Things we loved about living in Egypt.
1. Saving money: The financial benefits of living in Egypt cannot be under sold. It was the best thing about moving here. We saved a lot of money while enjoying a high quality of life. Travel, going out to eat, having a housekeeper come 2 days a week, not worrying about money at all for 2 years it was amazing. We were able to meet some very big financial goals and it felt so good.
2. Our apartment: we loved the location, the view, the size, how bright it was. This apartment is exactly the type of place I pictured us living in while we were here. We are also really glad we chose to live in New Cairo. It is so much more open, updated and organized than Maadi.
3. Our church community: The branch was right around 45 members the 2 years we were here. When Mark and I lived here in 2006 - 2008 it was close to 90 members. The benefit of such a small group is how close you can become with the other members. While living away from Maadi where all the other members lived sometimes made this feel harder than we'd like we are grateful for the closeness of our branch here. When we talk to members at home about our old ward it is shocking to hear of a youth group with 50 members. Here there were 10 primary kids, 3 YM and 3 YW. Mark served as the District President for the two years we were here, he got called a week after we moved in, and it was an interesting and challenging calling for him to fulfill.
4. Sites within Egypt and proximity to other countries: before moving here I really had no idea how much variety there is in Egypt. When I thought of Egypt my mind went straight to temples and pyramids. I really had no idea that it was a huge and sought after beach destination. The snorkeling in Dahab is the best and the prettiest ocean/sea water I have ever seen is on Egypt's North Coast.
5. The friends Jared and Lydia made. Jared was really fortunate that within a month or so of starting school he had a solid friend group of just really nice boys. Boys that teachers love having in class and are just good. Karrem A, Yassin G, Marwan A, Kareem E, Yueyang, Malek S, Tony H. his second year. It was great to see these boys interact with each other. After our first year Thomas moved into our branch and he and Jared became close friends and Thomas was so good for Jared. These kids took Jared in and helped him feel wanted and cool and it was awesome to see.
Lydia had such a hard time with school and friends our first year here. It was really hard. To see her develop some strong friendships in 5th grade was so rewarding. When Karma A moved here from Vietnam, we knew prayers had been answered. They fit so well. Lana, Amina and Rawia were great for Lydia and then June from church our 2nd year just made Egypt so much better for Lydia. We will always hold a soft spot in our heart for Lydia's teacher Ms. Erin (Rutherford). She is one of those teachers you read about on social media, the one who meets every student where they are and continually builds them up. She was Lydia's biggest fan and just got her. We feel so happy that we got to see this powerful example of a loving teacher in our own daughter's life. Because of Ms. Erin and Karma, Lydia could actually find something positive to say about AIS which we never thought would happen after 4th grade. 4th grade was just too much culture shock for her. It is a real thing and she could not comprehend how this was a school. To see her actually sad to not be at AIS next year was so unexpected. Despite it making leaving harder it was so nice to see this experience end on a positive note for Lydia.
The real problem with Egypt was always our school. There were very few things Mark and I could find to like about AIS. We worked with some wonderful teachers and interacted with some really nice kids but overall it was so far from the school environment we wanted to be in, we just couldn't stay. My job was so unfulfilling, and Mark felt like he was managing behavior 80% of the time and teaching 20%. I don't remember ever hearing him say he was enjoying teaching here.
Our original plan was to stay in Egypt for 3 years. That all changed at a whole school meeting in December 2022. Our school was basically running out of money. They had been losing money since 2016 and with the devaluation of the pound the school could no longer afford its foreign hired teachers. I met with the head of the school about a week before the meeting to see about moving from the Middle school (Middle schoolers are mean and grumpy) to the primary school and found out that my job with my foreign hire benefits would not exist next year. I could take a job as a full-time teacher and retain my benefits, but that was the last thing I wanted to do. We knew we could live comfortably in Egypt on Mark's salary, but if I was not working full time, we would have to pay tuition for one of our kids and we were not willing to do that. We would also lose any ability to save money which was the number one goal of coming here. We toyed with the idea of me homeschooling Lydia and doing work I enjoyed more online if I could find it, but then the school announced a change in how we would be paid. Instead of 80% of our salary in USD and 20% in EGP it would be 75% in USD and 25% in EGP but we would be held at an exchange rate of 21.6 pounds to the dollar instead of whatever the current rate was. (Right now its 30.8 EGP to 1 dollar) With rising prices and not being sure what income I would have and Mark not even liking his job we felt it was time for us to move on. The worst part is that we didn't even really feel like we got to make this decision. It felt like the school forced our hand. It was taken away from us and put us in a tight spot for finding a new suitable job. That very day Mark along with many, many other teachers activated his search associate account and started looking for new jobs.
