“How about Italy?” she said.
I was lying on my friend’s couch. It was 2010. Los Angeles. I was 20, visiting from University in Boston.
That year I had stopped playing competitive tennis. I had a spinal injury. I was depressed.
“You love food,” she said.
2007. High school. End-of-the-year evaluations. My Spanish teacher sat me at a desk in the back of the room, away from the other students. She opened a manila folder with my final course grade, and then closed it.
“You have great tenacity,” she said.
“But you’ll never learn a foreign language.”
“It’s just a small application,” she said. “You’ll finish it by the afternoon!”
On the plane to Italy I sat next to a girl my age, knees shaking, scratching her wrist. She was crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My father died on September 11th,” she said.
We held hands. And we took Italian together.
That summer we practiced Florence.
Fast forward to 2012. I studied more Italian at the Middlebury Language School. A couple teachers there helped me with my application to be a high school teacher abroad. I moved to Crema, Italy. The town is now known for the Oscar-winning movie “Call Me By Your Name.” Some days I’m jealous. If only the director had spotted me years ago! Seeking male 18-24 American, speaks French and Italian.
I speak French because I moved to Bordeaux.
Because why not?
My roommate was a grandmother. I still remember her first email to me:
“Malgré my advanced age it’ll be a pleasure to pick you up from the airport.” What does malgré mean?!
Despite. She was 74.
She stewed the best fig jam. Little dotlets of confitture and hot yellow butter, glistening against a crisp o’clock baguette.
My new grandmother got sick. She had to stay in the hospital for several weeks. She couldn’t swallow properly. I should’ve noticed. All the little yogurt spoons in the dishwasher.
I had to leave France when she was still in the hospital. She held my hand.
“Go, go, adventure!” she said.
I left for Los Angeles, a Master’s program. When I finished, I thought I was moving to Sweden, a fellowship I was applying for, a project between Portugal, Sweden and the United States.
I had to learn Portuguese and Swedish, enough so that I could pass the speaking portion of the B1 proficiency exams in both languages.
I touched every word I could find, working with online teachers, making sure I made that girl on the plane, and my French grandmother proud. Go, go, adventure!
I passed.
If I listed to you the languages I now speak, it would sound arrogant. But to recount the sequence of events that make me feel like any language is possible, I turn to the territory of the heart.
It’s quite random, who opens us. It would be easy to say that my high school teacher’s ignorance was what fueled me to learn many languages. Perhaps a little fuel. It’s a more profound idea to say that the ultimate compassion of friends, teachers, and strangers transform us. It’s not one individual who lets us learn. It’s the fragile edges of connection, from a sofa to a girl on a plane to a malgré grandmother, all who expressed self-love and towards-love simultaneously. Not romantic love, but a spiritual love, surfaced through the language of kindness.
Kindness is not about the expectation of others. I was a New England kid who expected to stay in Boston my entire life. I was expected to never learn a language. Ignore the preconditions. Start listening to the language of kindness – “how about…?”, a child’s cry, the goodbye wave – as open acts to start a conversation. Language then becomes living – the courage to sit with others, which is a bodily language, a language of our senses, which I’d argue is the easiest way for us to learn a language, to be an expat.
Resistance to foreign culture isn’t necessary when we’re close to the senses of others. Spoons in a dishwasher aren’t just spoons. It’s a physical memory I can recall. A relationship tied to a breakfast table. Jam is sweeter, adventure more of a quest than an itinerary. More words absorbed than “do you speak French?”
I speak what needs to be held, with hands, with my eyes, with my stomach. That’s real multilingualism. In fountains, gardens, kitchens, courts, alleyways, with the falling leaves, and flowers blooming. That’s real learning.
Go, go, adventure.
Joshua Kent Bookman is a writer and artist. Like the characters of his book, “close to elsewhere,” he calls several places home, and has worked in France as an agricultural laborer, as a high school teacher in Italy, and tennis instructor in the United States. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1990.
“close to elsewhere” was released this summer by the Swedish publisher LYS. This is Bookman’s first novel.
The ultimate list of international schools for saving money
Many of us think that working as a teacher at an an international school is a way to work and save way more money than we used to working in our home countries.
Is that reality or fantasy?
We have seen and read many discussion boards, Facebook groups, review websites and published books all discussing this topic, and the reality of this savings potential gets confusing and complicated to understand or predict fully.
Some people state they are saving upwards of USD 60000 a year at certain international schools. Many other people are stating that they are struggling to save USD 1000 or even USD 500 a month working at their international school. Even others state that they are saving USD 0!
Of course, there are many factors at play: Veteran international school teachers state that the more you limit the number of times you go out to eat, and travel during your many vacations, the possibility of saving money is higher. That is obvious, but a large number of us aren’t always willing to do that, at least not in the first few years of teaching abroad.
Another main factor for savings potential is the amount of money you are getting in your take-home salary versus the cost of living where you are stationed. Seems like the trend is that fewer schools offer that “amazing salary and benefits package” that we all hear about, and landing a job at one of those schools is getting increasingly difficult.
There are also many, many other ways to NOT save money while working abroad; many of these factors have nothing directly to do with the school’s salary and benefits package. We have a whole ISC blog series about that here.
But if one of the main goals of teaching abroad is saving some money, then we need something to help us figure out how it all works and how we can set up an opportunity that will help us actually save.
ISC has done its best to create an online community that can help us figure things out easier about saving money while teaching abroad. Besides the comments that members submit about the savings potential on the school profile pages at their international schools, premium members are also able to compare these comments on savings potential using our unique Compare Schools page on our website. The Compare Schools page is really helping prospective teachers figure out exactly how much teachers are saving at those international schools and which school they would prefer working at in the future.
Luckily, International School Community has a comment topic on our school profile pages related to this topic of saving money while working at international schools. Our teacher members shared what their experience has been working at various international schools around the world. There are a total of 630 comments (July 2019) that have been submitted by our veteran international school teachers in one of the 66 comment topics called – “Average amount of money that is left to be saved.”
Here are a few of those submitted comments:
“The ability to save changes each day, and has dropped by 1/2 this year. With the current inflation rate, I hope to save about $10,000 this coming year…” –
Escuela Bella Vista Maracaibo (Maracaibo, Venezuela) – 25 Total Comments
“I would be surprised if you can save any money here. But on the other hand – you get to live on the one of the most beautiful islands in the world…” – Boracay European International School (Boracay, Philippines) – 17 Comments
“If staff leads a very humble lifestyle it is possible to save your dollars (approximately 23% of salary). The city provides so much to do, and there are so many travel opportunities and so much time given off that many teachers actually struggle to save any money at all…” – Columbus School Medellin (Medellin, Colombia) – 53 Total Comments
“While the money affords a very nice lifestyle in South-East Asia, saving money for a house or retirement in North America or Western Europe is nearly impossible…” – ELC International School (Selangor, Malaysia) – 48 Comments
“The package is based on the Canadian Dollar, so after you are deducted transfer fees to your bank in the West and you consider the conversion of the CAD to RMB, the savings is minimal…” – Canadian International School Kunshan (Kunshan, China) – 43 Comments