(This was a question from someone on a yahoogroup with
me, and my answer)
>>Sheila I am not trying to be incompetent just
wondering, why don't you just move to a more homeschool-friendly contry? I
realize it is not like the US , but do they restrict you from moving out of the
country? I am sorry you may have explained this all aready but I have been
offline for at least 6 months now and last I knew you were still homeschooling
but those in authority were putting pressure on you to place your children into
the public school.<<
"Putting pressure on us" isn't quite strong enough--at the end of March, we received two fines and were told that if our daughter wasn't in school within two weeks, she would be escorted there by the police, so a bit more than "pressure".... (The fines, incidentally, were taken back in May because they realized that they had done everything illegally up until that point.) I now have all the updates I'd sent to lots of people (including this list) posted at www.homeschoolblogger.com/sheilalange/ , so more details are available there. :-)
But why we're still here? No, we haven't been prevented from leaving the country (although that HAS happened to some other families), but leaving isn't necessarily all that straightforward. With our western materialistic way of thinking, we did think having a place to live and a reliable income were important enough to not just pack up without planning anything... In May we actually did make the decision to move to Belgium, and my husband would commute to work in Germany (about an hour and a half one way to his part-time bank job, and he's all over the state for the mission work, so that wouldn't change), at least for awhile. In order to keep the authorities off of our backs, we registered the children in school (to start at the end of August), and just in case they actually WOULD have to attend for a few weeks, we registered them in a different school than the one with which we'd been fighting for nearly two years. Our intention was to start looking for a home in Belgium the next week, wait at least until our baby was born (due July 24th, and actually born that day, too!), and move in August. We hadn't worked out the details of what to do with our apartment here yet, as most of it still belongs to the bank, so if we sell it before we've paid back the loan, we have to pay a huge penalty fee. We did plan to keep it at least until January 1, 2006, to get at least the sixth year of the eight years subsidizing we get from the state for building a new home and having four children, but one way or another, it will be a huge financial loss when we leave.
But...when we got home from the school registration, my husband drove over to check on his father, who hadn't answered the phone for a few days and had been suffering from depression for the last 12 years, and had just been released from 10 weeks in the psychiatric ward of the hospital after an attempted suicide in March. It turned out that he had tried again a few days earlier and succeeded. So although we did drive to Belgium the next week to look at half a dozen houses, all plans for moving were put on hold, because we now had my father-in-law's self-owned apartment to sort out and put on the market. (We finished September 1st--it's now for sale, and we pray it sells quickly and we don't have to deal with it anymore.)
In the next weeks, concentrating on anything at all was somewhat difficult, to say the least, but my husband remarked that without his father to care for, we really don't have to stay close or even in Europe--we could go anywhere in the world. And an inheritance would be coming to us once his father's estate was settled, also opening up more possibilities. Then we remembered a long-time dream of doing a Discipleship Training School with Youth With a Mission, and he started googling. We ended up applying (in the middle of July) for a family-oriented DTS in Montana, USA, which starts at the end of March 2006. (Spilling the beans here: we got an e-mail this morning that we've been accepted!)
So one answer as to why we're still here could be simply "financial security"--we don't want to leave unless we know we'll have a place to live and a way to pay for it, and moving will also incure a large financial loss no matter what. But we've also been praying about it all constantly, and have felt God's guidance in every decision we've made so far. We still don't know what's going to happen next. We'll probably go the DTS, and we do really want to, but the mission work my husband does here has been growing recently (after shrinking in the last year, another reason we thought now might be the time to leave), so we're still talking about Belgium. Or maybe the DTS (five months), then come back and move to Belgium. We don't know. In the meantime, yes, the children are in school. Academically it's almost a 100% waste of time, but it's good for their German (which is weaker than their English, not that they're having any trouble at school, nor did their teachers realize that we consider their German to be "weak"...), and we're fairly confident that a lot of stuff that's happening some places is NOT happening there.
I don't know if that really clarified anything? We find it all confusing enough ourselves. My husband has been on the phone all morning trying to find out whether we may/have to/may not stay registered here while in the U.S. for six months, and what that would mean for each individual member of the family (one German-only wage-earner, one American-only dependent wife, and four German/American dependent children) with regards to health insurance, tax benefits, etc. etc. That's not even starting to talk about what we would do practically with all our STUFF. We looked at a storage facility a couple of months ago, and it would be cheaper to keep this apartment and keep paying the mortgage!! So, decisions, decisions...
