Category: U.S.

The Storm Before the Calm?

by pennypostcard • July 14, 2024 • 2 Comments

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.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Zero Miles Later

by pennypostcard • June 19, 2024 • 3 Comments

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.

Foreign Service, U.S.

May Flowers

by pennypostcard • June 18, 2024 • 1 Comment

May was a month of celebrations, from the visit of my eldest stepdaughter, to a 10-year anniversary with approximately one-fifth of our original A-100 class, to marking the centennial anniversary of the Foreign Service on the rooftop of the Watergate in Washington, DC.

Foreign Service, U.S.

An End of Tour First…

by pennypostcard • May 25, 2024 • 5 Comments

…At least, for me. I am about three weeks away from finishing my fourth tour in the Office of Children’s Issues in Washington. I’m in a busy period of time at work. But it hasn’t escaped me that at this point during every prior tour, I was working and buried in preparations for Permanent Change of Station (PCS) moves.

By comparison, my to-do list now – while never finished – seems manageable. I do have some trepidation about going into 13 months of full-time training, particularly 10 months of Burmese language class. Going from 60% remote to 100% in-person will pose challenges too – logistical, mental, and personal. But for the time being, I’m grateful to wrap up a tour for the first time without the stress of an overseas PCS move looming days away.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Happy Centennial, Foreign Service

by pennypostcard • May 18, 2024 • 2 Comments

May 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the modern United States Foreign Service. It doesn’t mark the beginning of American diplomacy, which traces back to the beginning of our young union, but rather the passage of the Rogers Act of 1924. The Rogers Act, also known as the Foreign Service Act of 1924, joined the diplomatic and consular services of the United States. (Personnel of the former staffed embassies and legations around the world; the latter primarily promoted trade relations overseas and assisted distressed U.S. sailors – a precursor to today’s American Citizens Services consular work.)

The two services had evolved separately under former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and in merging them the provisions of the Rogers Act created a more merit-based Foreign Service. The new structure provided more reliable pay, a guaranteed rotation process to keep officers from “going native” in their countries of assignment (complete with mandated stateside home leave between foreign tours), and updated policies around officer selection, promotion, and retirement.

Foreign Service, Health, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

PN250: Core Skills for Mid-Level Officers

by pennypostcard • April 30, 2024 • 2 Comments

Two weeks ago I went “back to school,” attending a weeklong mid-level training focused on strategic decision-making at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). I hadn’t been on campus since March 2020, four months before we ultimately left for my third tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. An FSI leadership training had been the last scheduled course I’d managed to attend before Foreign Affairs Counterthreat Training (FACT) was cancelled due to COVID and we went into lockdown in our PCS Lodging apartment.

Four years later, in spring 2024, FSI looks both the same and somehow changed to me. Since I’ve been gone, construction has started – and finished – on the new B Building. The resultant space is modern and light-filled. Flowering trees and daffodils dot the landscape in pinks and yellows. Green grass lawns stretch like taut carpets, connecting the cafeteria to its adjacent counterpart structures and hosting the perfect place for jeans-clad students to read, eat, or throw a frisbee around.

But as I came back to FSI, I couldn’t help but think the bucolic scenery seemingly belied the terrible reality the world – and our workplace – have seen since 2020. However much things have changed and are now attempting to boomerang back, they can’t truly return to what they once were. Not for me. And yet here we are. Like all successful creatures, we adapt and keep going. This trial run going to FSI for a week was as much a test for me of my current logistical and life skills (and how ready I am for a year of a slow roller coaster that builds and builds) as it was the core skills the Department sought to impart through PN250.

Foreign Service, Health, U.S.

Distance Vision, Part II

by pennypostcard • April 3, 2024 • 2 Comments

In January, I wrote about having eye surgery during the first week of the new year to free myself from glasses and contact lenses. The procedure was called refractive lens exchange, or custom lens replacement (CLR, pronounced like the word “clear”).

In CLR, an ophthalmologist removes the natural lens behind the eye and replaces it with a synthetic interocular lens (IOL). The synthetic lens can never develop cataracts and is free of the age-related hardening and opacity a natural lens eventually experiences. CLR restores the eye’s original refractive ability. Therefore, depending on the kind of IOLs inserted – the patient no longer needs vision correction as a result.

Although CLR corrected my astigmatism as promised, it took a second procedure, LASIK, in mid-February to fine-tune the results and try to bring my close-up vision into focus.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Diplomacy 1, Hacker 0… Part II

by pennypostcard • March 17, 2024 • 1 Comment

In my previous blog post, I began to tell the March 2023 story of how a hacker took over my Facebook account. If you missed it, I recommend reading Part I at the link before reading Part II. At the end of Part I, I’d left my tale of woe on a cliffhanger after reaching out to the hacker who had gained access to my Facebook account and locked me out.

The hacker had changed the phone number associated with my account before the primary email address. So I’d been notified via email of his real phone number. It had a Nigerian country code, and I’d found the number active on WhatsApp. The location data Facebook had sent me associated with the new primary phone number for my account indicated the hacker was in Southern California using an iPhone 6S. I wasn’t sure if he was actually in California or perhaps in Nigeria using a VPN to obfuscate his location. I was inclined to think the latter, given his iPhone was about eight generations behind. But at that point, it didn’t really matter in practical terms. He was in and I was out. I had fallen for a dumb scam thinking I was talking to a friend I’d known since 1999 when in fact, it was a total stranger.

