Foreign Service Reading List
The Expert Expat: Your Guide to Successful Relocation Abroad
By Patricia Linderman and Melissa Hess
Living and working in another country can be one of the most exciting and enriching experiences of your life -- but also one of the most challenging.
Fortunately, this book is here to help. The authors -- who have lived abroad for a total of more than 31 years, in twelve different countries -- have distilled their own experiences and those of many others around the world into a comprehensive, step-by-step guidebook, packed with practical suggestions and real-life examples.
The Expert Expat: Your Guide to Successful Relocation Abroad will help you:
- get organized quickly and find the support you need;
- pack and move without unnecessary stress;
- adjust more easily to a new culture;
- maximize your success in learning the local language;
- help children and teenagers adjust and thrive overseas;
- recognize and overcome "transition shock";
- identify employment and other opportunities for accompanying spouses;
- confidently face security and health issues abroad;
- avoid separating from beloved pets;
- keep your marriage and family relationships strong;
- minimize the surprising difficulties of the "reentry" move, and much more.
The new and expanded second edition, published in 2007, covers up-to-date topics such as the concerns of accompanying male spouses, current security and health issues, and working via Internet where local job prospects are limited or nonexistent.
I wish that The Expert Expat had been available when we first joined the U.S. Foreign Service some 30 years ago. This is not yet another dispassionate and footnoted treatise on moving and cultural adaptation. Rather, The Expert Expat is brimming with wise, compassionate and usable advice from its sensitive and perceptive co-authors. Because the two authors have either lived or are living this life, their comments all have the ring of authenticity. Anyone who is about to embark upon an expatriate existence should read this book before doing so. His or her capacity to adjust and to thrive will be all the more enhanced for having done so.
Mette Beecroft, President Emerita, AAFSW
Melissa Hess, a former managing editor of this website, currently works for the U.S. State Department’s School of Leadership and Management. She is also a Registered Nurse, English professor, and Foreign Service spouse who has served with her husband in France, Nigeria, Russia, Algeria, Egypt and Ukraine.
Patricia Linderman is Editor in Chief of Tales from a Small Planet, www.talesmag.com , as well as a freelance writer, editor and translator. With her FSO husband and two sons, she has been posted in Trinidad, Chile, Cuba, Germany and Ecuador.
More information about The Expert Expat can be found at the authors' website, http://www.expatguide.info.