I’ve just completed my first three weeks of Rangoon pre-departure training at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). The one-week courses were for mid-level consular managers and covered fraud and malfeasance (PC541), immigrant and nonimmigrant visas, (PC557), and American Citizens Services matters like crisis management and citizenship (PC558).
Month: July 2024
Know the Signs
In addition to ending my fourth tour and traveling to the west coast to see family, I did two other important things in Washington, DC in June. I had an opportunity to march in the Capital Pride Parade as a volunteer for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), and I went to a work-related training on atrocity prevention at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
Both the volunteer work and the training provided opportunities to reflect on important signs we may see that things are going wrong – before it’s too late.
The Storm Before the Calm?
In mid-June, as I finished my fourth tour, my husband V and I took a quick weekend trip to South Carolina. The occasion was an engagement party for my eldest stepdaughter A, who in April had become engaged to her longtime partner B. The following weekend, seizing likely my last opportunity for the foreseeable future to visit the west coast, I flew out and spent two weeks with my parents. I’d worked out the leave before my training schedule began in earnest by offering to stay in Children’s Issues an extra six weeks to cover a staffing gap, provided I could take time off at the end.
The subtext of both trips felt a little “last hurrah.” Obviously not in the sense I wouldn’t see family again, but because I was preparing to buckle down into more than a year of full-time, in-person pre-departure training at the Foreign Service Institute. Taking leave during training usually isn’t feasible, particularly as I was starting the first couple months of my schedule with a series of short classes I needed to attend each day of. Unless I potentially tacked leave on to Christmas when FSI was closed or a rest stop during my PCS to Asia itself, outside of holiday weekends I would be unlikely to get back to the west coast before heading to my next tour in Burma.
I had envisioned my recent travels as vacation and relaxing family time, but predictably, they passed in a blur. While I was still the master of my own schedule and had a lot of fun, the past month didn’t exactly feel like down time. As my flexibility to be outside of Washington dwindled, I wondered if my trips were the calm before the storm, or the storm before the calm.
Collecting Postcards 