When we came home from China in 2000, we knew that wasn’t the end of the Chases-oveseas story. Babies and toddlers and elementary years later, we have 3 middle schoolers, and we’re ready. Where to, then? Middle east or Asia? Not back to China, because we don’t want the two parents to be the know-it-alls; we want this to be a family-learning-together sort of experience. Turkey, Thailand, Malaysia … Vietnam. Finally we found that Vietnam felt peaceful as a destination for our year abroad.
Our mode in China was one of developing rich relationships with people and gently allowing conversations to go into deep topics. Then we came home to Bend, Oregon, and couldn’t think of a good reason to change that. So for 14 years we’ve lived here, living intentionally, developing rich relationships with people, and engaging deep conversations. Now we’re going to go to Vietnam for a year. We’ll be doing there what our life is here.
The Plan: We’ll fly out from Seattle this summer in early August. Land in Ho Chi Min City (Saigon). Recover from jet lag, then up to Danang, which is smack-in-the middle of the 1000-mile Vietnamese coast. We’ll teach, invest in people, and experience overseas living as a family. For the Tet holiday, at the lunar new year of 2016, we hope to travel into Laos and connect with friends in northern Thailand. Then back to Danang to finish out the school year before coming home in June.
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