Ten Reasons Why Your Family Shouldn't Take A Year Off: Reason #8 "How Will You Communicate Without Speaking The Language?"

Pulling up your family's suburban roots and heading off for some developing country for a year is foolish. There are lots of reasons not to do it. For example: How will you communicate without speaking the language?

With an itinerary covering thirteen countries and eight languages you might think that language would be a major stumbling block for our family. With half our time in Spanish-speaking countries, it helps that we are all now proficient in that language, but we have spent half our time in places where we don’t speak the local language. Here are some things to keep in mind when you are traveling and you don’t speak the local language.

1) English is (almost) everywhere. The English language is spoken in one form or another in many places on the globe and you’ll continually be surprised by the number of people in out-of-the-way places who can converse in English.
2) Motivation trumps language skills. Most of the people you’ll deal with while traveling are people who want to sell you something: a hotel room, a meal, laundry services, that pretty little artisan handbag. To travel is to be needy on a daily basis; those whose livelihood depends on fulfilling those needs will be more than happy to overcome language differences to close the sale.
3) Context conveys meaning. If you show up at a hotel at midnight with your backpacks, looking tired and desperately in need of sleep, do you really need to speak a common language with the hotel owner to understand what is being communicated?
4) If you really need it, so do the locals. Much of communication while traveling is driven by need fulfillment. Your interactions with locals will be about what you need, not about philosophy or art history. For example, if it is monsoon season in Thailand, there will umbrellas on sale everywhere.
5) Think about who colonized the country. If you are going to Morocco, chances are your high school French will come in handy. In Hong Kong all you will need is English. In central and south America, whatever Spanish you’ve learned in school will help considerably.
6) A smile is worth a thousand words. A smile goes a long way to smoothing over language barriers. 25 years ago I traveled with a young German man who had been in South America for 7 months and had not learned a single word of Spanish. In the interactions that I observed, he spoke English slowly with a huge smile on his face while trying to get his point across. The locals were so charmed with his smile they tried extra hard to understand what he was saying. He usually got what he wanted.

With these things in mind, you will find yourself in situations where there is a language barrier. When you do, here are some tips to help you communicate.

1) Learn the basics. Get a phrase book and learn the basics: “good day”, “yes”, “no”, “thank you”, “please”, “how much”, etc.
2) Use your fingers. While negotiating a price in a market, flash a single finger and then five fingers to convey that your offer is fifteen of the local currency. It’s a market so they’ve seen this before. In a restaurant, point at that tasty meal that the guy next to you is enjoying.
3) Write it down. If you have a pen and paper handy, negotiate by writing down the prices on paper. This has the added benefit of documenting the final price, in case an unethical merchant tries to change it after you’ve struck an agreement.
4) Use a calculator. When haggling, use the merchant’s or your calculator to make sure that you both have the same number in mind. Punch in your offer and hand it to the merchant. He or she will counter by punching in a new number and handing the calculator back to you. Simple head nodding will convey agreement or disagreement.
5) Use your pantomime skills. Once when I was in China, I wanted to order an omelet in a small restaurant. After trying English and quickly exhausting my limited Mandarin, I got my protein with a succession of 4 crude but effective pantomimed movements: flapping wings accompanied by clucking noises >> reaching down for an egg >> breaking the egg >> scrambling the egg. Yes I got an incredulous look, but I got my omelet as well.

I’ve seen many circumstances where two people speak the same language but don’t communicate, leading me to believe that communication is not language dependent. The bottom line is that an inability to speak the language is not a barrier to enjoying a great overseas trip.

Ten Reasons Why Your Family Shouldn't Take A Year Off: Reason #7 "How Would You Plan It?"

Pulling up your family’s suburban roots and heading off to tour developing countries for a year is foolish. There are lots of reasons not to do it. For example: How Would You Plan It?

Do you need a yellow fever inoculation to get into Bolivia and how long is it good for? (yes, 10 years) Do you need malaria pills in Kenya and can you buy them cheaply in Nairobi? (yes, yes) Can you take a ferry from Turkey to the Greek island of Rhodes in the winter and will you need a new Turkish visa when you return to Turkey? (yes, no) Can you enter Israel from Egypt at the Rabah and Taba border crossings? (no, yes) Can you plug your laptop into a wall socket in Peru and Tanzania? (yes, no) If you scored ten out of ten, you might not need any help, but if you’re like most of us, you’ll need some time. We started planning our trip about a year before we embarked and the amount of details to conquer is considerable.

