Dan Prescher author for The Huffington Post published this interesting article on April 2016 about the exciting idea and the challenge of moving to another country.
As exciting and adventurous as the idea of moving abroad can be, it sometimes packs a little zing of anxiety with it. It’s the anxiety you feel when you wonder how safe you’ll be in a foreign country.
It’s a perfectly natural feeling. Safety — for ourselves and our loved ones — is one of our most basic needs. None of the other benefits of living abroad mean much to us if we don’t think we’ll be safe in our new home.
Unfortunately, much of how we feel about the safety of places around the world comes from news coverage … and mainstream news rarely covers the good stuff. “If it bleeds, it leads” has been the golden rule of TV and newspaper journalism since TVs and newspapers have been around.
Downtown San Miguel
And if news coverage — or stories on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites — are what you go by to judge how safe a country is, there wouldn’t be many places you’d choose to live. Bad things happen everywhere. And it’s now only a matter of seconds before they are reported or shown in graphic detail on any Internet-connected computer, smartphone, or tablet around the world.
It would be enough to keep you from leaving your home country … if your home country wasn’t one of the places where so many of these awful things you see on the news actually happen.
What’s a safety-conscious person to do?
Based on my own personal experience, here are a few things to keep in mind.
First, if you’re wondering about any of the places we cover as potential expat destinations, know that we wouldn’t recommend these places if they were dangerous.
