It's always best to start off in the beginning.

In the last half of 2019, my dad introduced me to my now wife. Just to clarify, my wife is my step-moms youngest half-sister. We hit it off instantly. She is Filipina and I am an American. We talked from two to five hours every day for several months. At this time I was working full time at a great manufacturing plant, working on the assembly line. My life was really looking up. I knew I met a woman I wanted to grow old and share the rest of my life with, and had a great job. So I asked her to marry me, to my elation she said yes.

At this time we started to plan out the rest of our life together. We started looking at where we we going to live and provide for our family. At about the start of 2020, My company started a round of lay-offs, I was giving the option of being laid off or going to clean offices. This was obviously at the start of the pandemic before anyone knew a lot about it. The janitorial position was a $5/hr pay cut but I still had a job. In the end I happily took the janitorial position.

Now my dad and step-mom were working on selling their house and looking to retire in the Philippines. They were building their house over here and wrapping up everything they had to finish to make the big move. They were planning to move here at the end of 2020. During this time my wife and I we starting looking at coming her so I could meet her family and see my dad step-mom and step-sister get settled in.

On May 10th my wife and I were married. Shortly after we were married I was laid-off work due to the pandemic anyway. At this time I started to have problems with my depression. On that note I will say that both depression and anxiety run on both sides of my family, and I have dealt with both for going on 22 years now. I ended up gaining about 30-50lbs With that said my wife and I starting talking seriously about moving to the Philippines.

We were able to come to an agreement with her parents on a few fronts. First, we could stay in on of their extra rooms until we got on our feet. Secondly, since they had a piggery with 12 stalls we could use 10 of the stalls. The piggery roof was almost all destroyed and only covered 4 stalls. We happily agreed to fix the roof and clean out the rest of the stalls. We also were looking at opening up a small shop to help make ends meet.

I was personally not real excited about living with the in-laws, but only because I know that a good situation can go bad in cases like that. I was worried a little about running the piggery and it making enough to support us. I let myself be talked into it by my wife and in-laws. I was advised by a few family members, my brother and cousins, that I was making a huge mistake. I listened to what they had to say. I ended up not agreeing with them because of the reasons I was given. They reasons I was given were basically," Ohh it's a third world country" and "But it is half a world away".

Now, after evaluating our financial situation and weighing all the pros and cons, we decided to pull the trigger and move here. I started gathering all I the paperwork I would need for a resident visa. I made preparations for every evenuality I could think of and packed up and sent all my non essential property that I wanted to bring. I sold, gave away, or threw away everything else. I ended up with two suitcases, a carry-on, a backpack, and two 2 foot x 2 foot x 3 foot boxes.

Coming up next :

My ordeal with the airlines, immigration, quarantine and our first couple of months here.