Where would you even begin planning a year-long trip that encompasses several countries with differing languages, currencies, and requirements for entry visas, electrical voltages and tropical disease vaccinations? How could you possibly have reservations for all the hotels, trains, buses and rental cars that you will need? How will you know what your kids should be studying and where will you get the study materials? Like most big projects, the answer is to start making lists.

For many things, practical guidebooks like Lonely Planet and Rough Guides have a lot of valuable information. We have used our local library countless times to check out these books and make notes. Much of the information is on the web. Go to the State Department’s International Travel webpage for travel alerts and advisories and visa requirements for US citizens. Go the Center for Disease Control’s website for up to the minute information on which inoculations are needed in which country. Go to VoltageValet’s helpful Directory of Foreign Electrical Information to understand voltage, frequency, adapter plug and wall outlet type requirements by country. This area is particularly confusing as there are no worldwide standards. Former colonies often retain the standards of the colonizing country (i.e., Kenya has the same electrical standards as the United Kingdom) and sometimes places like overseas military bases use the standards of their controlling country instead of the surrounding region (i.e., U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia).

With the exception of airline tickets, almost all hotel reservations can be made en route. For homeschooling requirements, education standards are usually detailed at your state’s website and on-line textbooks and web tutorials are available all over the web.

The bottom line is that there is a vast amount of detail to conquer but if you give yourself enough time, it’s all doable.

Ten Reasons Why Your Family Shouldn’t Take a Year Off: Reason #6 “How Can You Afford It?”

Pulling up your family’s suburban roots and heading off for some developing country for a year is foolish. There are lots of reasons not to do it. For example: How Can You Afford It?

The bottom line is that it’s less than you might think, but let’s be clear on one thing: If your family needs to fly first class, stay in 5-star hotels and mom and dad frequently enjoy caviar and expensive champagne, you might need to have a bank account the size of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet to be able to keep up that pace for an extended period. By traveling on the local economy – taking public transportation and paying the local price for pensions and meals whenever possible – not only do you stretch your shillings and liras, you experience more of the culture. By paying the local price – the price that any self-respecting local would pay for something like a ferry boat ride or a plate of falafel – you are forced to interact with the locals while saving money.

Not to make virtue out of financial necessity, but paying for western-style comforts in developing countries can often serve to insulate you from the culture, as well. Stay in an expensive hotel with English-speaking staff and you’ll not learn any of the local language. Take the air-conditioned tour bus and you’ll never really appreciate the local weather or the distances that you’re covering. Order a hamburger in the expensive hotel’s restaurant and you’ll miss out on that region’s cuisine.

Sometimes paying the local price can be a lot of work. While it is easier to have a tour guide and huge air-conditioned bus take you on a full day tour, you will pay five to 10 times the cost of doing it on your own. Doing it on your own can at times be frustrating as figuring out the local bus schedule or blindly negotiating the local price of a taxi isn’t always easy. Obviously if you can speak some of the local language this is easier. We had an easier time of it in South America because we all spoke Spanish. Without any of the local language, you may find yourself pantomiming a chicken laying an egg as you try to explain that you’d like eggs for breakfast.

A family of four can probably travel through most developing countries for a minimum of $100 dollars per day, excluding airfare and larger excursions like safaris, Galapagos cruises or a multi-day treks that are guided and catered. For developed countries, you’ll probably have to double that amount. Accommodation, which usually comprises 40-50% of your daily budget, is where you can save the most. You won’t be staying at a Comfort Inn or a Hilton but for $10 per person or less you can have some fairly authentic experiences: i.e., sleeping in a cave hotel in Central Turkey, staying in salt-block pension on the Bolivian altiplano or spending the night with a Nubian family on the Nile in Egypt.

The notion that tourists have “more money than time” and travelers have “more time than money” is a cliché but it helps explain the financial/temporal dichotomy of travel. With only a week in a country, you don’t have time to figure out the local shared taxi system or learn what the locals pay for a pension and meals. If you have a month to cover the same ground, there is plenty of time to do (and pay) as the locals do.

Ten Reasons Why Your Family Shouldn’t Take a Year Off: Reason #5 “What about your kids’ education?”

