LET’S MOVE TO… BALI

Sarah Alderson - 9 May 14

When our daughter Alula was three years old my husband and I decided one day that enough was enough. We were both working full time in London and were completely exhausted by the juggling of childcare, work and the scant remains of a social life. Our daughter spent more time with her childminder than with us. The thought that ‘there must be something more to life’ kept coming up in conversation with alarming frequency.

One day we started idly dreaming about our retirement and what it would be like – a small place in France, long lazy afternoons reading under the shade of an olive tree…We sighed. It was only thirty years away. We’d have to start saving though. Then we looked at each other in stunned amazement and shook our heads. Were we crazy? What were we thinking? We could be dead by then.

Retirement could be a thing of the past by the time we hit sixty-five. No doubt people would be working from their nursing home beds by 2040. It felt as if Neo had come along and unplugged us from The Matrix. Suddenly we could see the insanity of working our butts off for a future thirty years distant, that might never happen. What about the now?

So we did the craziest, scariest, greatest thing we have ever done. It was also in the end quite alarmingly simple. It involved saying just two words (admittedly repeatedly): Fuck It (I highly recommend reading the book of the same name).

We quit our jobs. We packed up our lives. We bought three round the world tickets with a loan for a new bathroom (shhh don’t tell the bank manager) and we took off with our tutu- wearing toddler for an adventure that would ultimately bring us, via several wonderful months in India, Australia, Malaysia and the US, to the magical island of Bali, where we’ve lived for the last four years.

I say it was simple but that’s not strictly true. Quitting is surprisingly easy (you just write a letter and, frankly, it was the most enjoyable letter I ever wrote). The rest – the dealing with parents (you’re taking our only granddaughter how far away?), the dealing with our own doubts (we’re doing what exactly?) was hard.

For the six months before we left I questioned our sanity every day. We were throwing away security, tossing aside the 9-5, uprooting our daughter, leaving friends and family, for what? What was this illusive perfect life we were trying to find? Would we find out the grass wasn’t greener? Was it fair to take a three year old backpacking around the world?

To get clear we created a vision board. It was filled with pictures of beaches, turreted chateau, with post-its slapped all over it scrawled with words like ‘community’ ‘no more 9-5’ ‘sunshine’ ‘more time for family’ ‘chance to follow our dreams’, ‘an awesome school’.
It’s amazing how real that vision has turned out to be (minus the turreted chateau, but I can live with that.There’s still time after all for a stint in the South of France).

I’m sitting now looking out over rice paddies drinking coconut water. The sun is shining. Alula, our daughter is seven and is in her third year at Green School, a bamboo school with no walls set in the middle of the jungle, where the kids grow their own food, play in a mudpit, swim in the river and learn entrepreneurial skills before they can read. We live amid a creative, close-knit community and, most importantly of all, there are no Southern Trains to contend with, no winters, and no 9-5!

Of course explaining to a toddler that we were leaving the UK and could take only what we could carry on our backs was tricky. She had no concept or geography or time. India might as well have been the High Street and nine months a few minutes. In fact it was three weeks into our trip when she started to ask when we were going home. When we told her we weren’t going home, that we didn’t have a home any more, she stared at us blankly.

Guilt made us promise her elephants in India and Disney princesses in America to make up for the lack of home. She lapped up both, yet even as we watched her run wild and free on the beaches of Goa, bath elephants in rivers, order Dosa from Indian waiters in hole in the wall cafes like an old pro and make offerings to the fairies in Bali, and congratulated ourselves probably rather smugly on the experiences we were giving her, we also struggled with the knowledge that we were depriving her of her grandparents and vice versa, and also depriving her of stability.

We quickly realised that the old adage that kids are adaptable is just not always true. Alula was a creature of habit and found travelling hard going. At every new hotel or villa we would find our naturally introverted little girl ritualistically laying out her toys and carefully hoarded treasures beneath desks and chairs, poignantly keeping a plastic bag beside them as though at any instant she expected to have to pack them up.

We slowed down our itinerary, deciding to base ourselves in places for one month minimum in order to give her more stability but the habit never left her.
Even after six months in Bali, where we had strived to create a home and stable base for her, this ‘refugee complex’ didn’t desert her. When I told her we would be going back to the UK for a holiday in the summer ten minutes later I discovered her packing all her toys and treasures into a bag, having assumed I meant we were leaving that day. It broke my heart.

If you ask her today where is home she says she doesn’t know (neither do we). She has spent more than half her life in Bali, speaks with an American accent, prays to Hindu gods and has no memory of her first three years in London. We have created a little nomad. And given the state of the world today we’re not sure that’s a bad thing.

She is beautifully aware of the world, and has friends in every far flung corner (the upside to international schooling). She’s seen abject poverty and obscene wealth, often sitting side by side. In first grade when asked by her teacher to write about her dreams for the future she wrote about creating equality for all so that everyone in the world could earn a living doing something that they loved.

She lives in a mixed Muslim/ Hindu culture. This is a child who doesn’t blink in Bangkok street markets, whose favourite things to do are hunt out the best idli in any city’s Little India and hole up in a bookstore for an afternoon, who rode her first bike in the tropical Gili Islands and snorkelled before she could swim. She doesn’t bat an eyelid at snakes, bats or the skankiest of squat toilets. The world really is her oyster and she’s surrounded by people following their dreams and passions and striving to make a difference in the world.

While occasionally John and I wonder (along with our parents we’re sure) about her ‘education’ (she still can’t tie shoelaces as she doesn’t own shoes and eats with her hands most of the time), and worry that we have broken the hearts of our parents by living so far away, when asked if we’d ever go back to the UK we still shake our heads vehemently. Not a chance.

Alula pondered it too once and then we explained that if we returned to the UK we would both have to work in offices, that we wouldn’t be able to pick her up from school every day or put her to bed every night, that she would have to go to a school with walls and wear a uniform, that there would be no beach or swimming pool or dragon fruit. She swiftly withdrew her support for the idea.

The single best thing it turns out about having moved abroad though isn’t the sunshine, isn’t even the community. It’s the pleasure of drawing closer to each other. In having to strive hard to create this new life, in supporting each other to pursue our dreams, John and I have become inseparable – truly life partners. And Alula is our glue. And it’s that bond that I think we’ll feel more proud of than anything else we achieve in this life.

Sarah Alderson

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