Meena, Shasta and I moved back to India from the US a few days back with bags and no baggage! With most of my family in the states, this was one tough decision to take and it has been on our minds for the last three to four years. Our 2018 vacation in Uganda solidified our resolve to enter the Foreign Service and work towards a more holistic life that involved sustainable travel. During one of those long car rides, we decided it was time and planned to ‘initiate exit procedures’ right after our vacation. Just as we were finalizing things back in the US, we’d realized that we would be having Shasta that year and decided to push the move to next year. Come 2019, once we had Shasta’s paperwork in place and she was ready to fly, we head back to Uganda to spend a few months there with Meena’s father and finally made our way to India with a short stay in Dubai.
I resigned from WTW in April and decided to take some time off to spend with Shasta. She’s growing way too fast and I am beyond thrilled that I am able to spend some real quality time with her and Meena. On the work front, working towards the FS career, I passed the IMST test in May and am very optimistic of a call for the Oral Assessments. Though with anything in the foreign service, this is going to be one long shot and highly likely it’s going to be at-least a year for things to start shaping up. Spinning in tandem, I have an interim offer for a job in the U.S Embassy in Kampala. The security clearance is currently underway for over 10 months now and I am now cutting it wee closer to the September deadline. Fingers crossed! In the interim, I’ve been helping few universities in Uganda with their branding and plan to kick-start online test-prep courses for the GRE and SAT through W2SG. There’s another opportunity in Maine, U.S. that I might explore a few months down the lane.
The rest of 2019 is going to be as fluid as the last few months have been and I trust things will start shaping out soon. The other day, I was telling Meena how straightforward this all looks in retrospect - we were mulling over it over several interspersed discussions across years and all it takes is a few hours for one to uproot, move and get settled to a new normal! Friends and family keep asking us if our move to India is permanent. We tell them it’s ‘For good, for now’. I coined that phrase not knowing any better way to describe the shift we’re going through and the more I think of it, the more I like it! At the least, it does make the discussion a bit lighter!