A few weeks ago I was feeling overwhelmed by health issues, thinking I might need to retire early from the Foreign Service, and was looking back at my career as a foreign service officer. Foreign service officer is abbreviated as FSO. We use a lot of acronyms in the Foreign Service (FS). What were the highlights of my career as an FSO? What were my favorite assignments? Did I accomplish anything? For that last question, it's really this: Did I help people, make their lives better? That's an important one. I left behind a career as a social worker helping refugees assimilate into American society to become an FSO. I felt that as a social worker I was serving my community and my country. I did not feel like I was moving onto a higher calling by becoming an FSO. I was leaving a higher calling behind. So, it's important to me that in this FSO career I did something to help people. However, I'm probably saving that for a later post.
Here, I'll take an easier route and reveal my favorite assignment. The answer surprised me. I'm in the middle of my fifth tour. My career began in Arlington, VA with about nine month's worth of training, two thirds of that language. Not a highlight. Not my favorite assignment by any means, and technically not my first tour. Studying Mandarin Chinese language for six months was painful. There are much better ways to learn a language than the Foreign Service Institute (FSI, now NFATC) method. I had been looking forward to language training. Paid to learn a language; how awesome is that! Instruction methods were old school, not a good thing in my opinion. And for six months there was no escaping needing to think in Chinese, always the pressure to learn more, study more, memorize more, think more in Chinese, and finally talk, talk, talk in Chinese. My wife is a native Mandarin Chinese speaker and comes from a Malaysian Chinese background. Encouragement for her means constant criticism, or constant exhortations to study more, study harder. I generally like talking/speaking in Chinese, communicating. I don't like it when my wife is constantly grimacing, correcting me, and ever other sentence telling me to study more, study harder, and then gradually, little by little, and with a lot more grueling study and practice I will be able to communicate correctly.
Obviously scratch off that initial training assignment as a career highlight or favorite. I think people go into the FS dreaming about their favorite place to be assigned, i.e., their number one post to work and live. I didn't think about this too much. I was just excited to make it into the Foreign Service. That said, when I did think about it, I mildly dreamed of Central Asia, Mongolia or Kyrgyzstan, the further places from the USA, foreign and isolated. I padded out those dreams with open spaces, barren mountains, the occasional sheltered lake and mountain stream in a pine forest with fresh, crisp air. Or, I could have dreamed of Central Africa. That also seems incredibly foreign and distant from the USA. However, I knew my wife would never go in for an assignment to Africa, and I don't like jungle To finalize entrance into the FS as an FSO, one must sign an agreement that she or he is worldwide available. So, technically I knew we could be assigned to a post in Africa. The Department of State (DOS) told me to expect China.
Let's get beyond training. My posts have been Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Washington D.C., Hanoi, and Maputo. My favorite place to live was Rio. We lived near the base of the Dois Irmaos, or Two Brothers, the picturesque pair of mountains or hills seen in the distance from Ipanema Beach. I loved Rio for the mountains and the views from the tops, which always included the sea when looking east. The beaches, famous and otherwise, were fine. I am a mountain person and Rio is defined as much by mountains as it is by beaches. Women in thong swim suites, women unashamed of their bodies regardless of age and shape, were a bonus. A daily bicycle commute to work that included riding along Leblon, Ipanema, and Copacabana Beaches, then past the famous Pao de Acucar, or Sugarloaf Mountain, was almost unreal as the perfect bicycle commute. Our children were young while we were in Rio, and the locals absolutely adore children. It proved to be an entry way to meeting many Cariocas, the Brazilian slang for local folks from Rio. Cariocas are generally very buoyant, vibrant people. My wife love this about Rio, loved the music and dancing that seemed to come to cariocas so freely. It was a wonderful time to be alive as a family in Rio. Work was work.
