I haven't written anything about my current career - foreign service officer, U.S. Department of State. I'm currently at the U.S. Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique. On questionnaires requiring employment type, I normally have to choose between government worker or diplomat. I consider myself a consular officer because that's what I've done for the last 15 years - American citizen services abroad and visa adjudications for non-citizens to travel to the USA. In this context I've worked on some harrowing, wild situations. My girls don't understand much about what I do. Tonight the subject of the American prisoner came up. Both of my girls met him several times when we got him out of prison but still essentially under house arrest while we worked our tails off to have him repatriated to his home in the USA. He wasn't under house arrest because he had no home in Mozambique. We had him in a hotel across the street from the clinic where our panel physician is one of the directing doctors, and several doors down from the police station which manages diplomatic cases. I can't go into further details due to privacy issues.
Anyhow, "the American prisoner" as my girls know him came up tonight. He was in a documentary on National Geographic called Trafficked., the episode about unwitting or "blind" drug mules. The journalist and producer of Trafficked, Mariana van Zeller, has a friend in Maputo who helped her put together a film crew, scout locations, etc. to do the documentary. In the process, the friend became involved with the American prisoner, communicated regularly with his daughter back in Minnesota, and helped arrange care for the American prisoner in Machava Prison, things like food and laundry service. Without supplemental help, food in the prison is limited to two meals a day at most, and it's typically just water and paap, or water and matapa, or water and bread, just the barest of staples to survive. The prisoners also grow their own produce and corn, and there are fruit trees.
The friend's husband is a dive instructor, which is why this all came up tonight. My younger daughter wants to do a scuba class. So we went from talking scuba to the American prisoner, and I mentioned that there was a documentary about him. My younger daughter was surprised and excited, asked if she could see it. We watched it tonight. I had watched the first half previously when I was doing consular visits to the American prisoner, but avoided watching the entire episode because I needed to keep a professional distance. Why.
If anyone ever does read this, the answer is that the job of the American government is not to get Americans out of jail abroad. When American citizens leave the USA they become subject to the legal jurisdiction of the country they enter. Imagine if every foreign national in jail or prison in the USA had a foreign government telling judges how to rule in their national's case, or telling the jury how to reach a verdict, or telling the justice system to let their national go, unfair trial, our prisoner is innocent or your prison system is lacking and should not be allowed to detain our citizen.
The role on an Embassy and consular officer is to provide detainees with a list of local lawyers who can represent them, who know the law in their country and how the judicial system works. In addition, the Embassy and consular officer ensure detainees are treated humanely as far as local conditions can, have access to required prescription medications, and if needed, supplemental "nutritious" food, like protein bars.Visits to pretrial and trial detainees are once per month, more when necessary. If and when American citizen detainees are found guilty, the Embassy ensures visits once every three months to the prisoner to check on their overall well-being, and in many situations pass books, learning materials, family letters and such. If lucky, maybe we can pass a pack of cigarettes or a bucket of KFC as well. In my career I've advocated for medical and family visits for detainees and prisoners, helped arrange funds to buy them food, clothing and other services that prisons systems in many countries do not provide. That's the job of family. If you are in prison in Shanghai and you are from Shanghai that makes sense. If you are from the USA and were arrested visiting Shanghai for the first time, it doesn't make much sense, and that's when the Embassy intervenes to help supply the basics. Disappointing,right? Even infuriating? But there it is; our job is generally not to get Americans out.
Put another way, our job is not to be finders of fact. That is the roles of investigators, police, prosecutors, judges, and the occasional jury. We do not discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. We provide services to all detainees and prisoners. In Shanghai I provided services to an American detainee and teacher who was charged with sexually molesting six of his elementary school students. Does that change anyone's calculus on the USG being responsible for springing American citizens from jail abroad? How do we determine who is innocent and who is not? We don't. I'm not even saying the teacher was guilty of that heinous crime, if it occurred at all. (You can look it up and find the various sides.) We provide basic services, ensure American citizen detainees and prisoners have access to legal representation, try to prevent overt and extreme abuse in prison, find a baseline of humanity in the situation.
Back to the American prisoner in Maputo, Mozambique. He is out and went back home to his daughter in Minnesota. The documentary doesn't show this. It ends in February, 2024. I cannot share with you how he got out or went home. He has the right to privacy and as a government employee I cannot violate that right. My daughters know he got out because they met him while he was staying at the hotel. I visited him almost every evening to help with food. When I did not, Mariana's friend in Maputo and her husband, the scuba instructor, did. Well, the American prisoner did learn how to order take out, so in the end we were not with him every evening. But there is the right to privacy, so I shared very little about the situation and story with my girls. The documentary was the first time my younger daughter learned the story of the American prisoner whom she ate pizza with and who offered her soda. She learned about his daughter. She was impressed. She was also impressed there was a documentary about the whole thing, It's probably the first time she's felt connected to the news or something on TV, that these are real things, not just stories. My daughter is 12.
Tonight is the first time I've reflected on the experience. There were times when the situation became excruciatingly real - especially the conversations I had with the American prisoner's daughter, and taking to his cell mates in the aftermath of the Christmas riots and prison break that left so many people dead, saying goodbye and God bless to them the day the American prisoner left Machava Prison for good, leaving those injured souls behind. The American prisoner was never a number to me, never just part of the job. None of them have been. I take on their stories and their baggage. As hard as I try to keep a professional distance, they seep into my blood.
I'm not very healthy. My health has always been worse since becoming a foreign service officer. I guess this is one reason why. I just want to stock groceries at a Trader Joes back home, where ever home is. Somewhere in the USA.
