Month: November 2025

Postcard From the 16th Century Bayinnaung Kingdom

by pennypostcard • November 30, 2025 • 0 Comments

Before too much more time elapses, I decided to deviate briefly from the heaviness of the present-day story about my recent truck vs. pedestrian accident and highlight a trip V and I took in October to the ancient city of Bago, about two hours northeast of Rangoon.

I’ll give an update on my hospitalization in Thailand and recovery from the accident soon.

Burma, Foreign Service, Health

Aftermath

by pennypostcard • November 29, 2025 • 6 Comments

Coming home from the embassy that Sunday morning after my accident ushered in not only new levels of physical pain, but a lingering stretch of complicated, disorienting emotional terrain.

Burma, Foreign Service, Health

Butterfly Effect

by pennypostcard • November 28, 2025 • 1 Comment

The night I was hit by a truck earlier this month while crossing the street is blurry in places, with some parts missing entirely. I think of the first 48 hours afterward in two distinct phases: the initial hours of confusion, memory loss, and non-linearity; and the remainder marked by pain, overwhelm, regret, and the slow, devastating realization of what had happened.

The day and night of the accident had been completely ordinary. Ordinary, until a second before impact, when I turned my head expecting only traffic coming from the right and instead saw the truck barreling toward me from the left, traveling on the wrong side of the road. Everything after that is blank for maybe half an hour, followed by other gaps and hazy fragments during the three or four hours I spent in the hospital.

Burma, Foreign Service, Health

Wrong Lane

by pennypostcard • November 24, 2025 • 7 Comments

After more than six weeks of the longest government shutdown in history, things were finally starting to brighten up towards mid-November. After a sudden medevac to Bangkok, my husband V had successful gallbladder removal surgery and returned home to Rangoon. The U.S. government reopened and federal employees received our three missing paychecks in quick succession. The bid season relaunched, sparking renewed excitement about our potential next tour. V and I spent a day off together in observance of a Burmese holiday—swimming in our favorite local pool, then enjoying a quiet evening at home relaxing with our cat. All seemed to be getting back to normal.

Then, the following Saturday night, we had one of the worst nights of our lives—sudden, unexpected, and completely out of the blue. It was the kind of night that shifts your reality, stripping away any illusion that you are in control and leaving you in a world so different from the one you knew just moments before that the surreality comes in continual waves of disbelief.

Foreign Service

Tug-of-War

by pennypostcard • November 9, 2025 • 3 Comments

I heard someone say the other day that during this U.S. government shutdown—now the longest in history—federal employees are being treated like the rope in a game of tug-of-war. It made a lot of sense to me. Neither my husband nor I have been paid for our work for almost six weeks.

The federal government entered a shutdown on October 1, 2025, after Congress failed to pass a continuing resolution to keep agencies funded for the new fiscal year. As a result, almost one million federal employees are either furloughed (my spouse), working without pay (me), or some rotating combination of the two.

It’s hard to imagine anything more ridiculous and unfair than carrying out some of the U.S. government’s highest-priority work in a war zone—while not being paid for it, yet that’s exactly where we are.

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