"Putting pressure on us" isn't quite strong enough--at the end of March, we received two fines and were told that if our daughter wasn't in school within two weeks, she would be escorted there by the police, so a bit more than "pressure".... (The fines, incidentally, were taken back in May because they realized that they had done everything illegally up until that point.) I now have all the updates I'd sent to lots of people (including this list) posted at www.homeschoolblogger.com/sheilalange/ , so more details are available there. :-)
But why we're still here? No, we haven't been prevented from leaving the country (although that HAS happened to some other families), but leaving isn't necessarily all that straightforward. With our western materialistic way of thinking, we did think having a place to live and a reliable income were important enough to not just pack up without planning anything... In May we actually did make the decision to move to Belgium, and my husband would commute to work in Germany (about an hour and a half one way to his part-time bank job, and he's all over the state for the mission work, so that wouldn't change), at least for awhile. In order to keep the authorities off of our backs, we registered the children in school (to start at the end of August), and just in case they actually WOULD have to attend for a few weeks, we registered them in a different school than the one with which we'd been fighting for nearly two years. Our intention was to start looking for a home in Belgium the next week, wait at least until our baby was born (due July 24th, and actually born that day, too!), and move in August. We hadn't worked out the details of what to do with our apartment here yet, as most of it still belongs to the bank, so if we sell it before we've paid back the loan, we have to pay a huge penalty fee. We did plan to keep it at least until January 1, 2006, to get at least the sixth year of the eight years subsidizing we get from the state for building a new home and having four children, but one way or another, it will be a huge financial loss when we leave.
But...when we got home from the school registration, my husband drove over to check on his father, who hadn't answered the phone for a few days and had been suffering from depression for the last 12 years, and had just been released from 10 weeks in the psychiatric ward of the hospital after an attempted suicide in March. It turned out that he had tried again a few days earlier and succeeded. So although we did drive to Belgium the next week to look at half a dozen houses, all plans for moving were put on hold, because we now had my father-in-law's self-owned apartment to sort out and put on the market. (We finished September 1st--it's now for sale, and we pray it sells quickly and we don't have to deal with it anymore.)
In the next weeks, concentrating on anything at all was somewhat difficult, to say the least, but my husband remarked that without his father to care for, we really don't have to stay close or even in Europe--we could go anywhere in the world. And an inheritance would be coming to us once his father's estate was settled, also opening up more possibilities. Then we remembered a long-time dream of doing a Discipleship Training School with Youth With a Mission, and he started googling. We ended up applying (in the middle of July) for a family-oriented DTS in Montana, USA, which starts at the end of March 2006. (Spilling the beans here: we got an e-mail this morning that we've been accepted!)
So one answer as to why we're still here could be simply "financial security"--we don't want to leave unless we know we'll have a place to live and a way to pay for it, and moving will also incure a large financial loss no matter what. But we've also been praying about it all constantly, and have felt God's guidance in every decision we've made so far. We still don't know what's going to happen next. We'll probably go the DTS, and we do really want to, but the mission work my husband does here has been growing recently (after shrinking in the last year, another reason we thought now might be the time to leave), so we're still talking about Belgium. Or maybe the DTS (five months), then come back and move to Belgium. We don't know. In the meantime, yes, the children are in school. Academically it's almost a 100% waste of time, but it's good for their German (which is weaker than their English, not that they're having any trouble at school, nor did their teachers realize that we consider their German to be "weak"...), and we're fairly confident that a lot of stuff that's happening some places is NOT happening there.
I don't know if that really clarified anything? We find it all confusing enough ourselves. My husband has been on the phone all morning trying to find out whether we may/have to/may not stay registered here while in the U.S. for six months, and what that would mean for each individual member of the family (one German-only wage-earner, one American-only dependent wife, and four German/American dependent children) with regards to health insurance, tax benefits, etc. etc. That's not even starting to talk about what we would do practically with all our STUFF. We looked at a storage facility a couple of months ago, and it would be cheaper to keep this apartment and keep paying the mortgage!! So, decisions, decisions...
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