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.
Tag: Gratitude
An End of Tour First…
…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.
Happy Centennial, Foreign Service
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.
PN250: Core Skills for Mid-Level Officers
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.
Happy 10th Birthday, Collecting Postcards Blog (Something Blog-Worthy…Definitely)
Ten years ago today, on Sunday, April 13, 2014, I sat down at my laptop in the guest room of our former northern Virginia apartment and typed out a post called Something Blog-Worthy…Maybe.
I had been a candidate for the Foreign Service on and off since 2011 and had decided to start sharing publicly about my journey to become a diplomat. I reflected that I hadn’t kept any public writing presence since around 2004 when I’d finished my Peace Corps Volunteer service and let the website I’d had at that time lapse. But I wondered if I might be able to pay forward some of the wonderful things I’d learned from others’ blogs as I navigated my FS candidacy and build upon them in my own writing. I like helping others, and writing helps me to process and understand my own experiences.
I didn’t have any way to know then that I was only three weeks and one day from receiving my invitation to join the Foreign Service.
Diplomacy 1, Hacker 0… Part II
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.
Year in Review: 2023 Blog Stats and Recap
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.
Low Battery
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.
Gone From My Sight, Part II
[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.
The Land of the Golden Pagodas
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.
Postcard: Country Roads, Take Me Home
After finishing my visit to my dad and stepmom in Washington state earlier this month, in returning home to Virginia I completed my eighth cross-country leg (and seventh solo) since summer 2022. My husband V had already flown home from my dad’s a couple of weeks earlier to meet his work obligations, so I road tripped back on my own. Still sticking mostly to interstates, this time I decided to modify my route slightly to see some new-to-me places, and checked off two more states I hadn’t yet been to.
Gone From My Sight
In July I wrote about the cross-country road trip I had just taken with my husband V from Virginia to Washington state. The purpose of our trip was to visit my dad and stepmom, so for the first time I went to the west coast without making it down to California.
My stepmom was diagnosed with a serious illness early last summer. Since then, I’d visited her and my dad five other times. But V had not seen either of them since they came to visit us in Mexico in October 2021, several months before my stepmom’s diagnosis. As she entered hospice in June of this year, it became more important V and I visit together. My brother C and my stepbrother J and his family came too; my stepbrother B had visited the week before. And she was very happy to have us all under one roof. For me, it was reason #528 a domestic tour is a great place to be right now vs. serving overseas.
Fifth Tour Bidding: Postscript, Paneling and Beyond
In my growing file of Foreign Service-related “All’s well that ends well” scenarios, I had no sooner hit the publish button on my previous post about waiting to be paneled into the job for which I received my SIP handshake in July before the Department notified me my paneling had been completed.
And thus my fifth tour bidding experience came to a close – all before the regular bid season even starts in September.
Fifth Tour Bidding: What Comes After a Handshake?
As a result of my Special Incentive Post (SIP) bidding efforts, on July 5 I was offered (and accepted) a handshake on our next diplomatic assignment to U.S. Embassy Rangoon in Burma.
However, I reserved a little corner of my mind for disappointment. After a handshake, a number of administrative things would still have to fall into place before the job would feel safely “mine.” Now more than one month later, we are getting very close to that point.
Go Alone, Go Fast; Go Together, Go Far
A couple of weeks ago, my husband V and I drove from Virginia out to Washington state to see my dad and stepmom. My stepmom has been ill and we wanted to spend some time with her and help out my dad. My brother C and my stepbrother J with his family were also planning to be there. Although this was my fourth cross-country trip to the west coast and back in the last 13 months, it was the first one where I didn’t go alone.
As the African proverb from which I borrowed the title of this post tells us, we can get somewhere fastest on a schedule that doesn’t account for the needs of any other travelers, but going the distance often requires more support. Although I have proven with my last year of solo road trips that I can go both fast and far alone, I can also acknowledge there have been plenty of times when having another driver and companion would’ve made the trip more enjoyable (and less worry-inducing for my parents?). And I certainly experienced that on this trip.
Collecting Postcards 