In Foreign Service Housing, I wrote about the embassy homes where we lived during our first two diplomatic tours in Uzbekistan and Australia, respectively. I later wrote about the PCS Lodging apartment where we lived in Arlington while I studied Spanish ahead of our third tour in Mexico in Foreign Service Housing, Part II. Even though we left Mexico a year and a half ago, I want to finally write about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our house in Ciudad Juárez. I probably have avoided this topic at least in part because thinking about everything that happened with the house brings back negative memories for me. Astute readers may have picked up on my ambivalence (at best) the day we left. But in the interest of sharing my honest perspective, I’m going to try.
I had found it difficult in the past to relate to people who I perceived to be… overly critical about their diplomatic housing. After all, it doesn’t cost us anything and is a useful benefit of our employment. Two stints on housing boards over my first four years in the service gave me the impression some people will complain about anything and everything, like the person who demanded the embassy pay for and install a bay window in her kitchen or she would request a move, or another who refused to come to post with her husband because they were assigned a house she said was not possible to fung shui. Whether or not I thought these requests were reasonable was one thing; the fact we had such limited latitude to make people happy was another. I decided to be happy in my homes even though things were not perfect. On balance, there was far more good than bad. But it wasn’t until my tour in Juárez and the nuances of being truly unhappy in a house, that I realized firsthand some circumstances warrant complaining.
Of course, our housing wasn’t completely terrible or unlivable. I’ve heard worse stories, of showers that deliver an electrical shock or hallways through a bedroom. There were things I appreciated and liked about the house, like the double master closet, and the way the peachy coral outside of the house looked set against the backdrop of a cerulean desert sky. And it’s important to understand that we do not get to pick our housing; it is assigned to us. I’ve always tried my best before arrival to angle for something good for us, and after that, it was what it was. I’ve usually been able to keep a sense of humor about all of it, like the wild wallpaper and electrical problems in Tashkent and the lack of air conditioning in the Canberra house.
But overall, our good prior FS housing experiences and the assurances from people who had served in Juárez before and loved their housing created some assumptions and expectations on our part that ultimately didn’t match up with reality in Mexico. I guess our luck finally ran out and we ended up with a small house with a boring layout, many things broken, bizarre furniture, without so much as a hall closet, and that never felt clean no matter how much we cleaned.
There are times I question why I allowed the crummy situations with our house to continue for as long as I did. I probably didn’t think of it that way at the time, and knowing what I know now about how that tour went anyway (I curtailed at the 18-month mark), I’m not sure it would have mattered to our happiness had I done anything differently. There were more significant problems in that tour that eventually superseded our issues with the house. But if I had to identify reasons I was late to grasp reality, two come to mind.
One, the stress of a Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move can be so great you simply don’t have the bandwidth to take on or even notice one more thing. My husband had to return to Washington for almost two months (at our expense) to finalize his DETO arrangements two weeks after we moved in. I had a series of expensive car trouble incidents. My job was so busy, it essentially took all my energy and attention, particularly because it was work I didn’t have a lot of experience in yet. Compounding everything was my spinal cord injury that necessitated spinal fusion several months into the tour. Going and talking to people face-to-face was a challenge in and of itself. It’s safe to say I was distracted.
And two, while in retrospect a situation seems clearer, at the beginning of a new tour you don’t know how anything is going to be. You don’t know your routine. You don’t know how anything works. Sometimes you don’t even know what day it is, or what time of day. You haven’t hardly figured out which from a thick ring of keys matches your front door or how to find your workspace. You may have technical or phone challenges. You haven’t received your shipments or decorated to make a bare place feel like home. You know that things are unsettled, and you have faith you’re going to put them into place in the future. You look around your house and remind yourself, things are always weird in the beginning and it just takes some time. Hindsight is 20/20, especially when it comes to seeing too late how you got kicked when you were already down.
Had I challenged the housing assignment before the housing board, I likely would have won. But it took many months of discovering and trying to solve issues before we grasped that we just should have never lived in that house to begin with. We kept thinking things were going to get better, and V certainly made some heroic efforts to try and make that the case. When the pandemic eased enough to visit other colleagues’ houses and see how much better they were, this made us happy our experience wasn’t universal but still frustrated for ourselves.
I knew from the first full day we were in the house that although I was very happy to be just a few minutes’ drive from the consulate, we had challenges on the horizon.
