Over the winter break, my dad introduced me to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series of novels. For those of you who aren’t familiar, these thrillers deal with a transient, ex-MP who drifts from city to city dealing with trouble that just happens to find him, like witnessing a kidnapping, or being falsely accused of a murder. I immediately saw the similarities to my own life – we’re both 6’5″, highly trained, deadly, averse to material possesions, and have a totally accurate internal clock.

Maybe not. But we do, in fact, share a somewhat transient lifestyle. I’ve never lived more than five years in a single place, and last year I had decided to move on from Kuwait (literally) greener pastures. But I met a girl who convinced me to stay on one more year with the plan to recruit together the next. So we stuck it out in the desert and revisited the issue in November, re-registering with ISS and beating the virtual pavement to find schools with openings for both of us (she’s HS English, and I wanted to leverage my COETAIL experience to transition into a tech job). My positions was the sticking point – a lot of schools seem to fill tech integrator positions internally, and I was coming from a classroom position so it seemed like schools overlooked me. But follow-up and peristence paid off, and the American International School in Bamako interviewed us over Skype in December and offered us both positions two days later. They needed a response before the ISS fair, which sent us into intense private deliberations. There were slim pickings through ISS, but our current school had offered me a tech integrator position if we stayed and I would have been working with a great administration and colleagues, so it was a tough decision. I’m a fairly analytical person, so I weighed up the pros and cons in my head:

	Kuwait	Mali
Environment	Hot. Dusty.	Hot. Dusty in the north and more lush in the south.
Dietary considerations	Dearth of certain malt- and meat-based products according to sharia law	Refreshing beverages available
Level of development	Caribou Coffee and Krispy Kreme.	Two paved roads in capital.
Internet	Pretty bad	Pretty bad
Hazards	Highest per-capita incidence of traffic deaths in the world	Raging Islamist insurgency in north
Cultural opportunities	Watch a Hollywood movie (censored to remove incendiary topics such as kissing) after strolling past designer boutiques through an air-conditioned mall	Phenomenal live music
Physical fitness	Swim club near school	Rock-climbing, mountain biking
Health concerns	Obesity and heat stroke	Malaria, mango worms

Ultimately, aided by the hilarious writing on a blog kept by a current AISB teacher, we decided that Mali would be more of a work-to-live lifestyle in contrast to the live-to-work existence that we had in Kuwait. I’ll have to give up competitive swimming and $7 mochas from Caribou Coffee, but I’m excited to be the new IT Coordinator and anticipate deriving a lot of satisfaction from a smaller teaching load and new management responsibilities. After thinking about how I’ll continue my strength training regimen, I’ve transitioned to a sandbag workout that gets my heartrate up to 170-180 for 45 minutes and should be sustainable even in the third world, and hope to condition aerobically through rock climbing and mountain biking.

So there you have it – I’m moving on to a new and very different placement. The funniest thing is, before we started looking for jobs, I stated unequivocally that I wouldn’t go to Africa. Funny how life turns out.