The overseas contract

Most often, life as an expat means you live either way above your means, or way below them. My scruffy face has been on both sides of this coin – mainly the latter. Slumming as a young intellectual in the backwoods of Asia, I didn’t care that most of my friends at home were moving their way up the socio-economic ladder. I busied myself with exciting, non-remunerated tasks like learning a tonal language and spending late nights cavorting with dangerous people from the wrong side of town.

I was happy with that, and figured I could make money… whenever.

That moment came exactly three years ago, when I found out I was going to be a father. Being an expat now meant getting an overseas contract from a government or a multilateral agency. The overseas contract, if you don’t know, is the holy grail of overpaid, underworked extravagance.

Your salary? Bank it – you’ll be dining off your living allowance. Housing? Covered. Insurance? Covered. Business class travel? Check that shit off the list too.

Get yourself a big old house with a maid and a gardener, maybe even a driver if you’re lucky. Sunday afternoons by the pool, gin and tonics to keep you cool. Hey, they don’t call it imperialism for nothing.

Swell timing saw this contract come my way exactly six months before junior arrived. The next two years went by quick though, and when my wife got some low-paid but career-building work in Europe, we packed up the bags and off we went.

No overseas contract, however. Wow, Europe sure is pricy without a living allowance. I work at a bank, for fuck’s sakes, and we still come to the end of the month with a flatline for a bank balance. We live in a housing project, and I never leave home without my supermarket bonus card.

The other day I stopped to buy some veggies and almost had a coronary at the price of greens in this part of the world. I chose the cheapest option I could find – brussel sprouts.

I then went home to discover my wife had already been shopping, at a different supermarket. She had bought some veggies as well.

That’s right – brussel sprouts.

So now we had two big bags of brussel sprouts to chew through over the next week. After about the third day of eating the bitter little fuckers, it really started to sink in how far we’ve fallen.