But, looking back, our positing in Rio was not the highlight of my career as an FSO. To my surprise, as I took everything into account, it was Washington D.C., well, work in Washington D.C. and life in Pimmit Hills, Virginia. I felt like a normal American. We rented an extremely small house in one of America's first subdivisions built for veterans of WWII. The house had a big yard, as did all of the little houses in Pimmit Hills. Our house had a front porch. We had a small garden. I did a lot of gardening, tree trimming, raking leaves, and mowing the lawn. Our girls could walk to school across a small stream and through the edge of some woods, though sometimes they road the long, yellow school bus. We walked to parks, had picknicks in the back yard, jumped on the free trampoline we found on Craigslist. The girls had friends in the neighborhood who could easily come for visits. There was a 7-11 just up the street a few houses away, which brought all sorts of characters to the edge of the neighborhood, and not far beyond that a small shopping center with a Trader Joe's that I essentially used as our fridge, being able to walk there in two minutes. We went for hikes along the creeks leading to the Potomac River almost every weekend. I rode my bicycle to work most days, sometimes taking the metro. My bike commute was along multiuse paths most of the way and was about a 10-mile ride in one direction. Towards the end I crossed the Potomac River on the I-80 bridge with views of monuments and Georgetown University's towers. I passed the Kennedy Center and the Watergate Hotel.
My girls think of their three years in Pimmit Hills fondly, almost like home. I'd never consider Virginia or the D.C. metro area to be home, so it's odd to see that my girls do. They were comfortable there. I think life made a little more sense and had a nice, identifiable rhythm they fit into. I felt rather normal, which is a good thing. I was happy to not deal with house keepers and nannies, do everything on our own, pay normal bills. The commute to work was good and healthy. Work in Children's Issues felt fulfilling, like I was serving a higher good, or at least a higher purpose. Senior FSO's always say their best tour is their current tour. For me, that third tour in Washington D.C. was it. I can't bring myself to be diplomatic and write otherwise.
Work was not just work. For my Washington D.C. tour I was a country officer in Consular Affairs' Office of Children's Issues (CI). My job was to resolve international parental child abduction (IPCA) cases. I more or less chose the assignment as my number one spot when I added it to my assignment bid list. It was not a popular place to work, but the Special Advisor for Children's Issues visited the U.S. Consulate General in Rio while I was in the middle of my bidding process. She gave me an earful on the nature of IPCA work. What stuck was that I could help people in crisis every day. Soul crushing one of my managers in Rio called it. Those cases never get resolved, so you talk to people in crisis every day and there's nothing you can do. It's perfect for you another one of my manager's told me. I respected them both and went for soul crushing. As soon as I put CI on my bid list with those nine other "dream" assignments, CI was the guaranteed destination for my third tour.
I'm not to go into any detail on the abductions I worked to resolve. I will write that I was fortunate to have two mentors, older ladies, Giny and Ann. They were long serving civil servants in CI, had both endured almost unthinkable trauma with their own children, and could be forces of nature in resolving international parental abductions, bringing kids back to their left behind parents (LBPs). Many cases do go unresolved. Country officers talk to the LBPs on the phone and in person, time after time, year after year, and there's nothing that can be done to help them short of sanctioning the countries where their children have been taken. The DOS (specifically CI and the Special Advisor for Children's Issues) must review foreign governments for non-action in helping return abducted children to LBPs and eventually these countries can face sanctions if the governments fail to take action. Who knows if sanctions would resolve anything. They have been threatened. LBPs with no other options often demand sanctions. I don't blame them. What else can they do? The majority of countries are not party to the Hague Convention on IPCA, so there are no international laws that can help them, no resource other than to negotiate with the taking parents (TPs) or demand the DOS sanction the countries where their children were taken. I'll simply write that Giny and Ann were inspiring. I resolved many cases for which the Hague Convention was not a tool, and in others was able to convince the abducting parents to at least allow the LPPs to talk to their children some disconnected from the LBPs for more than a decade. The work was exhausting and often left me heartbroken and feeling useless. But looking back, I know working on these cases is what I will remember most about my career as an FSO. If I hadn't had that third tour I'd be doing something other that the Foreign Service today.
The last thing I will mention on assignments and tours is that it's only at the beginning when it's about the location. Most FSOs and people thinking of becoming an FSO have that dream place they want to work and live. By the second or third tour it's not so much location as it is the work, the dream job. There are hundreds of different types of jobs in the DOS. Towards the end it can become less about the job and more about the people. The FS is an up or out organization. FSOs who are skipped for promotion for too many years must retire. Then there is the usual attrition for issues such as: This was not the career a given FSO thought it would be; unbearable distance from family; health issues; overseas life wearing on spouse and kids; a given FSO is a fuck up and gets forced out; and a thousand other issues. At any rate, when an FSO is up there in rank and responsibility, their peers become fewer and fewer. They know all their peers personally or by reputation, so posts can become an issue of who you want to work with as opposed to the work itself. The luster and excitement of exotic life and work in that dream location abroad went up in smoke a long, long time ago.