First, the desert is hot, and the air conditioning broke in the middle of our first night. We woke up sweating in a house that was already above 80 degrees. For a moment I thought about the irony; our first night in our Australian house, it had been winter and the heater had suddenly crapped out. We were freezing for a couple days until some new friends (who now are more like family than friends) loaned us a space heater.
This time, we’d just driven halfway across the country in two cars loaded down with stuff, and hadn’t even checked in at the consulate yet to know who to call. Fortunately, our social sponsors came to our rescue and got someone out to deal with it. The reason I mention this relatively minor issue is because although it was fixed that occasion (albeit after three separate trips by local staff to the roof), issues with the air conditioning and the thermostat in general became recurring over time. The insane sewage smell emanating from the garage and stinking up the whole downstairs, and the proliferation of mosquitos in the house did not help.
Second, there were several unsatisfactory things about the way the make-ready was done. We arrived on the last day of July 2020, so it’s important to remember the context in which this occurred. Most of the world (including us) was wearing masks and trying to stay away from each other indoors. Although I had sympathy and guessed it wouldn’t be perfect given the health and safety situation, I still overestimated the care and attention the house would get.
Our house had apparently been one of the post’s few empty houses at the beginning of the pandemic, hosting a handful of marine guards for months to help with social distancing at the marine house itself. Oddly enough, despite a housekeeper supposedly coming through before our arrival, we walked in to find dirty toilets, no hand soap or dish soap, and our welcome kit not unpacked. I know V and I probably have higher cleaning standards than most people. But our house appearing to have been cleaned haphazardly didn’t make us feel safe, especially as we were required to quarantine inside the house for our first two weeks at post and the house had only recently been vacated by a handful of guys barely in their 20s.
We were happy our sponsors had washed the bedding and made our bed, but we were a little bewildered the first night when we didn’t have so much as a clean plate or fork to use. All the kitchen appliances and gadgets were still in their boxes and packaging, so V went off to try and find dish soap and we rummaged to put together a dinner with the groceries we’d just bought in El Paso. Again, this was at the time when people were iffy about anyone touching their things for fear of the virus, me included, but it was jarring all the same.
We turned our attention to putting things away and discovered bigger issues. The kitchen pantry had no shelves and was jammed with consulate items like extra dining room table leaves and a giant folding table cover. The house lacked any coat closet or linen closet. The paint on a built-in entertainment display in my home office was overly thick and peeling, and had sticky residue and random fuzz and hair stuck all over it. It looked like they had painted portions of it, but incompletely and without dusting it off or wiping it down first. This totally stressed me out because I wanted to display my purse collection there, but had I set any of my purses on those shelves, I could have caused them thousands of dollars of damage. So in hampers on the floor they stayed in their dust bags, for weeks.
This theme continued the following day as we went to put our clothes in the dressers and found debris and hair throughout, necessitating we wipe out each individual drawer before being able to put anything away. They were dusty as though they’d been sitting in a warehouse for months or years. A near-empty bottle of liquor was shoved in a master closet cabinet. Even the most basic make-ready should have turned up actual garbage in the house.
We set about cleaning the house as much as we could with what we had on hand, and luckily, since our PCS move was by car and not by plane, we had a whole crate of open cleaning supplies that the movers couldn’t pack out from Virginia. For days, instead of settling into the house, putting things away, and checking out our surroundings, we were scrubbing up someone else’s mess. The whole situation made me feel exhausted, and I lived out of bags longer than I should have because I just felt grossed out by my surroundings. Certain things seemed hopeless to get clean, like the baseboards – warped throughout the house by years of getting waterlogged by improper mopping, or the showers with old mold and opaque soap scum.
Moving in to both our previous houses had been so much cleaner, with that new-furniture smell and no delays in putting things away. Our house in Tashkent and our apartment in Arlington had actually been brand new, and we were the first ones to live there. And although some aspects of the house in Canberra had appeared dated, it was certainly move-in ready and welcoming, as best as I remember, with perfectly clean furniture and drawers. So this was all dejecting for us under already stressful conditions.
And third, the layout and decor of the house was not great. As the days went on, the oddity of the space and the way most rooms were set up began to make us feel discouraged. We had enough space for the two of us, but it was allocated oddly.
