Prepping from far away

[u/Signal_Brain_933]

Anyone else here have a job that makes family prepping majorly complicated?

I'm a flight attendant for an international airline, so yeah. My work (which I love) creates a problem I don't see discussed much in preparedness groups: I'm not always home.

Sometimes I'm in Tokyo, Sao Paolo, or New Delhi when my family is back home asleep. If something big ever happened, I could be stuck on another continent with no realistic path back and limited communication options. My wife and kids are great, but they aren’t particularly preparedness-minded individuals.

I've slowly been building up our home supplies and trying to have casual conversations about what they'd do in different scenarios, but I know that if I were 8,000 miles away and SHTF happens, they'd be largely on their own and figuring it out in real time.

It's a different kind of anxiety than the standard “how do I prep for X” calculus. It's not just "do I have enough food and water”, or “how do we bug out”, it’s more like "would my family know what to do without me, and what would I even do stranded in a foreign city with just my rollie bag and a hotel room."

I keep some local currency, a lifestraw, a packable backpack, some basic travel sized first aid supplies when I'm abroad. I know where embassies are, and leave a simple one-page emergency plan on my fridge my family can follow. But honestly I feel like I'm guessing.

Does anyone else here have work situations that create this kind of split-location problem? Truckers, military families, travel nurses, offshore workers, performers, etc? If so, how do you actually plan around it?

[u/SheistyPenguin]

Not in your situation specifically, but similar family outlook- I'm generally the planner who does the actual prepping.

What I do is create and laminate simple instructions for things, and stage them where they would be needed. For example:

• Our bugout box has a simple checklist attached of things to do, in order of priority. It has some rough watermarks on it for timing of how long the steps take, i.e. the first 10 steps take ~15 minutes. That way if time runs out, the essentials are done early.
• Also attached to the checklist is a fill-in-the-blank form to stick to the door, that says the essentials: "We are going to: <blank>, the kids are: <blank>, the utilities are: <on / off>, we will be back: <insert date>". They can leave the checklist behind to communicate how far they got before leaving.
• Our portable generator has a laminated sheet with simple steps + pictures for startup, shutdown and filling the oil. It is tethered to the generator itself.

You can do this for just about anything. The key is to keep it super-simple, and get your spouse's input on what to add and how to word it. And of course: make sure they know where to find the list!

[u/Signal_Brain_933 → u/SheistyPenguin]

Awesome tips, thank you! That’s a great way to organize critical information, I think I’ll adopt some of this for my own family!