Yesterday I ended my fourth tour in the Office of Children’s Issues. And as I’ve mentioned recently, in an end-of-tour first, I will be PCSing to exactly nowhere in the coming days. Since my orders are from a domestic assignment to an overseas assignment via long-term training, we’ll spend the next year living in our same house. I’ll just pivot from working in DC to working in Arlington. I won’t be entitled to PCS Lodging or per diem as I train up for my one-year assignment to Burma.
I’m telling myself it’s just a bonus that we won’t have to move three times in three years.
As I wound down my abductions work over the last few weeks, I did so with a sense of urgency. I didn’t want to procrastinate or shunt predictable tasks off until the last minute, given the unscheduled nature of some of our mandate. That paid off.
More so than with any other assignment, during this week I ended up with the earlyish, smooth wrap-up I’d hoped for. As a few unexpected taskers and last-minute requests arose, I was able to weave them into the flow sans panic.
As I closed off or transferred cases to my portfolio successors, I had the oddest feeling I was slowly disappearing. Today I checked my email and queue a couple times. Sure enough: just like when I’d first arrived, there was nothing unaddressed for me.
In a recent post entitled “ghost transmissions” from one of my favorite Foreign Service blogs towels packed, will travel, the authors – a tandem FSO couple – described the end of their tour in Costa Rica. I loved the following line:
Disappearing from post a day at a time, each completed check-out task effacing a bit more of one’s presence, one feels like a complete phantasm by the time the movers come to crate away one’s belongings.
Despite my own lack of movers, I’d also felt a bit this way as I tied off one task, case, or project after another and handed it over, finding some things harder to relinquish than others. As I announced my departure and said goodbye to attorneys, parents, and colleagues, my inbox slowly quieted down until hardly anyone was looking for me.
In total, during the last two years, three months, and 10 days, I managed to facilitate hundreds of Hague Abduction Convention cases between the United States and several other countries. I resolved over 50 cases, even if those resolutions weren’t always what either side was hoping for. All in all, I worked with my foreign counterparts to oversee the return of around 20 abducted children back to their countries of habitual residence during my tour.
I also had a chance to participate on multiple consular crisis task forces for global events, backstop embassy duty programs worldwide by picking up the phone when they couldn’t, and generally sharpen my emergency management skills from the Washington perspective.
A Washington tour can be a great professional opportunity for a Foreign Service Officer in any cone.
It was a very good feeling today to receive several thank you messages from parents I have helped. It was surreal to know the crises, the duty calls, and the desperate abductions-in-progress have now come to an end for me. The tour finishing somehow doesn’t seem real yet, as if tomorrow I will wake up and find that another regular day lies ahead. However, intellectually – if not emotionally – I know it’s time for me to make the PCS pivot, even if no mileage is involved this once.
The below two-minute video from our office’s counterparts in Japan (the Japanese Central Authority) describes perfectly what our offices do and what I’ve spent the past 27 months working on. You can’t watch the video as an embed, but you can click through and easily see it on YouTube. It’s worth a look:
You can also read a brief, clear explainer on why we need The Hague Abduction Convention, here:
Collecting Postcards 
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