Bidding on our next post!

Just got back from R&R last night. I have so much to blog about- M's birthday party from before we left and of course our wonderful visits with family and friends. For now, though, I want to blog about something of interest to many: the bid list for our next assignment!

The summer bid list came out 2 days after we arrived in Oregon, which means I have to beg forgiveness from my husband's family for basically disappearing into the computer for most of our visit. Yes, it seems as though we just arrived at post, but we've been here 10 months tomorrow and we bid approximately one year before arriving at our next post.

We can only bid on jobs that match our timing. Each job has an identified arrival date, with some jobs requiring bidders who already know the language and others including time for language training. We are eligible to leave post in August 2013, and most languages start training in Sept. 2013, which works well for us. However, if a job starts in Sept. 2013 and requires Russian language, I can't bid on it since I don't speak Russian.

The first thing we noticed right away is that almost none of the Spanish-speaking countries match my timing. Only about 10 jobs do, and they are not places we would love to go. I had been having an internal debate for months, wondering if we should try to stay in a Spanish-speaking country for the sake of my kids, who are speaking beautiful Spanish right now. One of my goals as a parent is to ensure that my kids speak at least one other language fluently. If we went to another Spanish-speaking country, they could go to a Spanish-only school and might have a chance of holding onto their language after we left (they would be 7 and 9 when we left post #2).

The bid list mostly resolved that debate for me. I am told that it's better for my career to work in a new region of the world and learn a new language. It's possible that we will still be assigned to one of the Spanish-speaking countries on my list, but now we are hoping we'll go to a new part of the world. We'll return to WHA (Western Hemisphere Affairs) for a later assignment.

I think the list is pretty awesome. However, we will bid in the second cycle, or tranche, as it's called. People serving at more difficult posts (20% hardship differential and above) will bid first, their posts will be assigned and removed from the list, and then those of us with 0-15% hardship differential (Santo Domingo is 15%) will be able to bid on what's left.

We don't mind hardship- in fact, a lot of our favorite posts have 15-25% hardship differential. We aren't looking to go to Western Europe. We are hoping for EAP (East Asia and the Pacific) or SCA (South and Central Asia), with a few random posts in other parts of the world. We would like to go to FSI for a while, since I like learning languages and most importantly, my parents live in the area.

However, we don't know what that final list will look like. I won't know until early July what we can bid on, and then will probably get my assignment in mid-July. So much time to wait!! Wish us luck.