The International Schools Review Forum

I'm sure there's beauty to be found in every city, but in some of them you have to look really really hard to find it, and it might just be next to that burning pile of garbage... And then again, some beautiful cities can be quite dangerous to live in due to high crime rates, and/or have terrible air quality.

Not many (but perhaps some) ITs dream of living in Dhaka, Lagos or Manilla.
They usually live in such cities because either the pay is really good, the school is really good, or both.
What are some of these 'hardship' locations where they do have a good or really good IS?

And if you are currently working there, or have done so in the past: do/did you venture outside of the expat bubble a lot, or hardly ever?

I realise that it's hard to define hardship, and if you stay inside the comfortable expat bubble in some of these cities, you might not call it a hardship location. So by all means, use your own definition of hardship and go from there.

Baku, Riyadh, Kiev, Lagos, New Delhi, and Phnom Penh

fine dude wrote:
> Baku, Riyadh, Kiev, Lagos, New Delhi, and Phnom Penh

i can't speak to any of the others but i wouldn't consider kyiv a hardship location at all.

v.

I have friends working in Yaounde Cameroon. They speak well of the school. Seems to be moving in the right direction. The city/country? Meh.

I wouldn't think of Baku, Kiev & Riyadh as hardship locations, but I haven't lived there, so I might be wrong.
In Riyadh boredom might be what makes it a hardship location? I read there's not much to do there, and for women the restrictions might make it hard to live there.
Below would be my list, but I haven't lived in any of them. I visited about half of them of but that doesn't always paint an accurate picture of how it would be to live there. All the cities I've mentioned have good to great schools.

Angola, Luanda (poverty)
Bangladesh, Dhaka (air pollution & poverty)
Brazil, Sao Paulo (safety)
Cambodia, Phnom Penh (poverty & maybe safety)
China, Beijing & Shanghai (air pollution)
Ethiopia, Addis Ababa (poverty)
India, Mumbai (pollution & poverty)
Indonesia, Jakarta (poverty & air pollution)
Myanmar, Yangon (poverty & corruption)
Nigeria, Lagos (safety & pollution)
Pakistan, Islamabad (safety)
Philippines, Manilla (safety & air pollution)
Senegal, Dakar (poverty)
Venezuela, Caracas (poverty & safety)

fine dude wrote:
> Baku, Riyadh, Kiev, Lagos, New Delhi, and Phnom Penh
Phnom Penh is a fantastic place to live! Certainly not a hardship city at all

Agree on Phnom Penh being a pleasant, albeit quite ugly, city. There is a problem with pickpockets though, but not enough to designate it a hardship city.

Islamabad and Karachi. Four months of vacation and the benefits more than make up for the hardship though.

I dont have any such list, how do you separate where you have to live from where you work. Doing that means your living to work, and work is work, if you have to work and then go live in a location that grinds on you. No IS makes a hardship life not a hardship. It may have benefits such as coin, etc., but its still a hardship.

Yes, that's what I'm asking about: hardship cities.
Those may still have good schools where it's great to work at, even if you don't like anything outside the school gates.
These are schools that everybody would love to work at if only they were located in a decent city.
But for some, working at such a school is worth living in a hardship city, perhaps because they don't go out much anyway or because it a good career move.

Just like there are great cities with crappy schools.
I know a few people that work at a crap school, where they also save zero coin, just because they want to live in Japan, Bermuda, or Italy.

Likewise there are people willing to endure living in a crappy hardship city, because they want to work at a certain great school or want to save a certain amount of money.

And since a teacher works around 8-9 hours a day, five days a week, I can see that for some, the city they live in is less important than the school they work at.
But that's a very personal choice.
Obviously, a great school in a great city would be ideal, but we can't always have it all.

So the question is, what are 'hardship' cities with good international schools?

I'm not convinced Shanghai is a hardship city, but to each his own

Im not one of those, there isnt a great IS ina hardship location, because I work to live, not the other way around. Ill suffer for enough comp, but its still suffering, but yes thats a very personal choice of my own.

I also work to live, but personally I can still imagine a school being great, despite it being in a hardship city.

The 'suffering' would be on my own time, outside the gates, not while at school, and I don't think I would actually suffer too much anywhere.
I wouldn't let the city outside influence how much I enjoy my hours inside the classroom.

That doesn't mean I don't look at the city when making a list of possible future schools, because I prefer both the school and the city/country to be great.

Overall, I would not consider Shanghai or Beijing hardship posts either. The pollution may be bad at times, frequently it is no worse than any other major city.

mignash wrote:
> Overall, I would not consider Shanghai or Beijing hardship posts either.
> The pollution may be bad at times, frequently it is no worse than any other
> major city.

Maybe you're right, and they shouldn't be on the list.
For me, air pollution is a major factor though, but back when I was still single and childless I wouldn't have considered Beijing and Shanghai hardship cities either.
Of course everyone has their own hardship list, although some cities will make it onto almost everyone's list, and some only onto a few.

The State Department of the US government has a list of hardship cities, which lists if you get extra pay (and how much) when working at an embassy in one of those cities (the 0% ones are non-hardship cities): https://aoprals.state.gov/Web920/hardship.asp