I moved my family to The Philippines despite not having a place to live or enough money to afford one.

We lived in my mother-in-law's house in the province, sent our son to the local rural school, and sat around all day with our cellular internet sticks, bikes, and farmland on the northern peninsula of a tiny little island wondering what to do with ourselves.

We technically owned the house because we paid to have it built a few years before but mom sort of wanted to live there too and I sort of didn't want her to since there were only two rooms for the four of us. But we'd never talked about how it would work out in real life so I think she was nonplussed by my odd American behavior. And soon she went back to their other house in the city, where she often spent time with the majority of her family who lived there.

Peace of mind. That's all I hoped to find. Fine, I won't have Sierra's to backpack and mountain bike but I'll be somewhere rural and peaceful and farming and I can be sustainable and it'll be great as long as global warming doesn't flood and/or fry us in the next dozen years. Nope, neighbors and other neighbors have loud sound systems and discos and kareoke starting at 6AM and often running all day and all night on the weekends.

Then there was the threat of robbery. Apparently we discovered, and we warned repeatedly, after we got there, that the only reason we weren't robbed was our neighbors/family members on two sides being home most of the time, watching and guarding our house. So noisy neighborhood we couldn't move from, even if we had the money.

Then I noticed my kid was not thriving at school. He'd put his head down and sleep during the Filipino part of the day rather than try to glean some understanding in the hope of one day learning the language. Sadly my wife neglected to ever teach him anything except dong and tulag na. I didn't even know wala when I got there.

Eventually I started to think I'd come up with a huge revelation: The beggar children weren't the only beggars. Everyone in the Philppines was a beggar towards me because they wanted what I had, to be a rich American, as all Americans are rich. They weren't staring at me out of curiosity, not because I Was like a minor celebrity, but because they were poor, I wasn't and they wanted in.

I was too poor to afford a car let alone a house. We relied on public transporttion and our bikes. We didn't buy a 'fridge so we at mostly street food for every meal. We didn't settle down and grow vegetables or buy a couple goats because I couldn't stand the noise and wanted to move.

Finally I convinced my wife to give up after her hand washing our clothes led to a midnight visit to the local clinic for a cortisone shot for an allergic reaction to the soap. We moved back to the city, found a hotel, and bought plane tickets back to the US. Three months after a year of preparation, purchasing things we thought we'd need, shipping things over, and selling most of our stuff including our car, and leaving behind a lot of that stuff, we returned to the US.

Luckily my wife was given her job back. We moved into an apartment. Three years later we bought a car. And we've been stuck here too. Not enough money for a house. No where to go, no friends, no resources, nothing.