Leaving children, parents, job, home and country to settle in Belgrade, Serbia has been challenging. My husband, Lewis Hawke, took up the role of Senior Financial Management Specialist for Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania a year ago. We left Canberra, Australia, dropped off one child to study in Perth, Australia and the other in Boston, USA and came to settle in the city centre of Belgrade. Lewis travels a lot and some days in our apartment were very quiet at first as I spoke no Serbian, had met only a handful of people and was not able to find a job. This last aspect was the most confronting and one year on I still have not found paid employment. However I have learned some valuable life lessons.

Looking over this past first year, I have enjoyed:

traveling with Lewis and experiencing at first hand some of the World Bank projects in the region. A couple of weeks ago I was able to visit some schools in rural Macedonia and see the positive impact of World Bank grants. This latest trip has also given me ideas for some childrens’ English books that I am hoping to write in the coming months with a distinctive Balkans’ flavour;

sipping coffee in the many Belgrade cafes where I can sit for hours and enjoy the coffee, people-watching and chat;

Skyping which allows me to keep in close contact with my children even to the point of sitting at the dining table eating dinner while my son eats breakfast and my daughter, lunch.

There have been some extreme frustrations also such as working out the appropriate police station to register visitors as soon as they arrive in Belgrade. Basic information would have been helpful to begin with like knowing that you can’t seal your envelope before the postal office has examined it inside and knowing the Cyrillic sign to look for so that you queue correctly. One morning I waited patiently in line for an hour at a small post office only to find that I was in the queue to collect pensions and had to start again. I also know now that I should have asked a Serbian speaker to sign us up for the household services we needed when we first arrived as I found that many companies ignored our applications as it was just too difficult to deal with English speakers.

I realize that I could have made this past year easier if I had engaged more directly with members of the WBFN. I expect that there are some of you who were posted to Serbia in past years and others who were born there. I could have sought your advice. I’m sure that all the hurdles I experienced have been faced before by others in the World Bank. While on a week’s holiday in Washington I was able to chat to Rula, then current President and Anne, then President Elect of the WBFN, who were keen to provide more opportunities for those in Country Offices to connect and support each other. I am very excited by the online training courses now being offered and I hope that as many of us as possible take advantage of what is coming online and encourage more to be offered in the future. I’d also like to see a service akin to the DC Jobs Spouse-net for those of us outside Washington. I look forward to contributing wherever I can to any ventures seeking to improve connectivity across the World Bank community.

Carol Kiernan Belgrade, Serbia