The entire formal dining room, living room, and breakfast nook downstairs were visible the moment you stepped in the front door, giving me some decorating challenges; I normally have a very formal dining room with a colorful and less formal living room, but having them side by side essentially in the same room always looked bizarre to me. The dining room and living room were set up backwards, so we had to move everything around.
The breakfast nook lacked a table and chairs, creating an odd empty space we weren’t sure how to use. Why no one would have thought to put furniture there is beyond me, and when I asked for it, I got blank looks. Months later, we did receive a small table with four barstool chairs that were a little beat up and nothing special, but worked well there and got a lot of use. I covered them with seat cushions and placemats from World Market and it looked almost nice.
I’ve often heard FSOs with pets or small children complain the furniture they received is too nice and worry they will be fined for damaging it during their tour. I always felt a bit of sympathy for this but didn’t relate to it; as a couple nearing middle age who lives alone, we seemed to receive the embassy furniture the management section was afraid to give to anyone else. Pristine white couches in luxurious brocade upholstery, heavy wooden furniture stained to perfection and without so much as a scratch. We were excellent stewards of these things and did not complain about the lack of modernity.
Perhaps that’s why I found the furniture in our Juárez house not only ugly, but absurd. We didn’t have a matching bed, nightstand, or mirror in any of the three bedrooms. They were not only mismatched, but totally different colors of wood. The desks were both missing the bookshelf portion that sits atop and allows you somewhere to place your books, photos, decor, and so on. I haven’t had a flat desk with nowhere to put anything since I was in elementary school.
Instead of the standard Drexel television console with glass-doored cabinets underneath in which to stash DVDs and cords, we got what looked like a drafting table my dad would have in his garage workshop. It was light birchwood, and literally was just a piece of plywood. To put our TV on. In the middle of the living room, which is the first thing you see when you walk in the front door. Staring at it and wondering where to put our DVD player that was yet to arrive filled me with a despair I can’t explain. It also looked terrible next to the very small formal dining room, which, by the way, had a buffet, a china cabinet, and a formal dining room table, none of which were part of a matched set.
The couches in our living room were so broken down, I could not sit on either of them with my spinal cord injury and had to pull a dining room chair into the living room. I’m sorry to say they also appeared to have years of shiny, ground-in filth. The one and only time I made the mistake of sitting down, I felt the urge to wash my clothes.
The dining room table had water damage, chips and rough edges, and looked like a decade of unruly kids had attacked it with forks and toys. I mean, I am probably beginning to sound like a snob, and I promise I am really not. I have no problem with humble things or even things that aren’t my taste as long as there is nothing wrong with them and they aren’t completely aesthetically offensive. But the furniture in our house? Furniture I saw in late 1990s frat houses looked less junky. I would have been embarrassed to invite company to this house, particularly for anything work-related. I asked myself what in the world the person who set up the house was thinking, and what we did to deserve it.
I told myself that preparing a make-ready when you aren’t supposed to even be in the same room as your co-workers must have been terrible. But that didn’t explain why some of this furniture was allowed to be in the warehouse to begin with, nor how little thought was apparently put into setting up a home where a family could live and maintain some kind of morale. Things were placed in the oddest configurations, with seemingly no consideration to how the house would be used.
We traded some of the furniture back, and some of what we received was far better than the consulate had initially placed during the make-ready. This was the first time I had ever swapped furniture at a post, which not many officers can say. I finally started to understand some of the complaints other officers had shared with me over the years about their houses, and I felt dismayed that I had been largely dismissive of their concerns.
And I must say, I excuse my sponsors from any blame, as these were extraordinary circumstances and maybe their impression of it was different than mine. They were busy with a young family and doing extra duties since half the consulate had evacuated on ordered departure back to the States a few months prior. I assume they did everything they could to pass the request I made before we arrived for dark wood furniture and firm couches. They became friends (and still are), and we appreciated the many things they did to go above and beyond helping us settle in.
Another rub was the impracticality of the laundry room. There was a utility sink, a washer, and a dryer. That was it. Not so much as a shelf or a cabinet or even a ledge upon which to place laundry items. When I raised this with the consulate, the suggestion was to place a bookshelf inside and use that. I would not have opposed, however, between the placement of the laundry room door, a second external door, and the utility sink, there was not a single wall space wider than four inches across to stand a bookcase. All you had to do was glance in there to understand that.
