The Big Decision

Welcome to our Blog! When we first made the Big Decision to move to Africa everyone I talked to said... "You should start a blog!" My first thoughts were, "Yeah that sounds great, but I am not a writer, and what on earth would I write about?" After I thought about it for a bit, I realized this may be the best way to keep our family and friends up to date on the happenings in the Hartz household. So let me start out by saying this, I AM NOT A WRITER!!! I write like I talk, I love run on sentences, misspelled words, inappropriate capitalization's, and using these three dots ... Now, if you can get past my horrible writing then I hope you will enjoy reading about our lifestyle. I can't guarantee that I will always have the most interesting things to talk about. Once we have been there for several months posts may become far and few, but I will try my best to keep this up to date and to find neat things to say. With all this being said, I feel like I can put out my first post, so here it goes.

Chase has been talking about moving since we moved to Kansas City. Not because we want to move, WE LOVE KC, but because there is ALWAYS a project in some city. He would come home from work  and typically start the conversation like this, "How do you feel about... (insert any place here, some examples include Dubai, Melbourne, Canada, California, and North Carolina). Almost every time he put this out there my reply was the same "If this is something you really want or you are passionate about we will discuss". Typically, these conversation never really led anywhere. After years of this game I finally started saying "When you have an actual offer, we can discuss". Then last year he came home  and threw out South Africa and like always I blew it off as another non-serious proposition. Well, this May the actual "offer"(a 2 year contract on a construction site) came and it was for of course, South Africa, one of the furthest away places we have ever discussed. So, we had to make this BIG DECISION. But, first we did our RESEARCH  

South Africa shown in Yellow with Pretoria pointed out

City view of Pretoria

Chase was offered a position as a Safety Manager on a power plant construction site just outside of Pretoria. Pretoria is one of the countries three capitals and is about an hour outside of Johannesburg. It's a large bustling city with many of the same amenities you would find here in the states. They have an American school for the kids and several safe gated neighborhoods for us to choose housing. Black & Veatch sent us a South African Primer, which I really think was just to scare the crap out of me, but it over all had great information about the city and South Africa in general. Chase is under the opinion that I need to know all the horrible situations that could arise, so I don't think he has held anything back from me either. There is a lot more violent crime in the country over all mainly due to the imbalance in money and power.  To put it simply people are either rich or poor and there is very little middle ground, which in general causes a lot of tension. But, if you use common sense when you are out and about you really don't have much to worry about. The families from the States that are there now, have nothing but wonderful things to say about living there and so far no one has experienced any major crime issues.  The wives over there have been very helpful in giving me an inside scoop on what it will be like to be stay at home mom there and have already given me great tips for packing and getting the kids set up in preschools.

Pretoria is also known as the Jacaranda City, due to these beautiful purple trees. Jacaranda Trees

 Now, for those of you who know us, we have NEVER lived more than a couple of hours away from family, so we were not only considering how this would affect us, and our two kids, but everyone around us as well. Thankfully, we have an AMAZING support system and though everyone knows it will be hard they still support us and realize that sometimes offers are too good to pass up. So, after researching, and discussing it over and over again we said, "Let's do it!" I shed plenty of tears worrying about weather or not this was the right decision, and stressed over how this would affect the children and our family, but most of my concerns are really just out of the fear of change in general and the fact that we really can't be certain until we are there.

So here we are 1 month away from departing for this big move. We are making all the plans, deciding on what to take and what stays, and more than anything we are excited.  I am excited about how close our family will grow, all the new people we will meet, and for all the new experiences we get to have together. So now we say bring on the BIG MOVE!

Until next time, Sending love,
Martha and Family