Pulling up your family’s suburban roots and heading off for some developing country for a year is foolish. There are lots of reasons not to do it. For example: What about your kids’ education?

Both our kids will miss the entire school year next year and our daughter studied under the auspices of the district’s independent study program this past spring. The three most common questions that we’ve heard from friends and acquaintances were “Will they let you take the kids out of school for a year?”, “Won’t they get behind in school?” and “How do you know what to teach?” As we started to tell our family and friends about our plans, these three questions cropped up more than any others. (One of the more amusing questions we heard was from an administrator at the kids’ school: “How will you carry all those textbooks?” Answer: “We won’t.”)

The first question is an interesting one: Will they let you take the kids out of school for a year? All school districts are different, but we had surprisingly little interest or concern from our kids’ middle school. No one from the school, the school district or the State of California has stepped forward and said that we couldn’t do what we planned to do. The school was much more concerned about the minutiae of our daughter’s independent study for the final trimester than for missing the entire next year. The independent Study program allows “distance learning” under a teacher’s remote supervision for a period of up to 60 days. Our daughter’s teachers set up an independent study curriculum with scanned pages from her math, science and language arts textbooks, as well as research reports on both the Andean Condor and the Andean ecosystem as well as a research paper on The Beatles.

The second question, “Won’t they get behind in school?” is a fear that many parents share. It helps that both our kids are very good students so there is no “catching up” or learning issues to deal with. Both my wife and I both think that there is not a lot of learning going on in middle school. It is a time when kids are going through drastic physical and emotional changes and middle schools’ resources are overtaxed just to keep kids from falling off the deep end. Additionally, the time required to homeschool two kids ought to be much less than the time required to teach 20 kids in a school classroom. Finally, when we did a 6-month sabbatical through Central America and Spain in 2005, both kids missed the final trimester of that school year and did not miss a beat upon returning in the Fall.

The third question, “How do you know what to teach?” is easy in theory but hard in practice. The California education standards for each grade are listed in detail at the State of California’s web site. The blueprint is right there on the World Wide Web and all you have to do is print it out. In practice, the act of coming up with problems, exercises and projects that will teach the standards has given us a deeper respect for the teaching profession. Last week both our kids finished 500 word persuasive essays on the question: The Monroe Doctrine: Good or Bad for Latin America?” This week they are writing a 750 word dual biography on the twin liberators of South America: Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin.

Most of this blog entry has been about “keeping up”, but there are many things that they are getting from travel that their classmates aren’t. They are already intermediate-level Spanish speakers and they are acutely aware that most of the world is nothing like the privileged place they call home. They have learned that many simple things that they have taken for granted are luxuries in the developing world. They are much more open to new and different people, foods, customs, experiences and points of view. Perhaps most importantly, they will have a broader view of their responsibilities as global citizens when it comes time to choose their careers. It may be a cliché, but it also happens to be true: “Travel is Broadening”.

Ten Reasons Why Your Family Shouldn’t Take a Year Off: Reason #4 “What about your career?”

Pulling up your family’s suburban roots and heading off for some developing country for a year is foolish. There are lots of reasons not to do it. For example: What about your career?

This is a really, really good question. Even with the economy on life support and people moving from job to job at a much quicker rate than ever before, employers still tend to look askance at a one year hole in your resume. Not only are you losing a year of income, but when you return, it often takes quite a few months to find a job. At the executive level – and given the current economy -- this might mean as much as two years without work. This is arguably the biggest obstacle to enjoying an extended sabbatical with your family.

There are, however, a few different ways of looking at this.

First of all, as a consultant in the very cyclical retail industry during the worst economy in a half century, there’s a chance that there may not be much work anyway in the next 12-24 months. If I were to go half the year with no income, we’d be worse off financially than if we rented out the house and traveled the world…in fact, we’d actually lose less money. This alone is pretty compelling. An additional benefit of being a consultant is that clients are used to the idea of an uneven work history due to the project-related nature of the profession.

Secondly, in the past 4-5 years, I’ve had a burgeoning desire to work in the non-profit sector and do something a bit more meaningful than just drive shareholder wealth for retail companies. What better time to offer my pro-bono consulting services than during the worst economy in decades?

