Tag: Loss

Farewell, Mexico

by pennypostcard • January 13, 2022 • 8 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.

PCS Countdown, Part II

by pennypostcard • January 8, 2022 • 3 Comments

The new year has come and gone. In the week plus since my last blog post, and as the days tick closer to our Permanent Change of Station (PCS) packout, my tempo of pre-departure preparations has become more frenzied. I’ve come a long way, and given the amount we accomplished today there is still quite a bit to do tomorrow but we have made it to the home stretch.

Foreign Service, Mexico

PCS Countdown, Part I

by pennypostcard • December 31, 2021 • 4 Comments

Over the last two weeks as I’ve started preparing for our next Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move, I’ve also been what’s known in the Foreign Service as “Acting.” That’s when you cover your boss’s position while also covering your own, and it’s common during the holidays or transition seasons when many people request leave at the same time. Since I was also Acting for all of last December, my boss offered me the chance this year to take Christmas off. However, I’d elected instead to take leave in January for Orthodox Christmas and New Year; I’d wanted to take V to San Diego to show him old places I love, and to Tucson to explore new places together. Of course, since we subsequently decided to curtail, we need to prioritize packing out and returning to Virginia in favor of traveling for fun. I’ll still take a few weeks of home leave once we get to Virginia, but there won’t sadly be any desert or west coast involvement.

I will reflect in the future on the thoughts and feelings I have about things I won’t be getting to do here. For now, I am looking forward to returning to Virginia. I’m particularly grateful that it’s much easier to PCS from a border post than it is from posts that involve air travel. In my limited experience of three Foreign Service posts so far, it seems the more developed a country is and the more you set up your life there, the more difficult it is to unwind everything at the end.

Foreign Service, Mexico

Fourth Tour Bidding, Part I

by pennypostcard • December 5, 2021 • 6 Comments

As I mentioned in September, towards the end of this past summer, I decided to cut out the third year of my tour and bid for my onward assignment.

When I arrived here in July 2020, I agreed within a month to a third year extension. Most mid-level Foreign Service assignments are already three years in length. Some higher hardship posts like Ciudad Juárez are only two-year assignments, the length of entry-level tours, but grant mid-level FSOs who extend a 15% pay bonus called Service Need Differential (SND) for each of the three years. FSOs must serve all three years to receive the money; the SND cannot be prorated. If you receive some portion of SND money and don’t serve the full term, you have to pay it back. At this particular post, you can even extend to four years, and many do. It’s not a bad gig, so close to the U.S. and if you can stick out three years, the financial incentive is great in addition to getting off the death march of moving every other year.

Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

For Immunocompromised People, The Pandemic is Now + How You Can Be An Ally

by pennypostcard • June 27, 2021 • 5 Comments

The United States is opening back up after almost 16 months of the coronavirus pandemic. According to Google, as of today about 152 million (or 46%) of U.S. residents are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. I have seen other figures that say half the country is vaccinated, and a quarter does not intend to get the vaccine. But for nearly 10 million vaccinated American adults like me with immunocompromised or immunosuppressed conditions, early data is showing vaccine efficacy may provide low or even nonexistent protection against the deadly virus. Medical experts warn immunocompromised people should get vaccinated, but continue maintaining the same masking and social distancing protocols we have the past year. In other words, get vaccinated, but behave as if unvaccinated. For how long, no one can say yet.

For the immunocompromised population, the so-called end of the pandemic feels like a party we have not been invited to but cannot leave. As people unmask around us and celebrate their safety and return to normalcy, public policy – and apparently most everyone we know – has decided the rights of the chronically ill to also be safe and protected from the virus should be sublimated by the convenience and comfort of the healthy, able-bodied majority. Amidst soaring hopes that society will soon be totally back to normal and unreasonable expectations about what activities are safe and medically appropriate for the immunocompromised to participate in, is it any wonder immunocompromised people could use more allies right now?

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

…Vaccinated

by pennypostcard • February 28, 2021 • 2 Comments

This month brought us a tremendous gift: the opportunity to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Foreign Service

Year in Review: 2020 Blog Stats and Recap

by pennypostcard • January 31, 2021 • 7 Comments

As longtime readers of this blog know, since I launched in April 2014 I have never missed a month. Sure, there were a couple of times where I posted on the last day of the month, but I have never gone a month without posting something. And I was not going to start 2021 by messing that up! I don’t know why it matters to me; it is not as if missing a month means I can never come back. People who know me would not be surprised by me adhering to this all-or-nothing mentality though. I guess it’s just the way I am. Lest you think I need rules to govern me entirely, I actually do still very much enjoy writing for this blog; it’s just that the last two months have passed in a blur of work and one crisis after another that have left me simultaneously exhilarated and wiped out, which are stories for another day. So here I am at the eleventh hour with a short recap of 2020 and blog stats for the year.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Ingratitude, and In Gratitude

by pennypostcard • December 22, 2020 • 1 Comment

I always know it has been too long between blog posts when too many half-developed ideas jumble together in my mind, clamoring to get out before they morph into something else with the passage of time. I try to think through my ideas, make them distinct, articulable, frame a coherent narrative from which I can draw conclusions. But sometimes it is not until I just release the words to the page, as it were, that the cross-currents of thoughts begin to flow in one direction and I understand what it is I want to say better than I could when I left it in my own mind. It is almost as if writing is my process of thinking; whether and to what extent I succeed in making a point is another matter.

