe that one of the most valuable gifts we could give our girls is the opportunity to become bilingual. No better way than immersion!
- Live cross-culturally – we want to be stretched, grow in flexibility, and get outside our comfort zones (and biases).. We love much about our home country, and we loved the community where we lived. And. We also believe there are so many ways of living life, so many different perspectives, and much we can learn from other cultures and peoples. We want to spend a season expanding our understanding and seeking to become (more) global citizens.
- Travel and explore – from a new ‘home base,’ have a launch pad to visit new cities and countries. We have long prioritized domestic and international travel, both as a couple, and as a family. And the more places we travel, the longer our list grows of places we’d love to travel! We want to spend a season doing this from a spot where we can easily reach lots of new places.
- Slow down our pace of life – we loved our life in Arlington, VA, where we lived for almost 8 years. We enjoyed the abundant personal and professional opportunities, great neighbors, and an incredible church community. But gosh, it was *so busy* all of the time. Seemingly inescapably so. We tried to do what we most valued, but it still often felt like everything moved at a frenetic pace. And we often found ourselves with little to no margin. So, while not the primary driver of our move, we hope to have a bit of a slower pace for a season.
- Spend more time as a family – while our kids are little, create the time and space to be more present with them. This is somewhat related to #4, but also a bit separate. Our third child was born in August 2022, and we knew we’d have a few intensive years of parenting littles. As we considered that reality, we wanted to create a life where we felt we could more sustainably be present with and for them. We want to live in a family-friendly and family-centric culture to see how that feels for us as individuals and as a family.
These are our hopes for this next season, and we feel tremendously grateful and privileged to be able to live those out. Not just a pipe dream or hypothetical idea we chat about, but actually *create* the life we value and seek. And with much prayer, a ton of help from friends, and a fair amount of dogged perseverance, our dream has become a reality!
Check out our next blog to learn about why we chose Medellín, Colombia…
