The walls of the buildings are colorful, the grass is a rich green, and the playground looks out onto the moody ocean and a street lined with coconut palms. The international school looks pleasant enough from the outside, but is ultimately an unknown. Just one more unknown in the mountain of unknowns looming in our children’s educational future.

Every time we walk or drive past that school my brain hurts. I love watching Ray develop physically and mentally as she turns into a little girl, but the persistent passage of time brings us closer and closer to her first day of school. What will that day look like? Do we homeschool? Do we send her to the international school? Do we move to Ukarumpa, the SIL center in the highlands, where she can attend a school full of other missionary kids? Do we try to work out some sort of one-room school with other PBT parents? And my head hurts!

This isn’t a problem isolated to expat parents of expat kids. In fact, if I wasn’t the natural worrier that I am, we could procrastinate this headache for several more years. Many stateside parents have to make schooling decisions when their children are still being knit together in the womb. So I’m grateful that we aren’t forced by society to frantically search for the right preschool and the right district before I even know my child, but I’m not very excited about any of our prospects and dreading the day we have to make a decision. When I see Ray’s ringlet curls bouncing off her ears, then her shoulders, then her back, I have a marred excitement. She’s growing so beautiful and strong… but she’s growing. Stop doing that! Homeschooling is something I never wanted to do. I have a degree in secondary education, but a degree certainly doesn’t make a person. When teaching days were good, I loved it. But it took a lot for those days to be good and I was not patient. Have I grown over the past decade and developed more patience? I certainly hope so, but I don’t want to test that out on my children and their division problems.

The international school is rumored to be quite excellent right now. Right now. In PNG, expertise comes and goes. The hospital has exciting (and usually imported) flavors of the month that never stick around too long, but are delicious while they last. This month’s flavor will be an anesthesiologist while next month’s flavor will be a neurosurgeon. Or perhaps there won’t be a flavor for one or two or ten months. One never knows. It’s always best to try and plan your medical emergencies around the flavor of the month. The international school works the same way. The level of excellence is dependent on the leadership, and that leadership has a high turnover rate. This year the school may be of the highest quality, but next year under the new leadership? Not so much. Are we willing to risk that? Or will we send her there while the quality is high and then pull them out if/when the quality dips back down?

Going up to Ukarumpa would be exciting for me. We have family up there (not blood, but family all the same) and the weather is crisp and cool. The school is better than most US schools and the girls would be surrounded by loving teachers that would be part of their spiritual growth as well as their educational growth. Seems perfect, but it’s not. Our work is here and it just feels wrong to go up there. It’s possible this will change in the years between now and then, but we really don’t see how it could.

I think my favorite option is collaborating with other parents here in town. I can’t even begin to know what that would look like or how we would pull it off, but in my head it’s less lonely than homeschooling, more stable than the international school, and local.

I recognize that God doesn’t always call us to places or situations that we feel comfortable in. Educating and socializing our children is one of those “situations” for me. It’s yet another area of our lives, highlighted by living here and being isolated from the girls’ passport country, God is asking me to leave to Him. To wait and trust that He does have a plan for this. While contemplating all of our flawed choices, my task is to find that happy balance between doing nothing expecting God to do everything and doing everything expecting God to forget this detail. That has never been an easy balance for me to achieve.