Kit Prendergast is a licensed clinical social worker from the United States.  Several years ago she followed her husband to Norway and left full time employment for the first time. 

"I had been counseling other people for twenty years or more and suddenly realized that I was cracking up myself," she explains. "The expatriate wife has a far tougher role than the husband.  He just goes to an office every day and comes home again, much as he always has done.

Careers are often forced onto the back burner while women have to deal with real crises concerned with culture shock and loss of a familiar identity.

In his book entitled, Guerrilla Tactics in the Job Market, Tom Jackson informs us that stress kills as many people as war.  Work you don't like is close to the top of the list of stress generators.  Not having a job when you want one produces even more stress than having a job you don't like.

Thousands of expatriate wives the world over will echo these sentiments.  In fact it is said that up to 80  per cent of the postings that fail, do so because the wife is unhappy about sacrificing her own career.

But before you vow never to be persuaded to move to another country, take heart. There is life after the packing cases are emptied.  In fact there is tremendous opportunity.

In A Career in Your Suitcase, the subject of successful portable careers is studied in depth.  Moving around the world throws up a host of opportunities and challenges, and while some people choose to retrain, others chose to define success in terms of satisfaction, say, rather than in hard cash.  Many find themselves changing career direction completely or tilting their hats, so to speak, rather than changing them.

Let's stay with Anne a little longer, for her marketing and publicity are typical of the tactics that can work in a small community.  When you are a large fish in a small pond, so to speak, and your product is accurately targeted at that audience, you have a high chance of success. Anne saw a need in the community and turned that need into an opportunity.

Synergy and clever targeting are not the only things that make for a perfect portable career.  Skills are important, but, as we have seen, they can be acquired or borrowed.  It is determination and self-motivation that are the key.

When I arrived in Stavanger, Norway in 1996, I felt invisible.  I was a lonesome, anonymous pine tree in a forest of four million. I didn't know the hideouts of the people who were going to barter skills with me.  So, I did something that I did in Oman before me, and in Dubai before that.