(Photo: Justin Hoenke near Mount Kaukau near Wellington, New Zealand)
It is my immense pleasure to welcome back Justin to the blog! In this post he is going to walk us through what it is like to be a U.S. librarian in New Zealand.
This past October I made one of the biggest leaps of my life: my family and I moved all the way from the middle of Pennsylvania in the USA to Wellington, New Zealand for a library job. I’m here today to talk a little bit about that process, what we went through, how we got here, and now 6 months in how we’ve all adjusted to life, libraries, and more.
Up until my mid 30’s I thought that I had super powers of some sort. Everything that came at me was something that I could handle, process, and incorporate into my life. Things that entered my life had their period of adjustment and then quickly they became part of the daily routines that I had. But as time came at me things changed. I slowed down a bit. I turned away from the rat race of daily life and work. I got less involved in completely changing the world and instead focused on what I could work on and solve. This whole paragraph will make sense later on in this piece, but I wanted to plunk it down here now to set the tone. Consider the tone set.
It was an easy decision to move from the middle of Pennsylvania in the USA to one of the biggest cities in New Zealand. New Zealand has long held a special place in my heart. I visited this great country and got to interact with its libraries scene back in 2015, when I was lucky to be asked to be a keynote speaker for the LIANZA conference (https://lianza.org.nz) in Wellington, NZ. When I was here during that time I felt nothing but positivity, love, and the personal and professional growth I was seeking. Not only did I find those things but I saw a place where my family could live happily and grow. There was (and still is) so much to do, see, and explore in this country.
The interview and application process wasn’t all that different from what librarians can expect in the USA. I took part in a few over the internet meetings which required some time zone difference juggling on my part. That was probably the most confusing bit. I kept in touch with the interview panel through email the whole time through. And then, just kind of like magic after a few months I was invited to accept the job. Since my family had long been talking about this we had already known what our answer would be (spoiler alert we said yes but you already knew that from the beginning on this post) and we had already investigated what we would need to do to get here.
Here’s a short list of what we personally needed to accomplish to make this a reality:
- Apply for and get the approval to get a work visa. Luckily my employer was on the list of accredited employers and that helped with the process. There was a lot of paperwork, background checking, doctors appointments, and much more that I’ve already forgotten about, but I will say this: applying for a visa to move to and work in a different country was basically like taking on a part time job on top of a full time job.
- Sell our home and most of our belongings. To do this, we had an auction for the home and the belongings. As I write this, we are still working on selling our home but all of our belongings have moved on to new owners.
- Organize our belongings to be delivered to New Zealand. This was huge and it cost over $7000 USD. On the last day we spent in Pennsylvania we loaded up a shipping container with the help of our friends and away it went on a 3 month journey across the sea. We cut out a lot of extra stuff from our lives, leaving only the very necessary things that a family of 4 could need and a few extra special things that we could not do without.
- Prepare the travel plans: for us that meant going to Maine to be with family right before we left the USA and then leaving from there on the very long multi-day process of getting to New Zealand.
- Setting up a temporary living situation; we rented an AirBnB for the first month or so that we were here. It was so helpful to have this temporary home to get us adjusted to life in a new country. Sure, it cost us a lot more than renting but it gave us the home we needed to have while we searched for a more permanent place to rent.
Now that I’ve given you all of that stuff I can finally now talk about what it means to be a librarian moving countries and working in a different culture. Long story short? Despite there being thousands of miles between the USA and NZ, there are a lot of common threads. There’s never enough staff to do all of the things that we want to do. There’s always budget issues. There’s always staff communication that needs to be worked through. There’s a lot of planning for things that may never happen. I think that’s just the state of libraries at the moment: we’re working on how to move ahead in this new world with the tools we’ve been given. At the same time we are imagining a world with more tools and seeing how we can get there. So there’s a common theme running through all of our libraries and it is that we are all trying to get to where we need to be.
As I adjusted to day to day life and to working for a bigger library over the past 6 months I got to fully understand that I did not have super powers anymore and that I was just a normal, average person like everyone else. I have limits on what I can do and who I can be. I can’t solve everything but I can always give it a shot. I don’t have the answer to every question. And I sure don’t have the energy that I used to have. Learning all about a new country on top of moving the lives of 4 individuals to a new country, starting a bigger management role in libraries, and then finally overseeing the opening of a new library branch over the past 6 months has reinforced the idea to me that I am a human being who has limits and a finite amount of energy. All of this sounds mighty depressing and defeated as I read what I have written, but let me be honest with you: I feel like I have been reenergized in a completely different way. I never thought that I’d feel like this, but my current career path has taught me just how important it is to take care of myself, to not care about libraries all that much, and to focus more on the people and the things outside of library work that make me smile. It only took a new country, 9,000 or so miles of travel, and a whole lot of library and work stuff to realize that. I don’t have super powers. I’m Justin Average Person.
You can read more about opening a new library branch during all of this here: https://justinthelibrarian.com/2019/12/18/waitohi-a-community-hub/
You can read about my library journey so far here: https://justinthelibrarian.com/2019/12/03/the-public-library-journey-so-far/