This isn’t everything, but it’s all true.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Trying Not to Pick Things Up By the Lid

by pennypostcard • November 23, 2020 • 2 Comments

Since our terrific socially-distanced trip to New Mexico six weeks ago for my birthday, V and I have been settling in to life in Ciudad Juárez together. It has been both great, and tedious, and prolonged, kind of like 2020.

Balkans, Peace Corps, Travel

Postcard Flashback: Peace Corps Volunteers Can Always Go Home Again

by pennypostcard • March 24, 2020 • 7 Comments

I have written about my experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) in the Republic of Macedonia (2002-2004) on this blog on quite a few occasions. In particular, I’ve written about departing for service, my own challenges with resiliency, how I initially struggled to learn the Macedonian language, excerpts from letters I sent home, the intense joys of getting a washing machine in my village, and even some things I was later grateful for about working at Peace Corps Headquarters (2010-2014). And of course, Peace Corps’ difficult and historic decision to evacuate all PCVs worldwide and suspend its operations earlier this month.

However, this post isn’t about any of those things. It’s about the heartbreak of losing your home when you finish your service unexpectedly, and the joy of one day getting it back. When a PCV says goodbye to their service, no matter the circumstances, it is a loss. But later you come to realize that the home you created during Peace Corps is never truly gone. It will welcome you with open arms for the rest of your life. So this post is in honor of the 7K+ evacuees tonight.

Australia, Foreign Service

What I Miss (and Don’t Miss) About Australia

by pennypostcard • October 27, 2019 • 2 Comments

Three months ago, during the last week of July, my diplomatic posting to Australia was ending and my colleagues threw me a going-away lunch. Over Indian food, one colleague asked what I would miss about serving in Canberra and what I was looking forward to in the United States. Funny he should have asked, because at that time, what I was going to miss about Australia was a topic I had been thinking about a lot. I’d actually been sketching a blog post outline about it for several weeks!

However, life happened and I didn’t manage to finish writing and editing the post before I left, or even during the past several weeks since we returned to the U.S. I started thinking about it again when I saw the post sitting in my drafts folder, and during my recent Spanish evaluation, when I was asked to compare and contrast life in the U.S. with life in Australia.

So here are my thoughts, in no particular order, about what I miss (and don’t miss) about living in Australia.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

5,225 Miles Later…

by pennypostcard • August 4, 2019 • 6 Comments

Last Friday afternoon, we paused a moment in the foyer of our home to say goodbye and thank it for the last two years. Even though it was empty of our belongings, it still didn’t feel quite like “just a house.” We’d drug all eight of our suitcases and carry-ons out to the driveway right before the taxi arrived, and now they were loaded. It was time to go. We left all the keys, alarm fobs, and garage door openers on the kitchen counter, locked the front door for the last time from the inside and pulled it shut. We had a flight to Sydney, and then a flight to Honolulu to catch. I was about to break my longest streak yet outside the U.S. – two years, four days.

Australia, Foreign Service

Farewell, Australia

by pennypostcard • August 1, 2019 • 6 Comments

It makes me sad to write this post, because it means that later today we leave Australia. We arrived on a cold winter day two years and four days ago, full of anticipation and excitement and hope for a terrific tour. And then all of the years and months and weeks and days and hours dwindled down as we worked and traveled and struggled and celebrated and laughed and worked and worked some more, until they ran out. And yesterday as I walked out of the embassy for the last time with nothing but my purse and some souvenirs, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed with how lucky I have been to serve here.

Australia, Foreign Service

In the Home Stretch… PCS Update III

by pennypostcard • July 27, 2019 • 6 Comments

We’re only a few days now from leaving Australia. The majority of things we have been whittling away at for a couple of months now are crossed off our to-do lists (see also PCS Update I and PCS Update II), although there are still several important things to either do or just get through. Although I’m sure there will be unexpected last-minute stresses as there usually are with a Permanent Change of Station (PCS), and I’m entering an unbelievable fifth week of being sick, I’m feeling like overall we’re in the home stretch.

Australia, Foreign Service

Packout Looms… PCS Update II

by pennypostcard • July 14, 2019 • 8 Comments

Before I get to the last post in my travelogue about our Ghan train trip across Australia, I thought it was time for an update on our upcoming Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move from Australia to the U.S. and eventually, onward to Mexico.

My posture towards the PCS is swinging back and forth between hyper-preparation and organizing everything, and hiding in my bed doing nothing. Both conditions may present even during the same hour. Ha ha! But whatever I do, it will not stop the inevitable: we are leaving Australia in less than three weeks’ time.

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