Thirdly, by working pro-bono, I am…working. I am doing actual work, helping an organization and adding to my professional skills and experiences. This is something that many of my out-of-work colleagues aren’t able to say. Additionally, in the internet age, it is much easier to keep in touch with my professional contact network via email and social networking sites like LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, a kind of Facebook for executives, it's possible to proactively manage the perception of my career to the people in my professional network. The people in my network don’t need to know that I am not getting paid; all they need to know is that I’m on an assignment with another client.

Lastly, when will we ever have a chance again to do this?

Ten Reasons Why Your Family Shouldn’t Take a Year Off: Reason #3 “What will you do with all your stuff?”

Pulling up your family’s suburban roots and heading off for some developing country for a year is foolish. There are lots of reasons not to do it. For example: What will you do with all your stuff?

As we started planning to rent out our house, we looked at all the “stuff” we had accumulated for the previous 10 years and wondered where it would go. We got some storage quotes for our things that ranged anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000. Fortunately, we found tenants who wanted our house furnished, so the biggest hurdle – where to put beds, couches, tables, desks, etc. – was cleared. It also helped that we decided to sell our second car, a 14-year old sedan, which further reduced our storage needs. The remaining stuff would be dealt with in four steps: 1) Toss it, 2) Sell it, 3) Donate it, 4) Store it.

Step one was pretty easy. Like most homeowners there were lots of things left over from house projects, such as old paint cans, old 2”x 4” pieces, extra pieces of chicken wire, old cinder blocks, etc. that had outlived their usefulness. After about four or five trips to the dump with the mini-van, all that was gone.

Step two was by far the most satisfying phase: selling it on Craig’s List. Craigs’s List is a beautiful thing because it accomplishes three worthwhile and simultaneous objectives: 1) you liberate yourself from your unwanted material goods, while 2) transferring it to someone who really wants it, while 3) keeping it out of a landfill. We sold dozens of items on Craig’s List, most of which fell into two categories: Kid’s furniture and toys that were either outgrown or no longer wanted and merchandise from sample sales of the various retail companies that I’ve worked for. If an item did not sell, we slashed the price; in some cases we offered an item for free, just to keep it out of the dump. For a couple months people were coming by the house at all hours to buy things. With multiple appointments on the same day, we sometimes became confused. “Are you here for the PlayStation2 console or the Pottery Barn rug?” “Was it the snowboard or the Williams-Sonoma wine rack?” “The Trek kid’s bike or the rattan chairs?” As these good passed from our hands to someone else’s, I reflected on the excitement of acquiring many of them. I remember buying the distressed pine wine rack at a Williams-Sonoma sample sale, snagging it just before another man could get to it. I remember the elation of beating him to it and getting it at a substantial discount over 12 years ago. It has done nothing but collect dust in our garage since that time.

Step three was simply a matter of taking everything that languished on Craig’s List and donating it to the local Goodwill store. After this was done, our garage was starting to look downright empty. Now it was time for step four: store it. Between our storage shed, the attic above our garage and the loft space above my mother’s garage we had about 1,500 square feet of storage to use. Over the course of the 2 months leading up to our departure, we gradually filled up every square inch of that space. We also stored our mini-van at my mother’s house.

With everything put away we felt really good about getting rid of almost half of the things in our house and even better about getting a lot of it to someone else who wanted it.

Ten Reasons Why Your Family Shouldn’t Take a Year Off: Reason #2 “What will you do with the house?”

Pulling up your family’s suburban roots and heading off for some developing country for a year is foolish. There are lots of reasons not to do it. For example: What will you do with the house?

Unquestionably, the cornerstone of our family’s ability to take a year off was being able to rent out our house. In fact, it’s safe to say that without renting out the house, our one year sojourn would have shrunk into an extended summer vacation. Because of this, our immediate focus was to do all the things that needed to be done to the house to make it rentable—without major problems cropping up during the year while we’re on a different continent. This included large projects like replacing the swimming pool light that was never grounded properly and cutting down the aging Monterrey Pine tree in the front yard that was sure to fall while we were away. The list also included scores of smaller tasks that had been put off for a few years like repainting the baseboards, getting screens for the office windows and replacing the lock on the garage door. There were also unexpected things like the 45 year-old sewage line deciding to back up and spew fetid water into the backyard about a month before I left for Peru. We had to replace 180 linear feet of sewage line. All of these things went on our list and we slowly ticked them off.

