The Land of the Golden Pagodas

Last week I was surprised by a housing questionnaire from my next post, Rangoon, welcoming us to “the land of the golden pagodas.” I think my surprise was because our arrival to said land is a year and 10 months away! I’ve never known a post to send a housing questionnaire so far in advance.

In comparison, I received our housing questionnaires for Tashkent, Canberra, and Ciudad Juárez four months, eight months, and nine months respectively prior to our scheduled arrivals. So our next post is clearly organized and thinking ahead (although when the Department releases the TMONE assignment cable necessary to confirm an officer has been paneled into a job and therefore will need a housing assignment is outside of post’s timing or control)! I immediately started to grin thinking of Burma’s beautiful pagodas that I’m so looking forward to seeing. However, it isn’t a pagoda we will be living in, but a house or apartment.

As I’ve talked about in the past, the purpose of the housing questionnaire is to help the post housing board identify the most suitable housing for you and your family before you arrive. The questionnaire is the time to declare your preferences, and the wording of the survey will always be specific to the conditions at post and layout of the area.

For example, will you be coming alone or with ‘dependents?’ Are you bringing pets to post, and what type/size/how many? Is it more important for you to live close to the embassy, close to colleagues, close to nightlife, close to your children’s school? If there are both houses and apartments in the housing pool, do you have a preference? Are there better options for internet, parking, or amenities in one particular part of the city or town? Is there anything that would really make a home great for you – if available – like a pool, lots of light, a yard for a dog to run, or a large wall space? Does anyone going to post have mobility or health conditions that the housing board should consider in your placement (for example, an elderly accompanying adult or toddler may have trouble with steep stairs, or a person with allergies may not want to live with dense carpet)?

With all this said, officers have very little say in the outcome of a housing assignment. In my experience having gone through three prior overseas housing assignments, although housing boards try hard to match available housing and size with officer preferences and position rank, what you ultimately get largely coincides with what will be available upon your projected arrival.

I’ve served on two housing boards, and I know myself that while housing is one of the top issues affecting employee and family morale at a post, the housing board is also responsible to balance the needs of the embassy. For example, ensuring leased houses are filled and don’t sit empty for longer than a defined period, and that timing of officer arrivals corresponds to the size and availability of housing in the pool for everyone, not just a vocal few. There can be a lot of moving parts.

Some complain we should have the option of taking a stipend and finding our own housing, but arrival to post can be bumpy enough with expectations of settling quickly and jumping right into work within 24 hours. And the pre-PCS period in the United States – often with language training and packout right up to the week of departure – can make the idea of finding and furnishing a home in a foreign context sounds like one more problem to solve. But, your perspective and mileage may vary.

I have more or less gotten used to the idea I won’t get to select my own overseas housing. We have been lucky enough the first two times (although there was that third housing assignment…) I still sometimes struggle with the ‘luck of the draw’ and how much money we’ve spent over the years setting up and taking down homes. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that V and I have treated every place we’ve lived to date like our true home, irrespective of the fact it “belonged” to someone else.

---

---

I’m not sure what the early receipt of our housing questionnaire portends in terms of housing assignment timing. But I’m hopeful the exciting news will come reasonably in advance of our departure for post.

We were notified of our housing assignment to Tashkent about six weeks prior to arrival; there was limited information as far as a floor plan or photos, because the house was actually still being built! It was exciting to think of living in a brand-new house without the wear and tear of older houses that had hosted generations of Foreign Service families.

---

---

For Canberra, we learned where we’d be living for two years a mere two-and-a-half weeks before arriving – and two months after leaving our prior Tashkent assignment. In other words, we had already packed out, PCS’d, finished tradecraft at FSI, and were at a California airport on home leave before receiving the welcome notification that we would indeed be assigned to a house with a yard. The gamble to put outdoor furniture and yard tools in our HHE out of Tashkent would pay off. However, since my predecessor lived in the house before us and he’d departed Australia for the United States a day before we’d arrived, we had to live in a hotel for the first three weeks while post conducted a make-ready on our house. That was stressful after living out of bags for three months already, but ultimately worth it.

And of course our housing assignment in Ciudad Juárez felt a little delayed because the pandemic delayed our PCS move from early May to late July 2020. With all things considered, post did a good job in the epic struggle to align officer arrivals with the ever-shifting target of health and safety.

---

We will submit our housing questionnaire for Rangoon this week, and keep our fingers crossed for a someday place that feels as much like home as our current house in Virginia!