Weighing the risk he might try and extort or blackmail me against the fact Facebook had locked down my account and he couldn’t see my personal info anyway, I decided to see what would happen if I contacted him directly.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Diplomacy 1, Hacker 0… Part I

by pennypostcard • March 16, 2024 • 3 Comments

Recently I was talking with some colleagues at a happy hour about ‘pig butchering,’ one of the more nefarious financial scams to emerge from Asia in recent years. In the high-tech long con, a stranger grooms an unsuspecting target through social media or text messages to invest in cryptocurrency. Like fattening a pig for slaughter, the ‘friend’ gradually convinces the target to trust in the relationship enough to take investment advice. After some encouraging returns, the target’s confidence grows. But what the pig butchering victim believes is the beginning of a lucrative opportunity crumbles once they’ve sunk in the desired margin of cash, and the stranger they thought was their friend vanishes with their money.

Sounds dumb, right? Who responds to an unsolicited text or chat from someone they don’t know? Let alone becomes their friend, let alone then sends them money? I was surprised to find out how pervasive this has become.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Year in Review: 2023 Blog Stats and Recap

by pennypostcard • February 12, 2024 • 0 Comments

In 2023, I met my goal of writing fewer words more often. I published 40 posts, several on Foreign Service-related topics. I wrote a series on bidding for and receiving my fifth assignment. I expanded a popular post about FS Housing into a series. I also wrote two new installments of ‘Your Questions Answered.’ In what turned out to be a very road trip and family-oriented year, I made four trips to the west coast and back – three by car – and my mom and dad each visited us on the east coast. In 2022, I’d received a promotion, meaning I wouldn’t be eligible to be promoted again for two years; I enjoyed the professional sweet spot where I didn’t have to PCS, learn a new job, or compete for promotion. The year ended on a sad note: my family faced the death of my stepmother and learned the hard way about the limitations of the Medicare-funded hospice program in the United States.

Foreign Service, Health, U.S.

Distance Vision

by pennypostcard • January 31, 2024 • 5 Comments

A couple of days into the new year, I had eye surgery in northern Virginia to permanently lessen my dependence on glasses and contacts.

Refractive lens exchange – – sometimes called custom lens replacement, clear lens replacement, or CLR (pronounced like “clear”) – – is an outpatient surgery that replaces the natural lens of your eye with an artificial interocular lens. Patients undergo in-depth testing and receive lenses tailored to their individual needs. The procedure stabilizes your vision, prevents you from developing cataracts in the future, and is supposed to correct for near-sightedness, far-sightedness, astigmatism, and reading prescriptions.

The jury’s still out on my up-close vision as my eyes heal and the swelling reduces, but so far my view to the horizon has been sharper than ever.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Low Battery

by pennypostcard • December 31, 2023 • 3 Comments

There’s something about the coming of another new year that makes me want to create a resolution in the same way it makes other people want to opt out of participating. Tying goal-setting to an arbitrary date on the calendar may feel just that, like another push in the endless striving for us to be productive or needlessly trying harder to achieve some hypothetical better version of ourselves. Coming on the heels of the holidays it’s all laced with a particular flavor of consumerism, in case your holiday hangover wasn’t already painful enough. Buy more, do more, be more – often without considering what truly makes us happy and what we truly need.

Foreign Service, Health, U.S.

Gone From My Sight, Part II

by pennypostcard • November 30, 2023 • 6 Comments

[This is a companion piece to a post I wrote in August 2023.]

The second week of October, I arrived in Washington state to help my dad take care of my stepmom L in what I now know was her final six weeks of hospice. She was battling pancreatic cancer – one of the scariest and most intimidating illnesses imaginable.

I don’t think of her as having lost a battle with cancer, but sadly, she did die in mid-November. In the weeks leading up to her death, I was forced to confront my own previous assumptions about the home as proxy for a ‘good’ death and my shock about how much of hospice care in the United States falls directly to a patient’s family.

Foreign Service, U.S.

File Under the Auspices of Accidental Chip on Shoulder

by pennypostcard • October 31, 2023 • 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, a friend I served with in the Peace Corps came to town on business, and we arranged to meet for a weeknight dinner in Washington, DC. We had a wonderful time talking about what’s going on in our lives presently and reminiscing about the nearly 21 years we’ve known each other. A small financial matter at the conclusion of our dinner prompted an unexpected exchange of insights on our different public handling of being charged for something we did not expect to pay for. Watching my friend’s proactive response and hearing his rationale made me realize my own behavior towards “bill shock” deserves further examination and recalibration.

Burma, Foreign Service, U.S.

The Land of the Golden Pagodas

by pennypostcard • September 6, 2023 • 3 Comments

Last week I was surprised by a housing questionnaire from my next post, Rangoon, welcoming us to “the land of the golden pagodas.” I think my surprise was because our arrival to said land is a year and 10 months away! I’ve never known a post to send a housing questionnaire so far in advance.

In comparison, I received our housing questionnaires for Tashkent, Canberra, and Ciudad Juárez four months, eight months, and nine months respectively prior to our scheduled arrivals. So our next post is clearly organized and thinking ahead (although when the Department releases the TMONE assignment cable necessary to confirm an officer has been paneled into a job and therefore will need a housing assignment is outside of post’s timing or control)! I immediately started to grin thinking of Burma’s beautiful pagodas that I’m so looking forward to seeing. However, it isn’t a pagoda we will be living in, but a house or apartment.

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