#entry 2

Are you ready for a change?

It was a quarter to two of one Tuesday in August. And I said to him on the phone: - You have fifteen minutes before my meeting starts. He asked me to go to a private place to hear what he had to say. I went outside the building, down the stairs (the same ones that I had fallen down some months ago – but this is another story) and, with the sea in front of me I waited for the news.

- It is probable that until the end of the year we will have to move to Houston. But, don’t tell anyone right now.

I can’t remember what was my reaction in the exact moment that I heard him. But I can recall what I thought some minutes after: my book. I was performing my dream to have a book and I wouldn’t be in Brazil to gather the credits that would come with it.

I went back to the office for the meeting. Don’t ask me what my boss and my workmates were talking in that moment, because I couldn’t even heard them. In my mind I had so many thoughts about this big change that only my body was in that meeting. We had to wait several weeks for the certainty. And it was terrible because I couldn’t tell anybody, even to my family.

I left my job, that I loved, in November, forty days before leaving Rio de Janeiro to spend some days with my family and, almost, three months after that phone call.

This is not the big change in my life. Actually, this is the third time that I left my job and move to another city because of my family. But it is the first time that I change the country. And I will be very sincere, I thought It would be worse, especially for the language. But now I am here and I don’t feel myself as an immigrant or “like a fish out of the water”, as we use to say in Brazil. I think we were lucky to have been transferred to Houston. The proximity with Mexico and by the quantity of oil and gas companies that have here, it is a city that is used to living together with people from all of the world. Sometimes, at the supermarket I can hear any kind of language except English, and I feel good for that because I think: It is not just me that is far from home.

To finish this long story, I can say that I overcame the fear of not understanding and not to be understood by other people, and from the moment that I realized that, the change became easy. Of course, I still have so much to learn about English. And, see my daughter completely adapted to the city and the food and the weather makes me feel more comfortable with all this change.  So, I can say I am ready for a change. I know that sometimes it won’t be easy, but, for sure, it is possible live a change in a good way.