Once we’d made headway on the list, we decided to advertise the house on Craig’s List. We got a lot of out-of-town responses immediately from families with kids who were moving to Marin County and wanted their kids in our local school district. People from as far away as Texas, Los Angeles, Connecticut were all familiar with our neighborhood and school district and wanted to see the house right away. Most importantly, all were comfortable paying an amount of rent that would cover all our monthly housing expenses.

This response was in contrast to the last time we rented our house out for 6 months (March to September 2005). We turned up exactly two families, both of whom couldn’t afford what it would take to cover our monthly costs. We attributed this to the longer one-year period and the fact we were requesting a lease to start in the summer prior to the school year.

After many responses and a few showings we met our present tenants, who we liked immediately. The man owned a successful business and was financially solvent and they specifically wanted to live in our neighborhood. Although they lived about 40 minutes away, they wanted to move near a nearby high school so that their daughter could play basketball there for her senior year. Even better, since they planned to keep their house, they did not need much storage space and were fine with us keeping the furniture in the house, which meant that we did not need to find external storage for our things.

What we thought would be our biggest hurdle has turned out to be a relatively small one. Fortunately, we quickly located great tenants whose rent covers all our monthly costs; what could be better?

Ten Reasons Why Your Family Shouldn't Take a Year Off: Reason #1 "What will you do with the dog?"

Pulling up your family's suburban roots and heading off for some developing country for a year is foolish. There are lots of reasons not to do it. For example: What will you do with the family dog?

Our dog is a male, 6 year-old shepherd-mix that we got from Smiley Dog Rescue in Oakland, California about three and a half years ago. After a 6 month family sabbatical in 2005, one of the things we decided to do upon returning home was to get a dog. Without a lot of experience with dogs, we evaluated the pros and cons of rescue dogs and decided to get one, figuring that giving an unwanted dog a home outweighed any other considerations. By October of 2005 we had our dog and after a transition period where he would find every possible way out of our fenced yard, he settled in quite nicely. We quickly learned that he had to stay on leash while on walks, as he'd lunge and growl at certain types of dogs while he'd be friendly with others. Around the family he was very good and he was a great dog for us.

When it came time to start planning our suburban exodus, deciding what to do with our dog was not "top of mind" for us. Once we started to focus on it, the first thing we did was to add up a year's worth of kenneling costs At the rates we'd paid previously, we were looking at $9,500 for a year and that's only if he never left a 4'x4' cyclone fence cage with a concrete floor. If we added a daily 45 minute walk, it would cost close to $20,000 for a year for a pretty miserable existence.

Around the time we were starting to wonder where we could possibly place our dog, the woman who was to rent our house suggested that we could keep the dog at our home and she'd take care of him, along with her three poodles. This seemed perfect; our dog could stay in his own home and even have some canine companionship. She and my wife decided to give the idea a test one afternoon. All of our hopes came crashing down as our dog immediately defended his territory and started growling and barking and did not stop for the entire hour they were at our house. With each growl and bark, our dog's chances of a nice comfortable year in his own house slowly evaporated. Both my wife and our tenant agreed that this would not work.

A few weeks later during a dinner party with our best friends, after a few glasses of wine, the wife of the couple said that they'd love to watch our dog while we were away. As we put away a few more glasses, we ended the evening feeling optimistic about this scenario. The next day, in the cold light of day, we all realized that their house was on the market and there was no way of knowing if their future home would accommodate a dog. Back to square one.

A month later, a dog-loving friend of my wife's casually mentioned that she might take our dog for a year. My wife slowly worked up to suggesting a "doggy-sleepover" to see if such an idea might work. With no other options in sight, we awaited the fateful night. Again, our irascible canine could not contain himself. Not being on his home turf, he paced the house all night and just could not get comfortable. Again, it was mutually decided that we would pursue other options.

At this point, my wife even emailed Smiley Dog Rescue to see if there was a possibility that they'd take the dog back, even temporarily, but they said no.

As a last resort, my wife called her sister in Los Angeles. My sister-in-law and her husband don't have kids and have a nice back yard and she told me wife that she'd do it only if all other options were exhausted. My wife assured her that they were. She and my son brought the dog down in May and thus far the match has been very good. Our dog gets a lot more time walking than he did with us and my sister- and brother-in-law seem to genuinely enjoy his company. At one point during a recent walk, one of their neighbors even asked if he was for sale. From being unwanted and possibly having no home to being set up in a perfect environment and being the talk of the daily walk, our dog has come a long way.