In just five years, Eliud Choge, an IT auditor and his wife Eunice have relocated across the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, California, and now Canada, showcasing the realities of expatriate careers. It has been a journey of financial trade‑offs, the strain of constant resettlement and bringing a career spouse along, and the balancing act between professional ambition and family life.

In 2021, Eliud got a job offer from KPMG to work in the Cayman Islands.

“It was exciting,” says the 31-year-old, “the prospect of working abroad and taking my first ever flight was super exciting. I had never even been on a local flight.”

By the time the Cayman Islands application landed in his inbox, he had years of solid IT audit experience under his belt. After graduating with a master’s degree in IT Management, he worked at PKF Kenya, PwC, and Safaricom Sacco, but never out of the country.

Stepping off the plane, he noticed how small the country was. The population is about 90,000 people, which Eliud compares to a single constituency in Kenya. “It is one of the world’s most famous offshore banking destinations, a tax haven where corporations, billionaires, and the financial professionals who manage their money all converge on a tiny strip of island in the Caribbean Sea. Crazy, right?” he tells BDLife.

Starting a job in a foreign country can feel overwhelming, but Eliud says what helped was KPMG’s “buddy system,” where one is assigned a colleague to pick you up from the airport. He was housed in a hotel for two weeks, given a rental car, and paid relocation fees of Sh646,000.

But it was his church community that truly made him feel at home. The first Saturday he arrived in the Cayman Islands, Eliud walked 20 minutes to a Seventh-day Adventist Church. By the end of the service, a church elder who was also a bank CEO offered him a ride in his Mercedes-Benz. Weeks later, a church member helped him get a rental car.

“This is a story that has replicated in the different countries I have gone to,” he says. “For me, the church has really helped me find a community.”

Finding a good house is another hurdle for expatriates. In the Cayman Islands, Eliud says he opted to share a house with a Kenyan colleague. “We were paying Sh388,000 rent per month for the two-bedroom house with a shared living room and kitchen. I’d eat out most of the time because groceries are pricey, they are imported from as far as Ecuador and Venezuela.”

But there was one thing that made the cost of living bearable. In the Cayman Islands, there is no income tax. Whatever a person earns is theirs to keep.

“Imagine your gross income is your net income,” Eliud says.

Moving a spouse

For many expatriates, the toughest part of relocation is the logistics of moving a spouse. Most leave them in Kenya and visit, but Eliud chose otherwise. When he left, Eunice Mokeira, his now-wife was working as a medical officer at Tenwek Mission Hospital. They were dating and once he settled he started working on inviting her to Cayman. But he got a transfer letter to work in KPMG in the United Kingdom. Luckily, just before he moved to the UK, Ernst & Young gave him a job in the Bahamas.

“They were building a new IT audit team and wanted me,” he says.

He weighed the two locations: London or Nassau.

“Bahamas and the Cayman Islands offer better financial packages than the UK, and it would have been easier for Eunice to practice medicine in the Bahamas,” he says.

In November 2022, Eliud moved to Nassau, his new workplace. In June 2023, he came back to Kenya and married Eunice.

Getting to the Bahamas for the couple was smoother than they expected. Kenyans do not need a visa to enter the Bahamas, but they do need one to transit through the UK. Eunice applied for a UK visitor’s visa, which came through in about two weeks.

Her first impression of Nassau was surreal. “I was amazed,” Eunice says. “The beaches were very clear. It was really beautiful,” she says.

Settling in Bahamas

Just like the KPMG move, Ernst & Young paid Eliud a relocation package of about Sh387,000 and covered other additional costs.

Again, the SDA church community in the Bahamas helped them settle in. A pastor rented to them his late father’s house and the pastor’s wife sold them a Nissan March at an affordable price.

“Compared to Cayman, Bahamians are much warmer,” Eliud says. “You would be crossing the road, and someone would say, ‘Morning. At first, I was not too sure if they were greeting me or talking on the phone.”

Food in the Bahamas was also different and more accessible, from Johnny cake bread soaked in thick fish soup, plantain fried golden in a pan to the famous peas and rice dish, which Eliud loves.

“The Jamaicans call it peas and rice. Trinidadians call it rice and peas,” Eliud says, laughing. “But they are all wrong because it is not even peas, it is beans.”

Eunice started working at a private clinic in late 2023, but she was not happy. She preferred a residency programme, yet the Bahamas had limited vacancies.

In August 2024, Eliud got a transfer to Ernst & Young’s San Jose office in California, the US. The relocation package was the most generous support he had received since Eliud started moving jobs.

Then came an unexpected twist. Just as they settled in California, Eunice received a job offer from Princess Margaret Hospital, the main public hospital in the Bahamas. It was exactly the kind of hands-on clinical experience she had wanted. She travelled back to the Bahamas and worked for eight months.

“I loved the fact that I’d still go back to the Bahamas,” Eliud says.

Working in California

California gave Eliud an experience unlike anything in his career so far. San Jose sits at the centre of Silicon Valley, surrounded by the headquarters of the companies that shape the modern world. He would spot self-driving Waymo cars on the streets of San Francisco, and Tesla Model Ys in parking lots. Stanford University was a short drive away.

One of Eliud’s biggest clients was Gilead Sciences, the company behind the HIV prevention drug lenacapavir. NVIDIA, whose work in artificial intelligence had made its long-time employees millionaires almost overnight, was practically a neighbour.

“You just feel like you are in the home of STEM,” he says. “If you have a good idea, you will find the capital, because there is a lot of venture capital looking to invest in startups.”

Yet California was the most expensive place they had ever lived. A one-bedroom apartment in the Bay Area costs about Sh323,000 a month. Taxes were steep. The paycheck was generous, but so was every bill that came with it.

“You earn a lot more, but you spend a lot more,” Eliud says. “It sort of cancels out.”

Eunice eventually joined Eliud in California full-time after completing her eight months at Princess Margaret Hospital. But by then, both of them had begun asking a deeper question. Not where the next job was, but where they actually wanted to build a life.

The answer was Canada.

“We are at that place in life where we are considering family,” Eunice says. “Canada has good options for families in terms of social services and healthcare. It is very family-friendly compared to the US.”

New life in Calgary

They chose Calgary specifically, drawn by its lower cost of living compared to cities like Toronto and Vancouver, its strong job market, and its path to permanent residency and eventually citizenship. Ernst & Young supported the move again, transferring him to their Canadian offices. Eliud arrived in Calgary in February 2025, where he is working.

“Rent is fairly cheap. Groceries are affordable. It is not so bad,” Eunice, now 31, says. “Healthcare in Canada is free. Schooling for children is free. The pace of life in Calgary is gentler than San Francisco, less frantic than Toronto.”

Again, they found family in the SDA church community in Canada, which had many congregants from Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Panama, and Ukraine.

If you asked either of them which country now feels most like home, neither of them would hesitate. “The Bahamas.”

“It felt like we were home,” says Eunice, who is now working toward qualifying for a medical residency programme in Canada. “We got a very wonderful church community, and we were really welcomed there. Any day, I would go back. It feels like our second home.”

Eliud adds, “we always joke that once we get our permanent residency and citizenship, we might end up going back.”

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