The Logistics

The logistics of moving a family of five halfway around the world are daunting, to say the least.  It requires months of lists and questions.  First, we worked on finding me a job, as I am the "weak link" of the two of us. David is an ID doctor with interest in HIV and TB coinfection, and I am a pediatrician, who has seen pediatric HIV twice.  Miraculously, I have been offered a position with the Texas Children's Hospital Pediatric Global Health Service Corps (say that ten times fast). Now, we are trying to find Dave work in Lilongwe. 
Financially, there are so many open questions to be answered that it is exremely frustrating trying to plan.  Will he find a job?  Will it be paid?  If so, how much?  What will our taxes be?  Will we be taxed at our current tax rate of nearly 40%?  How much does it cost to rent a house?  How much does it cost to send children to school (X three)?  How much does it cost to buy a car?  We have been told we may need 2!  How much does it cost to fly a family of five to Linlongwe, Malawi? (Answer to that one: About $10,000)
That's enough to keep me up nights, and then there's food...we are vegetarians, and live on veggie burgers and vegetarian chicken products and tofu and soymilk.  My middle child is a whisp of a thing, and here she has almost unlimited choice.  What in the world am I going to feed her?  I worry she will disappear, or that I will be reduced to submitting to her pleas for candy, in a desperate effort to get calories in her.  When we lived in Belize I made reasonable Seitan, and we were fortunate enough to have met Gomier, a tall, Bob-Marley-channeling gentleman from St. Lucia.  I was able to keep my kids from starving, but we ate an embarassing amount of Ramen soup.  Perhaps Lilongwe will have some magical vegetarian restaurant, but endless Google searches and hours pouring through guidebooks have not left me hopeful.
I have thought about trying to make soymilk, but I do not know if there are soybeans in Lilongwe.  I have begun to think like a refugee, overcome by my maternal drive to feed my children well. I find myself buying two of each of the items that we use every day that I do not  imagine we can survive without (quinoa, tvp), and mentally calculating how many pounds of high-protein whole wheat bread flour I can stuff into my 5 ft long duffle bag. The trouble is, we only get two bags, each weighing no more than 50 lbs, before we begin paying to bring things with us.  I have to admit, this fact has helped protect me from the fugue state that usually overtakes me the moment I walk into Target.  We already have way too much.
The shots we should be OK on, as we were vaccinated before we brought Malawi home from Ethiopia last year.  She has asthma, which seems to improve only when she takes Singulair, which has a $50 copay in the US, and I imagine is unavailable in Lilonwe.  So I am thinking of asking a drug rep to bring me a year's worth, or else I will be forced to take samples from our closet each week until we leave...
School for the children worries me. My kids are all at Montessori, which believes in "following the child", and working things out at "the peace table", and the schoolwide Spiral Dance, where everyone holds hands outside.  In Malawi it appears that we have two choices for international schools. One is a conservative Christian school.  It is regimented,  has required biblical courses, and (I'm pretty sure) lacks the Spiral Dance.  I have a very strong belief in God, but I am not Christian.  I really don't want to be the religious outcast in my own home, and I can't think of a more opposite approach to teaching from where he is now.   The second follows the Bristish curriculum (better, but definitely NOT Montessori), and is $10,000 per kid per year.  That is approximately my salary for the upcoming year. So we have considered homeschooling, but this is not realistic, as both of us will likely work full-time and more.
Another concern.  Here, I am part-time, and am available to tuck my kids into bed each night and bake chocolate-chip cookies and play Moose in the House (great game).  There I know I will feel compelled to work as much as possible, in order to do as much as I can.  And so I obsess that my children will suffer for our absence, alone in a  new and strange country.
So many worries, so little time...