So last year, the wife and I left
our jobs, sold everything and moved to the Philippines (planning on a 2-year
stay to facilitate the adoption of my wife’s 4 year old nephew). We were given
the impression that our employer would allow us to work remotely and still have
an income during this period so we wouldn’t have to beg family members for cash
once our savings ran out. Well, the employer flopped (after sending us overseas
with a work laptop and voip phone) and our savings lasted about 6 weeks.
Here are some pics from our time in Boracay Island.
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| Coffee Shop Hustlers |
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| Me preparing for a rain shower. |
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| Full Moon on Boracay |
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| Andrew Playing in the Ocean at Twilight |
Right at the end of this period, I was walking to the beach at night to get food (the vendors all lined the beachfront so that's where you get your food) but I tripped over some busted cement on the makeshift alleyway road and tweaked (or broke) my foot pretty good. I couldn't walk at all for about a week, and proceeded to limp around for the remainder of our journey.
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| Last Night in Boracay |
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| Last Night in Boracay |
This was where we stayed...
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| The view from our kitchen. |
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| Our bedroom in Boracay. |
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| Our kitchen at the Boracay apartment. |
As you will know from previous
blogs, the apartment we’d booked in Boracay was not available once we arrived
so we moved into the only other available place to rent on the island, and it
was expensive. That ate through our savings quickly, so we packed up and moved
5 hours inland, to a city called Iloilo. That cut our money rent from $750 a
month to about $250. There was only one catch -- it was unfurnished. Thinking
it was the best deal we could find, we signed a one-year lease and used the
rest of our savings (and regrettably, a credit card) to humbly furnish the
place.
Living in the city was quite
different than living on the island. For one thing, there were more foreigners
than local Filipinos on the island, so nobody gave me a second glance there. In
the city, however, you couldn’t find a foreigner anywhere, so I stuck out
everywhere I went, catching stares and getting hustled. On 3 separate
occasions, I found myself in a cab with a bunch of angry Filipino friends,
engaged in a shouting match with the driver over the inflated fare. It got
pretty intense and on one occasion we simply forced him to pull over, got out
and tried to hail another taxi. Another time it was just me and my wife and I
felt the driver was actually trying to kidnap us. My sweet wife gave him an
earful and forced him to return us to our motel.
Here are some pics from the city...
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Notice a difference?
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| Andrew made himself a hat. |
Our adopted son, Andrew, had been with us for over a month when we moved to the city and adjusted to us (and us to him) very quickly. That part of the story couldn’t have gone any better. I couldn’t believe how fast the kid took to us, and how he seemed to have no problem with this very bizarre situation. Talk about rolling with the punches.
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The alleyway outside our gate.
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Our end unit apartment.
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How we spent the hot nights...
Luckily, I had a couple of family
members step in at this point and offer financial help. Doing so would allow me
to stay with them in the Philippines while my meager book royalties filled the
gap.
And then things went wrong. My
wife’s brother got sick and had to be admitted into the hospital. His x-ray
showed severe Pneumonia as well as Tuberculosis. So 4 weeks go by, with my wife
at the hospital all day with her brother while I’m watching Andrew (who doesn’t
speak English, so this made for some interesting and hilarious communication
attempts). My wife’s youngest brother stayed with us and helped translate when
he could.
Fast forward a little bit, and we
are able to finally speak to the local welfare office about our case, and how
to best proceed with the adoption. Now we’re hit with some news that we could
not have predicted -- everything we’d been told and had read about international
adoption was wrong. We were told that we could only process a local adoption
after 2 years of living in the Philippines, but that wouldn’t automatically
grant the child a visa to immigrate back to the US with us. Apparently, filing
a local adoption would be the slowest and most expensive way to adopt Andrew,
and he wouldn’t even be assured a travel visa once the process was over.
So we had two choices. Stay there
and file through the local courts, and continue extracting money from my
already strapped family members…. Or we could go home and file an international
adoption through the Hague Convention.
We came home.
