Tag: Loss

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Sixth Tour Bidding: Showing Up

by pennypostcard • December 10, 2025 • 0 Comments

When the U.S. government closed for more than six weeks this autumn, it completely blew up the Foreign Service bid-season timeline for summer 2026 bidders. Summer 2026 bidders are those of us completing our assignments next summer who need an onward. Our bid cycle was meant to begin at the end of September 2025, with bids due in October and handshakes coming out in November.

But as the shutdown dragged on through October and into November without appropriations, bidding—an activity not deemed “excepted”—was at a full stop. Posts and bureaus weren’t permitted to interview candidates, and bidders couldn’t express interest in projected vacancies. In an attempt to create parity between excepted employees who were working without pay and non-excepted employees who had been furloughed and weren’t allowed to sign on during the lapse, the organization even took the portal used for most bidding activities offline, cutting off bidders’ visibility on capsule descriptions for open assignments.

Foreign Service, Health

Claustrophobia

by pennypostcard • December 8, 2025 • 1 Comment

My accident—the day I was hit by a truck and my life took a hard right turn—was just over three weeks ago. It feels like a lifetime has passed, yet it’s also difficult to believe I’ve already lost so much time. During a one-year tour, each week makes up 1.9% of the assignment. By that math, I’ve already lost 5.8% of my time in Burma (along with post allowances like danger and hardship pay), and the count keeps climbing because of this accident.

Over the 20 days I’ve now spent hospitalized in Thailand, the overall ordeal has felt a bit like Groundhog Day, even as the details of my daily lived experience have shifted subtly over time.

Burma, Foreign Service, Health

Aftermath

by pennypostcard • November 29, 2025 • 5 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

Wrong Lane

by pennypostcard • November 24, 2025 • 5 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.

Burma, Foreign Service

Sixth Tour Bidding: Not So Fast

by pennypostcard • October 20, 2025 • 2 Comments

When I first wrote about sixth tour bidding in late September, I described it as a “ready or not” situation; bidding had snuck up on me quickly at less than two months into a one-year tour. But just two days after the cycle opened, everything ground to a halt. October 1 marked the start of the new fiscal year, and without an approved federal budget, the government shut down. And so, at least for now, this bid season has become another exercise in “hurry up and wait.”

Foreign Service, U.S.

Wishing for Halcyon Days

by pennypostcard • August 10, 2025 • 0 Comments

In late July, after leaving Virginia and driving almost 2,800 miles by myself, I arrived in California. I think my friends and family used to be in disbelief when in 2022 I first started driving across the country alone to see them, but now my wild stunts have become almost expected.

My original plan had been to drive directly to the home of my nana in the San Francisco Bay Area. But when I’d looked at my route, I’d realized I would drive right by my mom’s in the Sierra Nevada Foothills on the way there. It made sense to stop at my mom’s to avoid arriving at my nana’s—about three hours farther away—at night. I got to my mom’s right around dinnertime, just as I’d planned.

Foreign Service, U.S.

A Sad Day for Diplomacy

by pennypostcard • July 13, 2025 • 3 Comments

Friday was a mixed bag of emotions for me. On one hand, I was happily celebrating the successful end of 10 months of Burmese study. I was busy running errands around town, completing lab work, seeing my doctor to fill prescriptions before moving to Burma, using the official pouch to save my precious suitcase space and advance work-related materials to myself in Rangoon, and driving my husband V to his urgent dental surgery.

But on the other hand, as V and I were making every effort to deconstruct our lives in the United States and prepare to move ourselves and all our stuff on overseas government orders, we were paradoxically also both monitoring our work emails to see if we were losing our jobs. That’s right, losing our jobs. On Friday, the Department of State fired more than 1,300 U.S.-based employees via email, including almost 250 Foreign Service Officers (FSOs).

Foreign Service, U.S.

Moving Ahead: Learning Burmese, Week 40

by pennypostcard • June 8, 2025 • 4 Comments

Week 40 was the week where we could finally say, “We’re moving to Burma next month.”

And also, “Less than five weeks left of language class.”

Psychologically, each time we’ve advanced to a new stage in the program—moving from single-digit to double-digit weeks, hitting week 20, week 30, and so on—has felt like a milestone. And none more so yet than week 40.

Foreign Service, U.S.

A Message From Beyond, Part II

by pennypostcard • May 5, 2025 • 0 Comments

This post is the second half of a story from 2023 that I began to write last week. If you haven’t read the first half, I recommend you do so first so this post will make sense.

Foreign Service, U.S.

A Message From Beyond, Part I

by pennypostcard • April 27, 2025 • 3 Comments

I want to take a break from the intensity of Burmese study-related posts and tell a story I’ve been meaning to share since 2023. It’s an emotional story, sad, and long, but I think important, so I will tell it in two parts. This is the first part.

It’s fair to say I am the type of person who relies more on science than I do faith to explain what I experience in life. Most people who know me would probably describe me with words like serious, rational, skeptical, judicious, and methodical.

However, I have also long believed there are things we don’t understand about the human experience. In my opinion, sometimes things happen that we cannot simply explain (or explain away) with facts. Some things we simply feel, and intuitively believe to be true, even if we cannot prove it. This is a story about something like that. It’s a story about a message from beyond.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Earthquake and ချယ်ရီပန်ပွဲ (Cherry Blossom Festival): Learning Burmese, Weeks 30-31

by pennypostcard • April 6, 2025 • 0 Comments

Calendar year 2025 has continued to present a strange mix of hardship and beauty. Over the past two weeks of Burmese class, the cherry blossoms around Washington, DC’s Tidal Basin reached peak bloom—just as a devastating earthquake struck Burma, killing thousands.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Winter Sun: Learning Burmese, Weeks 16-18

by pennypostcard • January 4, 2025 • 4 Comments

The Friday of week 16 in our 44-week Burmese course fell just before Christmas and brought our second progress evaluation. For me, the evaluation was a frustrating experience, the culmination of weeks of discouragement with my slowed progress since our class expanded from two students to four at varying levels.

I pretty much bombed my evaluation, despite intensively studying grammar, reviewing my thematic texts, and dedicating five hours before the evaluation to quiet practice and protecting my energy. By contrast, the effort I put into creating a memorable holiday for my family paid off, which is generally what I expect when I’ve worked tirelessly to achieve something.

Foreign Service, U.S.

To Its Rightful Place

by pennypostcard • August 23, 2024 • 1 Comment

I believe that when someone passes away, especially at a young age, those who knew them have a responsibility to share their memories with the deceased’s family as much as possible. Once a person is gone, memories of them become incredibly precious. Whether something tangible like photos, letters, or mementos, or intangible like stories and reflections, every memory becomes part of a finite legacy—everything that remains is all there will ever be.

Every mourner experiences the loss of a relationship with the deceased that was theirs alone: irreplaceable, and deeply personal. Each person who loses someone loses a unique version of that person only they knew, and in some way, part of themselves along with it. Sharing memories, even if painful, forms part of the lasting echo of the individual. It helps to preserve their essence in the hearts of those left behind.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Know the Signs

by pennypostcard • July 25, 2024 • 1 Comment

In addition to ending my fourth tour and traveling to the west coast to see family, I did two other important things in Washington, DC in June. I had an opportunity to march in the Capital Pride Parade as a volunteer for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), and I went to a work-related training on atrocity prevention at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

Both the volunteer work and the training provided opportunities to reflect on important signs we may see that things are going wrong – before it’s too late.

Foreign Service, Travel, 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.

Page 1 of 5

1 2 3 … 5 »

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: