Tag: Consular Work

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

PN250: Core Skills for Mid-Level Officers

by pennypostcard • April 30, 2024 • 0 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, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Diplomacy 1, Hacker 0… Part I

by pennypostcard • March 16, 2024 • 2 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.

Burma, Foreign Service, U.S.

Flag Day Announcement… V

by pennypostcard • July 7, 2023 • 4 Comments

On July 5, handshake day dawned as I was having a somewhat frantic morning. Between juggling the end of my 24-hour Overseas Citizen Services duty officer shift and the requisite duty report, acting for my boss, dealing with the lack of wifi connectivity in our house, and fretting over my damaged car out in the driveway with a fallen tree limb laying next to it, I was distracted. I was aware a bidder handshake could hit my phone anytime, and that at least one post had short-listed me. However, I was slightly more focused on trying to get out the door to work in DC and be responsive to emails about a duty issue that had caught the attention of our front office.

And then, somewhere between trying to curl my hair and looking too hard at my eyebrows in the mirror, I glanced down at my iPhone balanced on the edge of the pedestal sink and saw the offer pop up.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Fifth Tour Bidding: Before Handshake Day

by pennypostcard • July 6, 2023 • 3 Comments

The day bureaus are permitted to start extending assignment offers to successful bidders on the Special Incentive Post (SIP) bid cycle is called handshake day. In the lead-up to SIP handshake day, my life was a little chaotic. So much so, in fact, I almost lost track of the fact handshake day was coming. It’s not that I actually forgot about it; I was certainly aware. But I wasn’t exactly twiddling my thumbs and waiting for it to arrive, either.

Australia, Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, Mexico, Uzbekistan

Consular Officers Have the Best Stories, Part I

by pennypostcard • June 28, 2023 • 3 Comments

When I joined the Foreign Service as a consular officer, future colleagues said to me, “Oh, consular officers have the best stories!”

“Oh yeah?” I smiled.

“Sure. Between the visa fraud, emergency passports, natural disasters, and American citizens getting arrested overseas, there’s no shortage of stories. I once visited this U.S. citizen in jail, you wouldn’t believe what happened with this guy…”

Oh boy, I thought. Tell me. I can’t wait.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Fifth Tour Bidding: A Preview

by pennypostcard • April 17, 2023 • 3 Comments

Unbelievably enough, I have officially passed the halfway point of my fourth tour and that means it’s time to start thinking about bidding. Again.

It is strange and a little unsettling to think about bidding a fifth tour, while I feel like we just figured out where to store our linens. It took 11 months from the time we moved into our Virginia house for the new master bedroom furniture set we ordered to even arrive. I just joined a gym this month. Thinking of having to find another job and pack up every item we own all over again kind of makes me want to hide under the bed. And… it also kind of makes me think how exciting it is that every country is a possible new home.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

On the Road Again: Coast to Coast

by pennypostcard • March 29, 2023 • 3 Comments

As I mentioned in my Road Trips 2022 roundup post last December, I not only drove by myself from northern Virginia to the west coast in June, but also in November to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. I left at the end of a busy work day the Thursday before the holiday, fighting my way through rush-hour traffic on the beltway to get a head start on my journey.

And as usual when you’re trying to leave the office for a couple of weeks at a time, I had an active international parental child abduction case with two children returning to the United States from Venezuela in-progress that very afternoon. Thanks to the help of my excellent colleagues, I was able to track the return up until I needed to walk out the door, and then hand the case off to my backup. As I crossed my first mountain pass in Pennsylvania’s Alleghenies against pelting snow, she worked to monitor the landing of the children’s flight in Miami and update our leadership on their reunification with the left-behind parent. When I finally checked into my motel in Ohio and caught up with my work emails very late at night, I was elated to see all was well that ended well. Fortunately for me, my road trip went just as smoothly.

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

Who’s Who at Main State: A Scavenger Hunt

by pennypostcard • January 29, 2023 • 2 Comments

Last fall, our team in the Office of Children’s Issues paused our regular international parental child abduction casework and bilateral portfolios for a daylong retreat. In addition to team-building exercises and an in-depth examination of our processes to see where we might improve internal coordination and workflow, we also took a 10-minute walk over to the main State Department building near 23rd and C Streets in northwest Washington, DC.

Balkans, Travel, U.S.

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part I: Heading to Macedonia

by pennypostcard • January 1, 2023 • 3 Comments

At the end of July, I went to an Incubus show a couple of hours south of DC by myself. V and his daughters had already left a couple of weeks prior for the Balkans, and had been enjoying traveling together in Macedonia and Greece while I stayed home alone in Virginia, worked, and held down the fort. I would travel to Macedonia myself for a few weeks the day after the show. I was going to miss my 19-year old stepdaughter D, who had to return to the States before my arrival in Europe to prepare for her sophomore year in college in Tennessee. But V and my 23-year old stepdaughter A, who is in graduate school in North Carolina, would be awaiting my arrival to spend some family time with V’s relatives in Macedonia and Serbia, and the three of us were planning a road trip to cities across the former Yugoslavia, including Sarajevo and the Croatian coast.

