We’ve now completed 75 percent of our Burmese training, and times they are a‑changin’. Half of our classmates have tested out with their scores and moved on, leaving only the two of us—as it was in the beginning. The seasons have shifted from summer to fall, then winter, and now spring. With about three months left before we depart for Post, the sense that we’re coming full circle grows ever stronger.
In Class
Both the structure and the format of our language class have recently changed.
As winter waned, we were five students—four intermediate and one beginner—sharing two teachers. The beginner student understandably always needed a teacher because she couldn’t join our class. To accommodate this, the intermediate students spent two or three hours together in the morning, and then rotated between alternating two‑person lessons with the teacher while the opposite pair had an extra hour of independent study.
Now that the two most advanced students have completed their End‑of‑Training tests—each surpassing the required score, I might add—we’ve returned to a full five‑hour schedule. Usually the other intermediate student and I have class together, though we sometimes receive individual lessons (for example, when the beginner student has Area Studies and the second teacher is free).
For me, this return to a two-person class has worked well, not only because the other student and I are more similar in our language ability, but also because we now have more individual attention.
As much as I personally like (and miss!) the camaraderie of the other students, their more advanced level of speaking and comprehension often made it difficult for me to follow along and had an inhibiting effect on my speaking.
I’ve already made a demonstrable improvement just in the first week since they’ve been gone. It feels like our class again.
Outside of Class
This long-awaited period when we’d return to two-person classes also inevitably means our time here — at FSI, and in the United States more broadly — is finally drawing to a close. V and I have been stateside now for just over three years following our tour in Ciudad Juárez, and have the attendant full life and household to dismantle before our PCS to Rangoon.
My activities outside of class have vacillated between good efforts on culling my personal belongings, and hiding in my bed scrolling fashion Instagram instead.
I want to ignore my overflowing emails, my need to finish my TMTWO (Request for Orders), and the research on what consumables we should bring. I want to ignore figuring out the logistics of FACT training the week after Burmese ends, picking our packout dates, and deciding on how I’m going to manage our items that won’t come to Rangoon or be put in government storage for forwarding to a future overseas assignment.
I definitely want to ignore a small mountain of paper I need to scan and shred. I found myself looking at it the other day and wondering if it weighed more than five pounds, or if there’s anything in the pile I would miss if I didn’t see it for a year (or two). D’oh! Ignoring is not the answer.
Of course, there are always these small irritants. I renewed my driver’s license last year so I could get state-level Real ID. However, I apparently did it more than a year from the expiration date, so the Commonwealth of Virginia in its wisdom issued me an upgraded license but didn’t extend the validity. (Cue massive eye roll.) I tried last week to extend it online, but got a message that said I had to come in person. It isn’t difficult… it’s just… one more thing.
My lack of PCS orders is formally holding me up from getting vaccinations scheduled, applying for my Burmese visa, getting an embassy mailbox assigned, or making flight arrangements for us and our cat. I don’t even have a housing assignment yet from the embassy.
To be fair, I’m not really late with the TMTWO; those leaving before me still haven’t received orders despite filing their TMTWOs a while ago.
V also doesn’t yet have formal approval to “remote” his job to come with me — something we expect to happen but since it isn’t yet done, it’s one more worry in the back of my mind. The last time we underwent such bureaucracy we were separated (at our expense) for months.
Complicating PCS travel, I’m also going to sell one of my cars and drive the other to Washington state on the way to Burma to put it in my dad’s care, stopping in California to see relatives “along the way” on a very tight timetable. After FACT and packout, I will have only days to get to Burma on Post’s preferred timeline before the end of July, so it isn’t really the time to swan off on a cross-country goodbye tour.
But I would honestly rather set my car alight and watch it burn than trust it to government storage again, and I’m pretty done missing time with family because the Department wants to frog-march me along. So I’m happy with this arrangement even though the road trip will be less relaxed than the ones I took in 2022 and 2023.
In the meantime, in late July once I hit the road, V will be post-packout in our house, cleaning and likely sleeping in a hotel before he meets me on the west coast for the big flight to Asia.
So in theory, in the next 13 or so weeks, I would have received my orders-visa-housing assignment, sold my old VW and half our furniture, successfully passed Burmese, completed FACT, packed out everything we own into suitcases, air freight, sea freight, or storage (down to a stray bag of rubber bands), turned our house back over to the landlord, put all my purses in a separate private climate-controlled storage in an undisclosed location because I’m extra, driven across the United States with only what I’m flying with on the plane, and somehow kept my head attached to begin working the day after I arrive in war-torn Burma.
No wonder I’m hiding in my bed! I’m very envious of my colleagues whose families are staying behind in houses they own, and all the officer has to worry about is what to put in their suitcases for a year.
I have no idea how any of this is going to turn out, but I promise I will write about it here. In my experience, the best way to do it is as much as possible, as early as possible. So as we approach the last 90 days later in April, I will be ramping up my efforts towards a smooth PCS. Stay tuned!
Collecting Postcards 