The only space was on the high-ceilinged wall above the washer and dryer, and after much negotiating, I agreed to pay 50% of the costs associated with a carpenter installing a set of cabinets there. I thought it was bizarre to expect us to cover that, as our request was aligned with really basic expectations of the function any laundry room should have. But it wasn’t the hill I wanted to die on. I would have paid more money to know what the people who lived there before us did.
Continuing on with the lack of ability to put anything away and function normally in this house, all three of the bathrooms had no drawers, and no cabinets. I spent several hundred dollars at Bed, Bath and Beyond buying wall-mount cabinets and medicine cabinets, much of which we had to leave behind just over a year later. Had V not had a drill and handyman skills, I would have just been out of luck.
And then, there was all the broken stuff. The oven broke almost immediately. If I’m not mistaken, the dishwasher and fridge both broke in short order too and were replaced. One of the three bathrooms also didn’t function, with a broken toilet and a toilet paper dispenser that broke all the way off the wall on move-in day. An ugly row of hooks hung over a part of the upstairs guest bathroom wall that had fallen out, showering plaster all over the floor while doing so. We hung a painting over it.
The balcony off my husband’s second story office had a drain that wasn’t set up correctly and every time it rained, the French doors would leak to the inside. A couple of times he had an actual flood that garnered a panicked call to facilities and ruined consulate furniture and some of his own possessions. The most irritating thing about this was that V had explained on multiple occasions that exact problem would occur on the first rain and nothing was done about it. When local staff arrived to look into it, they announced to V, “It’s flooding!” (which he had informed them on the call) and promptly departed to fetch tools while we stewed.
Every time something broke, either V or myself would open a ticket and then have to get into a lengthy and often unproductive back and forth with multiple visits from local staff to see and decide what needed to be done. I admit I quickly get out of my depth on home repair, but V has a lot of experience and is very handy. He chafed at what he saw as the cheapest and most superficial way of doing things that often just compounded whatever problem was being reported. As the spouse who worked from home, he often got stuck with supervising these irritants. My main regret here is that I didn’t properly escalate his complaints when things inevitably became stuck or inefficient.
The tile floor throughout the entire house was positioned over concrete and so hard, the one time I knocked my iPhone off my desk, it smacked on the floor, the screen went black, and it never turned on again. Anything you drop on this floor is an instant goner, I warned V.
And then, there was, for both of us, what really became the very last straw: the broken floor. Slowly we started noticing whenever we were barefoot in the house that we got brownish dust all over the bottoms of our feet. My husband was first to notice that many of the tiles were “floating,” and not actually connected to the floor. Stepping on many of the tiles would result in a scary “cracking” sound and sometimes a shift in your footing. The builder who had originally laid them had apparently used totally subpar materials, because before long, our kitchen looked like this.
Shards of tile and little piles of dirt were all over the place. For a barely 10-year old floor, this was a joke. What if we’d had a crawling toddler? Would anyone have cared then?
We tried for months to work with the consulate to fix it. First they said the landlord had no extra tiles, so nothing could be done. Then they sent a lone worker with the wrong tools and skillset who proceeded to break several tiles in V’s office while trying to swap them with different tiles of the same size. V took pictures of what he was doing and asked him to leave.
In the interest of grinning and bearing it, I asked if the consulate could loan us a series of area rugs to cover all the tiles in high-traffic areas and eliminate the safety issues, and was told area rugs were only provided for the Consul General’s residence. My suggestion to carpet the house was also shot down. I then spent several hundred more dollars on my own area rugs. My husband spent weeks on his hands and knees repairing as much of the floor as he could at his own expense. He mixed grout that was a different color but held better. No one noticed or thanked him.
I talked to the housing board, and they told me I could challenge the housing assignment, but that many officers had loose tiles in their homes. The construction of most of the houses in the pool had been rapid and shoddy, but was still above the standard many local people lived at. I wasn’t convinced.
After months of ignored complaints, I finally got a higher level of attention on our issue. After an inspection, the first-tour facilities officer informed me we would need to move out of the house and put all our things into temporary storage so the consulate could make repairs to the house, which she conceded should have been done before we moved in. She couldn’t tell me how long that would take, but estimated months. I had had it.