Foreign Service, Health, Travel, U.S.

No Nepenthe

by pennypostcard • June 22, 2022 • 3 Comments

I technically started my job in the Office of Children’s Issues (CI) – part of the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ Office of Overseas Citizen Services at the State Department – back in early March after my home leave ended. The position is as a country officer working on international parental child abduction (IPCA) cases; CI functions as the U.S. Central Authority for the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

In a nutshell, the convention is a treaty whereby the U.S. and other countries agree that matters of custody and visitation of minor children between parents should be decided in countries where children are habitually resident, without one parent removing the child to a different country in order to prevent or limit access by the other. In other words, we want to avoid or remedy situations where one parent abducts their child to (incoming) or from (outgoing) the United States.

More on that work at a future date, but for the time being, suffice it to say between training and onboarding, the time it took to receive a regional portfolio assignment, and various technical difficulties with getting up and running with the database access I needed to begin actually doing my job, the first several weeks weren’t as productive on my part as I’d expected. I felt guilty my colleagues were so busy while I largely spent March and April waiting to start working. I felt like I burned up a lot of time doing online webinars and bugging IT folks, and walking around my neighborhood at lunchtime only to return to an empty inbox.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Not So Far Away: Last Hurrah to the Sunshine State

by pennypostcard • April 22, 2022 • 3 Comments

The first week of March, I drove from our new home in Virginia down to Florida for my dear friend T’s baby shower. I’d made my plans in January upon receiving her invitation, and they hadn’t included flying; the freedom of road tripping in my trusty Volkswagen felt safer and more socially distant as the Omicron variant bled across the country. I also wanted to do some IKEA shopping, and perhaps stop in NC to see my matron of honor J and my stepdaughter A. It would be my last week of home leave, and thus my last immediate chance to get away and clear my mind before starting a new period of professional focus.

Foreign Service, Mexico

Farewell, Mexico

by pennypostcard • January 13, 2022 • 4 Comments

My last night of every overseas tour, I have traditionally bid the assignment goodbye with a post I draft and publish upon my departure the following day. As much chaos as a PCS entails, once the packout is over, the badge is handed in, and the suitcases are packed, I will find moments of calm to reflect upon such an exercise. I did so in 2017, in the wee hours before the expeditor came for us in Uzbekistan, filled with gratitude and nerves. I did so in 2019 as we wrapped up our last breakfast in Australia on the back veranda, when the only thing that kept my heart from bursting was that winter had made our vibrant, colorful yard cold and still.

And now I’m getting ready to do it again in 2022. This morning we will load up our cars and begin our nearly 2,000 mile drive across Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee to our new home in northern Virginia. The end of this tour feels both too soon and like it should have happened months ago. I probably won’t truly understand how I feel about it for a long time, but it’s a definitive goodbye all the same. As we start over we will carry with us a piece of this place we barely got to know, and I will leave a piece of myself behind.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Flag Day Announcement… IV

by pennypostcard • December 14, 2021 • 7 Comments

Monday, November 1 was Handshake Day for the Summer 2022 bid cycle. My handshake email came early in the morning and was not a total surprise to me. The Bureau of Consular Affairs had sent me an email on October 25 to tell me I was the Bureau Leading Candidate, or BLC, for the position and inquire whether it was still a valid bid for me. It was. I was very interested in the work and had interviewed for the position twice, including once from my family vacation at the Iberostar (on my birthday, unbeknownst to the interviewer!). None of my political coned bids had ultimately gone to the final stage, so I wasn’t expecting further BLCs. CA wasn’t going to offer me more than one choice, so it had come down to this. V and I discussed all of the implications and decided, as we had when we’d decided to bid jobs in that area, that we could make it work.

Foreign Service

Fourth Tour Bidding, Part II

by pennypostcard • December 11, 2021 • 2 Comments

I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for (or worry about) Summer 2022 bidding, which started in mid-September 2021 and lasted about six weeks. Shortening my tour in Ciudad Juárez by a year had propelled me into bidding the day before a solo road trip to see my mom in northern California for the first time in over two years. And bids would be due several weeks later during my dad’s upcoming visit, when we would be at a Mexican resort almost a four hour flight away. I hadn’t seen him for over two years either, so I wasn’t open to changing my leave plans, plans I had made many months before when things had been different. If anyone had told me then I would be bidding and leaving Post a year early, I’d have told them the chances of that were somewhere close to zero. Bidding this year was the last thing on my mind, in terms of vacation plans or anything else.

[This post is a companion piece to Fourth Tour Bidding, Part I.]

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