discipline posted:

yes it is scary, but people do it all the time. here are simple steps to leaving your country of origin and relocate to a country in the developing world:

1. accept that life will be rough, that you will be behind your compatriot peers professionally, you will be worried about your next step. accept you will live in tough conditions. I slept on a mattress on the floor for like 6 months, had to go without running water & electricity sometimes. tom used to get electrocuted in the shower pretty regularly, his landlord also had a bad gas leak in the kitchen

2. look where your friends live around the world. if you know someone in another country, you can build off this relationship. when I first left I left because I knew a girl in my class, who I wasn't very close to, with whom I am still not close, who had lived abroad and got information from her, contacts

3. investigate a way to get cheap housing/food right off the bat. this can mean signing up for a volunteer scheme. usually these schemes will charge you for rent, but it's pretty cheap considering you don't know fuckall about the place you're going. this is also a good strategy because I basically begged for money to go volunteer abroad from strangers and they paid most of my way when I told them I was off to teach english to refugee kids. consider this an opportunity to learn about the country with training wheels on.

4. investigate visa restrictions. this is not something you want to worry about when you're there. if you need to get a visa, try and plan out the steps/costs before you go. it costs around $50 to get a six month multiple entry jordanian visa, and this was helpful in my situation because if I got booted from one country I could bounce back to another without much problem.

5. always have enough money saved or put aside to get you the fuck out of there in case of emergency

6. look into having travelers insurance. I never had this because medical care was really cheap where I was, but I can see the value in it. I knew a girl who busted her own kneecap and had to get flown back to france to get everything fixed

7. pack essentials like any prescription medicine you can get a hold of, things that may be useful. if you have insurance, tell your doctor you're going to leave the country for a long time and ask for some broad spectrum antibiotics like cipro or something. I also got a tetanus shot which I thought was rather silly at the time, but then I got 1.5 inches of rusty rebar in my foot one day and it was suddenly worth it. if you are locked into a relationship with any scheduled drugs, you should kiss these goodbye, wean yourself off them, etc. also pack anything you will miss while overseas. get a kindle, I had like 70 lbs of books I dragged around with me and it was totally silly.

8. when you arrive, if you don't have a volunteer position lined up, try and have enough money to stretch you a few months while you look for jobs teaching english. you can post this shit up on light posts if you like, but your best bet is getting in with an org that teaches english. this will probably pay you utter nonsense, but you can make relationships with students and then move into private tutoring. for instance, I know tom was getting paid like $7 an hour to teach english, but his students were paying like $25. so he cut deals with a lot of them to teach for like $15 per hour, they saved money and he made more, also made friends with people which is also helpful.

9. learn the language, you lazy piece of shit. learn enough to talk to clerks, taxi drivers, your neighbors, etc. they don't care if you speak poorly and you shouldn't either, as long as you're understood it doesn't matter.

10. make friends with locals, do not hang out too much with expats. it's fine to make expat friends, but don't get too used to it. acquainting yourself with locals will make it easier to learn the ropes of getting around and paying for stuff. they will also save your ass all the time if you make an embarrassing mistake or end up in jail. do you know good lawyers in your destination country? do you know good doctors? do you know good landlords? probably not. this is important, and locals can help you. they will also help you learn the language. also: people rip off foreigners from rich countries, even if you are not rich, they rightly assume your parents are (at least compared to them). they will rip you off on rent, on food, on fares, on basically everything. I was never an asshole who demanded to pay market prices on these things but it's gotta be a reasonable ripoff. I can afford to pay $300 for rent - but I also will pay rent on time and in a lot of countries tenants have major rights, also people squat a lot so there's a give and take in everything.

11. stay in touch with people back home. I had skype set up to send everything to my shitty 2002 cellphone and it was like $15 per month, not bad

12. have a contingency plan for everything before you actually get there. pick up a lonely planet guide. I never really used mine but it gave me a weird sense of security, also helped when I was at customs saying I was just a tourist

13. Oh, are you a baby who wants to live in a developed country besides your own? well I don't know much about that. I do know that visa restrictions for americans are easier than if you're from senegal but they're still basically impossible without a sponsor. you can live pretty easily as an undocumented person in europe, but it's hard to get a job like this, also even if you did find a job most countries want you to apply for a visa in your country of origin, which is a pain in the ass. besides why would you want to live in europe, not including all the outrageous public benefits you have, it's really expensive and hostile. I always hear it's easy to get a visa to live in australia, especially if you're white, but I don't know anything about this.

Step Zero: amass at least $5000, ideally $10000+

Skylark posted:

Skylark posted:

If it were up to capitalism you would have a really huge pocket with luggage wheels at the bottom that you lug along proprietary luggage railroad track at ten cents a yard to your job at the pocket filling station.

piss posted:

guidoanselmi posted:

i live in stlouis now, it's kinda like detroit/3rd world country. i wonder what the gini coefficient is of the 1 mile radius from my home

living on the outskirts of stl. crazy as hell driving through the city 1 block gated and nice the next block completely fucked and thats basically how it is the entire time. obviously except places like ladue where you drive through them and just feel shitty or something

wait, what's ladue like now? we lived in east saint louis when i was really young and then creve couer after that, and i went to ladue middle school until we moved to california meth country.