I conveyed in no uncertain terms that nothing of ours would be going into storage, and that if we moved out of the house we would not be moving back, but rather moving permanently into someplace livable for the duration of our tour. I asked her to think about how she would expect to be treated in the same situation. Then a decision was delayed on what to do until such time as I had spinal fusion and couldn’t do much as bend down for three months, let alone pack out, and it became a non-issue. I no longer had the energy to fight: I needed it for other things.
We would be staying. We were angry, and didn’t feel we had a choice. We felt like no one had ever cared about whether this house could become a comfortable, functional home for us, or demonstrated any awareness we needed or deserved that. Besides our sponsors, no one did anything beyond box-ticking. And that became emblematic of my entire experience at that post because I soon came to understand how much deeper and more significant the lack of human care was. We were on our own.
Although these issues obviously affected us, we didn’t take it out on the house or let it ruin our moods every day. At that point, V and I decided to not talk to anyone involved in the situation anymore and to just find our own peace in our off-time. I frankly started feeling sad for the house.
I tried to get used to the dustbowl that was the front and back yard. We had a nice palm tree in the front, one of the things I liked best about the property. The backyard looked pretty awful, with only a stump remaining where our housing assignment photos had shown at least some sad greenery. We had so much looked forward to a yard, and it grated on us that for our third housing assignment in a row, and after investing much time and money on each yard we had since said goodbye to, we had again inherited a neglected yard that needed a lot of work. But instead of putting up with the dust or fuming that our landlord didn’t deserve our efforts to improve his property value, we prioritized our own needs.
My husband in particular worked very hard to landscape the front and back yards in his free time – and again, all at his own expense – to make this a nicer house for us and anyone who came after us. We have always treated the temporary places we have lived like our real homes, and tried to care for them in a way that fosters tranquility, enjoyment, and a good representation whether anyone notices and appreciates it or not. The funny thing is, everywhere we have ever lived we have been asked to sign an agreement that we would return the house in the same condition it was in and without damage; in each case we turned it back in better condition than it had been issued to us, often straightening up a variety of issues that were mishandled before our arrival, such as broken or missing sprinklers, plugged drains, broken or dirty appliances, and the list goes on and on.
In retrospect, it makes me sad V planted all these things never knowing that we would leave before spring and we would never get to see them in their full glory. That feeling is slightly eased by knowing we did what was best for us, and remembering the way our Mexican neighbors would walk down the street in the evening, exercising their dogs or out for a stroll, and look at our front yard with appreciative interest.
On the positive side, we know we embraced the house for what it was and tried to live in it fully. We ate many wonderful meals in this house, we accepted guests, we celebrated two New Year’s, birthdays, and the success of my back surgery and losing 100 lbs. My dad and stepmom came to visit, and as she a year later became seriously ill, it was likely her last trip overseas.
This house was where we watched movies, launched road trips across the American southwest, took sanctuary as the pandemic raged throughout El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, worked out in the garage, and adopted our first FS pet, a feral cat named Dzish who moved with us back to where we now live in Virginia. When we would return home from a trip, we would sigh and say, “It’s good to be home.” It was where many tearful evening discussions took place, and I finally set a boundary in my career that I would no longer be mistreated in a workplace that saw me as expendable, or didn’t see me at all.
And we recognize there is a big difference between some of the smaller issues and the larger, more difficult ones we experienced. There are always going to be minor rubs or eccentricities about a property, but this blew any sense of what we should expect in the future out of the water.
While we were appreciative to have a house, and particularly one that sheltered us as the pandemic raged all around us in one of the hardest-hit areas of the country, we resented the lack of basic respect that was shown to us as a family and to this house – a completely different experience than we’d had anywhere else. And we’d thought the cockroaches and 2 a.m. neighborhood mariachi parties were going to be our biggest problems! (Truth be told, those also occurred but don’t deserve more than an honorable mention.)
I don’t know what ever happened with this property after we left Post, or whether any future tenants kept up all the beautiful gardening V cultivated with so much love. But I hope if someone else did move there, they enjoyed it more than we did. I was not sad to leave and I do not miss it, nor most of what I experienced there.
Someday, when we no longer live in our Virginia house, I will share my photos, and reflections of what it was liked to live here on a domestic tour. It has its own challenges, but a little foreshadowing: it is night and day better.
Collecting Postcards 
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