It took longer than we hoped to get his profile activated and once he did it took a really long time to hear back from schools. Eventually he heard back from Saint Francis College in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Saint Francis is full IB school (the full program includes: early years, primary, middle and diploma) and a British school. Mark has wanted to be back in an IB school since he left his school in Colorado. The IB program is an approach to teaching that he prefers and enjoys. We wanted a smaller school and a school with a lot more discipline/structure. It is a K-12 school with around 900 students. AIS had over 2000 students. Mark served his mission in Brazil and is really looking forward to being back in Brazil. He is happy to have a chance to receive IB training and thinks he would one day like to be an IB coordinator so finding a school with a full program was important to him. Mark was offered this job in late March, and we are looking forward to experiencing Brazil. We really hope we love the school and living in Sao Paulo and can stay there for many years.
Getting our work permit/visa has been an incredibly frustrating process. Our school hires an agency to do this for them and both the agency and the school told us it was a long process, but we did not expect it to be this challenging or slow. School starts August 15th, and we are still in Egypt waiting for them to come through. We have tickets for August 14th and really hope we can use them. The amount of stamps and signatures and the slowness of the Embassy here and in Brasilia has been maddening to say the least. I already struggle with the unstructured ness of Summer and have just been feeling stuck here all Summer, bored to death. I lacked any motivation to plan activities and was just frustrated that nothing seemed to be happening. Summer of 2023 is definitely in the top 3 of my least favorite summers so far. We wanted to move to Brazil on July 21 one month after school ended here. We had a trip planned to Israel with Mark's sister and would not be back in Egypt until July 02. School meetings started in Brazil August 01 so it felt too tight to go home and visit everyone in the states. So, we planned to go straight to Brazil from Egypt. That was a mistake. We have just been stuck here waiting for the embassy to call us in. Had I known how long this was going to take I would have most definitely planned our summer differently. It has just been long, hot and boring.
Jared does not want to move to Brazil. He loves Egypt. He is not mean or grumpy about it but we know it is not the outcome he hoped for. I feel bad taking him away from a place he loves and we all just hope Brazil is a better fit for the next years.
We moved out of our apartment (August 12th) after selling basically everything we owned and into a friend's apartment in Maadi. They live in a villa out in New Cairo so the apartment is furnished but not lived in. It was incredibly generous of them to let us stay at their place. While we were incredibly grateful to have a place to stay we were not happy to still be in Egypt. We would have enjoyed staying in Egypt a bit more if we could have been in our own place with our own stuff. We had made what we thought were good plans and none of them worked out. It was so frustrating. We were just spending money we wanted to spend in Brazil and our days were long, hot and empty. School started and we were nowhere near getting our work permits cleared. We just kept hoping and waiting to get good news from Brazil. Mark actually booked 3 separate tickets to fly to Brazil even though he had no idea when we would leave, he just couldn't help it. It was driving me crazy. We would show up to church each week and have no updates to give anyone. We said goodbye to friends from school multiple times and just constantly wondered what we were supposed to be learning. I still haven't figured out what the lesson was, I don't think there was one this time just government slowness.
One positive of this time in Maadi was that Jared and Lydia had a chance to experience living in Maadi and having more interactions with their friends (mostly branch members) there. There were also quite a few new families who moved in, and it was nice to get to meet them. I know it wasn't all bad and things did all work out but it was still a horrible and frustrating summer. I missed having a routine and just normalcy to our life.
We finally got our work permits cleared on September 12. We went to the Brazilian consulate in Cairo at 9:00 am on the 12th, got our visas into our passports and then flew out that evening at 6:00. Since we had been living out of suitcases for all of August and September it wasn't that hard to quickly pack up, clean the apartment, drop off a few items we had left and head out.
Our friends from church stopped by to say goodbye which ended up being a perfect way to leave Cairo. It was the longest, hardest summer ever and not how we wanted to end our time in Egypt but when it comes to government bureaucracy you really can't know what you are going to get. Brazil actually ended up making Egypt look pretty good which is really saying something.
As Mark looked at flight options the one he kept coming back to was Qatar Airways. Since our school had allocated a certain amount of money for us and we only needed one way tickets he decided to splurge and book business class tickets. The prices were really good and as it was a 15-hour flight he decided it was worth it pay the extra cost out of pocket. Another big factor was the luggage allotment. Most airlines only give you one bag free even for international flights now so to get all of our stuff here would have cost a lot of money. We ended up not paying for any luggage which was so helpful. We flew just under three hours to Doha and then 15 to Sao Paulo and actually arrived here pretty well rested. All of us slept over 7 straight hours. Jared slept almost 10 of the 15. This was really helpful as the very next day (a Thursday) we all went to school, just a month after it started. We have been settling in pretty well and are just happy to have routines and be starting our new adventure.
