During Week 38, I finally completed my fourth and final informal progress evaluation, which had been rescheduled twice from Week 36. It went fine overall, and I was placed in the lowest band of the ‘on-track’ category.
I dislike the evaluation process — the discomfort of being on the spot, the way FSI tries to measure learning for curriculum it doesn’t uniformly teach across language departments, and the eternal conflict between students needing to prepare topics for the test vs. acquire the tradecraft language skills we actually need to do our jobs. But for the time being, the system is what it is and it’s still better than no language training at all. With only five weeks remaining now until my formal End of Training test, I’ve accepted that I’m going to need to focus on studying more than I want to (or really have time to) in the coming period.
As we enter the final stretch — the weeks that start with a “4!” — and complex sentences are churning a little more easily out of my mouth, at least it feels like I’ve broken on through to the other side.
At the beginning of week 38, I went and dropped off our visa applications at the Embassy of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar in Washington, DC. It was a quick, polite, and pleasant experience.
It’s a humbling experience to walk in visa applicants’ shoes and reflect on the uncertainty of the outcome. During the next year in the consular section, I will come face to face with hundreds or even thousands of people who face similar uncertainty. They will search my face during their interview, hoping for some clue of what my decision will be. Hoping as I now do, that they’ll be approved, able to travel and carry out their plans.
Also during week 38, I met online with future colleagues at Post to hear about life in Burma. For whatever reason, my Burmese classmates and I still haven’t been assigned social sponsors.
So the consular officers currently at post—including my predecessor—are not only coordinating consular transition discussions with my future boss and me around class schedules, work demands, and a nearly 11-hour time difference, but they’re also doing the legwork of answering our many non-consular-related questions.
Questions about consumables, mail, effects shipment times, hiring helpers, the embassy dress code, housing, the effect of rolling blackouts, locally-available activities, domestic and regional travel possibilities, and money. Information that makes the upcoming transition feel more concrete.
At the end of Week 38, just as I was basking in the relief of having completed my progress evaluation and preparing to head out of town with V for Memorial Day, I came across a stunned bird sitting on the sidewalk outside FSI’s C Building. In the preceding week or two, all the buildings at FSI had undergone window washing, and I realized with sadness this bird had flown full-speed into the glass.
After an hour of watching the bird try unsuccessfully to fly away (V and I brought it a little bottle cap of water and some berries, which it ignored), it seemed to recover itself. But then I saw three other birds dead near some bushes under the sky bridge connecting the F and C buildings. It made me so sad that they had all crashed and fallen dead, their colorful feathers and beaks in pitiful contrast to the black sidewalk. As FSI has signs up saying it is a National Wildlife Federation-certified wildlife habitat, I’m going to ask my maintenance colleagues to consider putting decals on windows around campus as the Audubon Society recommends to help prevent bird collisions. In a time of budget cuts, I bet that could still be done with little to no cost, and maybe even with supplies we already have.
As we enter week 40, I’m feeling mostly calm in the face of much uncertainty. I need to arrange travel, packout, the cancellation of various utilities and services. I need to sell a car, say goodbye to friends, and make decisions about everything we own, from furniture down to the condiments in our refrigerator.
But without orders or a visa yet, it feels like it will all break loose at once and become a hasty rush of to-dos. This amidst news of a massive reorganization at the State Department that will affect thousands of employees. In some sense, we’re all trying to overcome many obstacles to begin our new assignments while also being afraid that any of us could lose our jobs.
One of the many reasons required traits for Foreign Service Officers include composure, planning and organizing, and resourcefulness.
Collecting Postcards 