Texas families go to Lisbon for safer schools – 06/18/2022 – World
When Fisher-Muñoz’s daughter started learning Turtle, she started doing a public simulation in Lisbon. She was faced with stares of amazement and not informed that in Lisbon this does.
“I think kids had PTSD just from doing my drills,” says Kindergarten. She and her two teenage children, coming from the month of July, are going to the neighborhood of Austin, a city in Texas.
Although Austin is a very liberal city, in Texas where the Republicans took the free gun policy to the extreme, Fisher-Muñoz looked to Lisbon for an escape from the United States and a high-quality, but more accessible, political economic life. They have joined the growing number of Americans who equate themselves to Portugal for similar similarities.
The whole family speaks Spanish — her husband, Fernando, is Chilean — so it would be natural for them to move to Spain. But the process of getting a visa to Portugal was easier, and “everything in Portugal is amazing,” says Fisher-Muñoz. They came to Lisbon on D7 visas — for retired people and remote workers who do not need to look for a job in Portugal and want a residence permit.
Fisher-Muñoz’s daughter wants to do animation. The family moved to Areeiro near the public school of arts António. “And it’s very safe — flat sidewalks, no hills,” says Fisher-Muñoz, who loves his neighborhood. renting a house but want to buy an apartment soon. “But it’s very expensive here,” she blurts out, though that’s not surprising, given the amount of fellow countrymen she’s going to meet with the same interest through her blog.
Fisher-Muñoz started a blog last year called Vegan Family Adventures, to write about travel, food, and examples of the logistics of moving to Portugal. It started as a hobby, but it’s growing and it’s also a source of income. “My mission is to spread veganism in Portugal and tell the whole world what the options are here,” she explains.
Fernando works for his company in Austin and has an art studio at LxFactory in Lisbon, where he works three or four times a week. He has made friends with other artists at events. “It’s fun because it’s a very international community.”
When she mentioned the idea of moving to Portugal, her daughter, who is now 16 and her son, 14, asked why. “But then, with the schools with the problems they want to change, with the news they want, to put it mildly.”
What happened recently was: in May, one of them attracted 19 children and 2 teachers to an elementary school just 50 km from Austin.
The Fisher-Muñoz family wasn’t the only one who came to Lisbon to find safer schools. Allison Baxley also moved with her husband and two children to nearby Cascais in July last year. They lived in Brooklyn for twelve years, but she and her husband grew up in the small town of Rockport, Texas. When the pandemic started, we were organizing a move to Budapest because of her husband. The months dragged on and, with another international job offer, they ended up making a change.
Baxley really liked Lisbon when he visited the city in 2012, but he wanted to live where his kids—ages 3 and 6 or kids—with space to play outside. In Cascais, close to all year round, Lisbon and several international schools. After choosing the city, choose a school: Apprentices, which goes from preschool to 12th grade with teaching in English and Portuguese.
The mother wanted a school that taught Portuguese to her children without those excluded because they still did not speak the language. “They’re going to be fluent a lot sooner than I am,” she says, laughing. The 3 year old son already knows the colors in english. The low cost of the school is a bonus: “We now pay for two children the same as we pay for my son’s daycare in New York alone.”
In New York, Baxley in advertising, her husband in the movies. He now works on projects. She left advertising and started a blog, Renovating Life, about moving to Portugal. “It’s about how we’re changing our lives by moving here,” says Baxley. “I’ve been very focused on writing, which I didn’t do in the advertising world,” she says.
“There are a lot of things coming in the United States that are both comforting and frustrating,” says Baxley. “We want our kids safe at school. With what’s happened recently, it’s more obvious that things aren’t going in that direction,” she says.
Portugal is the third safest country in the world. There was a school shooting in 2018, but it did not involve students or school personnel. In February, police arrested a man who allegedly planned an attack on a university. The country is not crime-free, but it does not suffer from shootings often. A person who wants a firearm in Portugal has to legally ask the author to carry a firearm, and the laws are restrictive.
“We know we could never go back to living in Texas after Trump and how difficult things were to get there, and we still have things for me to go back to,” says Baxley.
Baxley says his hometown of Rockport, Texas, is similar to Cascais, a “small, coastal, fishing village.” So, after years of living in big cities —Chicago, New York, London, Berlin— in Portugal she felt as if she had returned to her roots. “Only the Portuguese version,” she says, smiling.