Week 10 - friends repatriating

I’ve known for a while that the family of J’s best friend here would be repatriating, probably at Christmas, but had been asked not to tell J until the children of the family concerned knew themselves. They’ve now been told. I’ve been dreading telling J : he enjoys his friendship with the boy so much, and it’s a welcome relief for him when he’s a bit wiped out by the school-all-in-German thing. But tell him I do, and he’s very upset but surprisingly sensible about it – he knows from our own experience that you have to go where the parents’ work is. It’s sad for him though, and one of the drawbacks of the “international experience” – you might make a brilliant friendship, only for that person to have to move on very soon afterwards. And one of the reasons I felt that for us, likely to be here for a while (I hope) it would be good for the children to have the opportunity to go to school and make friends within a less transient community. C’est la vie, but that doesn’t make it any easier.