Where will we go after the Bahamas?

I now interrupt my wife’s heartfelt, honest and inspiring baby blogging with some other Korol related news.   Muriel and I learned yesterday of my next assignment in the Foreign Service – Rio de Janeiro!  We are thrilled about this news – Rio is a city near and dear to hearts in many ways, we love the city and are excited to live there as a family. 

The assignment process - how do we already know where we will go in 2017?

It is amusing to go through the long and laborious process of bidding for the NEXT post when I have not been in the Bahamas for a year yet.  I am closer to the beginning of my tour here than the end and that will be the case for another couple of months.  But this is a job that leads to you thinking of the process for the future and my timing of arrival to the Bahamas last year dictated that we went through the process for assignment this summer.

Because we already live in a gem of a place, my bidding priority was low and many of my colleagues received their assignment for the next tour more than a month ago.  We got the list of assignments about a month ago (right when a few other things were really chaotic in our life).  We had 2 weeks to turn a list of 400+ into 30 bids (places that we want to go)).  These 30 places had to fit a number of parameters including language training, type of work, correct timing, and hardship.  It was wonderful to have an analytical and whip smart wife to work together and fun to collaborate on the list.  We also borrowed heavily from a couple of tools provided by friends who were in the same process. 

We are engaged! Almost exactly 9 years ago in Rio

First Muriel and I came up with principles/criteria to dictate our rankings – and these were Elle’s welfare, Muriel’s job, and freedom of movement, access to outdoor sports and an economics position, in that order.  After getting the bones of the list complete, we then played around with the order.  Rio was right near the top of the list, and the only one in our top 20 that we listed multiple positions due to various timings.  The only reason it was not #1 was due to the jobs being another 2 years of consular work instead of economics work.  We submitted the list about 3 weeks ago, when I was in the U.S. to bring Mu and Elle back home. And then we waited.

The News

We waited until about 5 pm yesterday, while I was in the midst of a 15 hour day as a co-coordinator for the 550 person Official 4^th of July Celebration for the Embassy.  The party was great, but there were a ton of moving parts.  I popped home at about 5 pm to change into my suit and while I was dashing around to get back I looked at my blackberry – the assignment email was at the top of my work inbox.  Whoa!  I called Mu into the room and we nervously clicked on the message.  Its contents would dictate our life until the summer of 2019.  And there it was: Rio!

Hell yes.

Why Rio?

So why was Rio near the top of my list.  First, it is pretty self evident – a city of beach and mountains with surfing and climbing right out your door.  The city where we got engaged.  The city where my grandfather and his family, my mom included, lived for 2 years during her childhood.  A city of carnival.  A city of music everywhere.  A city of lyrical Portuguese.  Look at these pictures, that is a city that tugs at our heartstring.  What a city!

Living in Rio has been a dream of mine for a long time.  When I was a senior in college I had these three posters tacked up on one of my walls, separated into places, learning and experiences.  On these I wrote anything that I learned about or craved.  Then when I moved out at the end of college I put them all on a single piece of paper and promptly forgot about it for about a decade.  Somehow I stumbled across the list when we moved down to the Bahamas and tried to de-clutter our lives at a transition point.  It is remarkable to look at the list now and see how many of the places Muriel and I have traveled to together are listed.  Some things have dropped away, and now if I repeated the process over a year I would need a much larger set of poster boards.  One of those experiences, written simply but powerfully 13 years ago: Live in Rio.

And now we will.