Tag: Featured
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There’s a kind of wealth most people never talk about. Not money. Not investments. Not even a passport. Just a small plastic card — a second residency. It doesn’t look like much. It sits quietly in your wallet, tucked behind your driver’s license. You don’t flash it around. No one ever asks about it. But…
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In the last few years, more North American families have come to us looking for at least a Plan B location, if not a complete Plan A. What they tell me is consistent: the city feels different, the school board keeps changing what’s “normal,” the communities they’re part of become less aligned with what they…
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Hey — scrum time! Instead of user stories and bug fixes, we’re going to plan for your life, for the next 30-40 years…because how often do you do that? We’ll keep it short and focused: Yesterday: Where you’re at. Blockers: What’s in your way. Next Sprint: What to build next. Today: What you can do…
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My parents scheduled an appointment on a Tuesday. A week later, they walked into the consulate. Two weeks after that, they had everything they needed. Total cost: the price of gas to the consulate. For most families, the hardest part of international planning isn’t the paperwork—it’s believing it can actually be this simple. Why Mexico?…
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A Ukrainian man living in Germany for ten years goes to renew his passport. The embassy refuses. His choice: return to fight in a war, or become undocumented in the only country he calls home. When the war in Ukraine broke out, the government began drafting men to fight. What shocked the world was how…
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I joined the Marine Corps in 2002. Not by accident, and not for lack of conviction. I joined because I believed in it — because the idea of standing for something larger than myself, of courage, of doing my part, felt obvious. I was eighteen, and the world was simple. The war cycle happened to…
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Two Loyalties, One Lie We’ve been taught, from the time we’re children, to conflate two very different kinds of loyalty. The first is loyalty to the people who matter most in our lives — our families, our children, the communities we choose. The second is loyalty to a geographic location, to borders drawn on maps,…
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The System That Taught Me Won’t Teach My Kids I grew up in the public school system in a small Canadian town. It wasn’t great, but there were good lessons being taught. I excelled in math and engineering disciplines — the kind of skills that got rewarded in the 90s and early 2000s. I could…
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I used to think I could explain it — why giving birth abroad mattered, why it was worth the risk, the distance, the uncertainty. I thought if I just laid out the facts clearly enough, she’d see what I saw: the opportunity, the security, the freedom of choice. But facts alone don’t move us toward…
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My son doesn’t know he’s lucky. He just knows that in Brazil, soccer meant running barefoot through neighborhood parks every evening, the whole community cheering from the sidelines. He knows Festa Junina means dancing in a straw hat while bonfires flicker and the air smells like sweet cake and smoke. And this weekend, like so…
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I still remember the moment each of us was handed our permanent residency cards in Panama. My spouse first, then me, then each of our children. Four cards. Four keys to a door that can never be locked. Standing in that office, it hit me: our kids will always have somewhere to go. No matter…