It looks like the SF teaching week in Pakistan is happening, March 6-10 2023. It’ll either be in Lahore or Islamabad; details to come as they get finalized. Really excited to be working with Pakistani SF writers; I think it’s going to be an amazing experience!
(ICFA will be March 15-18 in 2023, so I’m tentatively still planning to do ICFA as well. If I don’t fall down.)
I checked with my department before confirming, to make sure I was allowed to do this, and my chair said it was okay; they also offer a little flexibility with asynchronous / online teaching, such that I can cover a few days with asynchronous without trouble. But that’s going to use up my time for that kind of thing, which means I don’t think I’ll be able to extend the trip at all, to do extra sight-seeing in Karachi, etc.
My only real regret is that I don’t think the timing will work out for me to add a few days in Sri Lanka, which feels sort of silly, to fly to that part of the world and not swing by and see my friends there!
But I’m still really hoping to take Kevin and the kids to Sri Lanka for a longer visit in the next year, hopefully once the country has had the chance to recover a bit from the fuel shortages and economic challenges of the last year. We will spend lots of tourist money, which will hopefully help! I want to give Anand a chance to pet elephants, and snuggle a snake, like Kavi did.
The only challenge there is that Kavi is tentatively hoping to work at the Park District as a camp counsellor next summer; if she does that, we’ll only have five days between the end of Anand’s school and the start of her camp work, which really isn’t long enough to visit Sri Lanka — I think 10 days is pretty much a minimum, given travel time / recovery. Our schedules are suddenly getting a lot less flexible!
We could pull Anand out five days early (which is a lot, and more than we’d normally do), but also Kavi would probably be exhausted starting her new job, which doesn’t seem ideal either.
I think maybe we should try to plan for going at Christmas 2023? If we can get the school calendars to line up, we might have the most flexibility then. Kavi might also change her mind about working next summer, esp. if she finds a summer abroad program at OPRF that she wants to do instead. Well, we’ll see.
We’re very lucky that we can be flexible here — we don’t need her to work full-time next summer to help save for college, which some of her friends are already doing. Feeling grateful for that economic privilege. Wish we had free college for everyone here. Sigh.