Progress Report - Step Two

Step Two, you may recall, was Find A Job!

Here's is where it got weird. There's supposed to be this huge shortage of nurses in NZ, yet did anyone rush to get back to me when I applied?

Nope.

We want to settle in Wellington, so I concentrated my job search there. Answered some ads, sent off a general letter of enquiry to several facilities and kept my eyes open, checking the job sites regularly. From all of that, I got only one fairly quick reply and set a date for an interview (which was almost a month away due to the busy diaries of the two managers involved!). While waiting, I got a bit edgy so I contacted two agencies - one here in SA, and the other in NZ - Geneva Health. Within days, the local agency came back to me with two "fantastic opportunities" - their interpretation and mine of 'fantastic' were clearly not even on the same planet ... but Geneva, on the other hand, arranged a telephonic interview for me with a really great-sounding rest home in Karori, which is about 4 kms from Welly CBD. They phoned, we chatted, they said they were impressed with me, I was certainly impressed with them - then they offered me a managerial position at $10,000 pa more than the previous agency had offered. Woo hoo!! I said YES!

Now we're going to be getting my work visa organized and a student visa for Livi. OH, and in the mean time, a few of the places I wrote to initially have been writing back, wanting to organize interviews... but too late! Seems like NZ runs on Africa time too ....

Four weeks ago I took a Big Leap Of Faith - and booked our air tickets! We fly to Welly on 23rd January 2009. Now at least I'll have a job when we get there! Whew! :-)

Progress Report - Step One

This adventure started back in June when we decided to Do This Thing! Steps needed to make it happen were as follows:

1. Get registered as RN in New Zealand.
2. Find a job and get a work permit.
3. Go.

So I started the paper trail in mid-June - requested police clearance, requested three references, requested the SANC to send over verification and transcripts and contacted a few agencies to find out about getting a job as an RN. The police clearances took FOREVER as they kept losing things and sending them to me piecemeal, but eventually, by early September I had them all. The SANC also took FOREVER to process my request, and they too sent my docs to NZ in early September. Yay for that!

Then the NZNC wrote back (by snail mail nogal!) with a string of queries. One was their mistake - they thought my certified copied were photocopies of certified copies. Duh! Then they said the SANC had given them a wrong verification number - which they had! Took a week to sort that one out. Then they wanted a hard copy of my IELTS results - they had already verified them online but they wanted the Piece Of Paper! From next year, IELTS will be compulsory for all foreign nurses but they made it compulsory for SA nurses from August this year - and did not put that info on the website or the application forms. The bad news was that my IELTS results expired about three days before their letter requesting it arrived in my mail box. The good news was that I wrote them a two page email explaining why I thought they should waive the requirement - and they agreed to do so! Yay again. To rewrite the IELTS exam would have meant a two-month delay and would have cost me almost R2000.00.

Finally, I got a letter dated 9th October from the NZNC telling me my registration has been approved.

Double YAY! Step One is now complete. I've started on Step Two ...

Beginnings

Mark Twain once said:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the things you did. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover!"

So we three - a single mom and her two teens - are going to do just that. We're leaving the Rainbow Nation behind and heading for the Land of the Long, White Cloud. Why? It's a long story - see next post, probably - but here's one very good reason to start with! :-))

We're all mad about movies. We love the Lord of the Rings. And Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro are going to be making The Hobbit there over the next two to three years! Isn't that a good enough reason to start with? (Yeah, of course it's not the main one, but it works for us!)