Full Circle: The Adventure Ends

(Note: This post is my story of starting and ending a career in the Foreign Service and comes at a time when nearly 3000 (former) employees are living firsthand their own adventure-ending stories - nearly half not by choice. Given this was my third career, I came in older than most of my cohort. Therefore, I qualified for the minimum retirement age plus ten service years retirement program (MRA+10). This option was a relative luxury in comparison to other younger or newer employees who simply were fired mid-career. I elected retirement for many reasons I'll detail in a later post, but one reason was the hope that by removing myself from the rolls, I might save a spot for someone who didn't have another option. Please don't take the rosy tone of this reflection on my career as evidence that I am okay in any way shape or form with the manner in which the new powers-that-be carried out the RIF process. Behind these words, written only to highlight the motivations that brought me and my husband to start our Foreign Service story, is a healthy stream of obscenities about how we were treated and publicly portrayed in these final months. But more on that later. With that, here's my story:)

It was November 11, 2002 and I was waiting for my flight from Nairobi to Port Louis, Mauritius. Seven months into a solo trek around the world and frankly, I was bone tired, but also excited to be continuing east. 

Given this, you're led to believe that I'd actually BEEN to Nairobi. While technically correct as there I was in the airport, the truth was that just a few days before I was set to leave Tanzania for Kenya, I chickened out of visiting the city itself. Nairobi was meant to be my final stop on the African continent after backpacking my way up the southern and eastern edge from Cape Town, through South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania. This stretch of travel had been the most challenging thus far, but also the most rewarding. While I was gaining comfort in the daily rhythms of life, a little voice in my head was beginning to question the odds of my good luck continuing. So after nearly three months with only one illness, two minor thefts, and many, many scary (but survivable) modes of transportation, I lost the nerve for another risk - one nicknamed "Nairobbery" at that - and instead took a bus directly from Arusha, Tanzania to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. 

There I sat, drowning my wimping out shame in some refrigerated beverage while soaking up a few hours of efficient air conditioning in the terminal before my flight. After months with rarely either of those two, this felt like a luxury. Seated near me was a family of four: two parents and two young children, a girl and a boy of maybe five and seven years old. I watched them for a bit, imagining their story. They sat quietly, even the kids, but looked anxious and tired and I guessed this was their first time in an airport. My curiosity got the best of me and I started a conversation with the father, the only one among them who spoke any English. They were Sudanese and headed to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Seated near them, but not engaged in our chat, waited a Canadian woman with a folder of paperwork in the crook of one arm. Their refugee minder, I learned. The father told me of their resettlement plans, how they were going to stay in Winnipeg for a short time and then hopefully move somewhere less... cold. They wore flimsy winter jackets against the airport's A/C that I predicted would barely suffice inside the Winnipeg airport in November, much less once they stepped out through the automatic doors and into their new country. The father told me his children were born in the refugee camp in Kenya and knew no other life. Our conversation quickly ran out of vocabulary and so I wished them well and let them be. 

As my wait continued, I kept thinking about the family and how their lives were about to change. How the children would be educated in Canada, would soon be fluent in English, would know four seasons, rocky mountains, Tim Hortons, hockey. I then observed their minder and imagined what her job was like. Was she accompanying them the whole way, or just getting them onto the plane?  How involved was she personally in their case and did she know their names without looking at their paperwork? What happened in their family history to bring them to that camp to begin with? Did she imagine for them what I had imagined? I knew right then I wanted a job like hers. Something where I could merge my insatiable curiosity about lives I haven't lived and my ingrained drive to make things better for others. I just didn't know what that could be.

In 2011, I would find out. 

But first, in May 2009, my husband stumbled upon an ad in the Seattle Times for a State Department recruiting fair coming to town. Hmmm... let's check it out, we decided. Since we'd met, we'd shared a long term goal of finding some type of life or job that would let us live overseas. I wanted to be someone like the refugee minder I'd observed in the Nairobi airport, and he pictured a life like he experienced as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic. I'd heard of the State Department, absorbing the name as one does via the news running in the background. I knew we had embassies and ambassadors and helped American travelers... and that's about it. Let's just say that U.S. history and government was my first period class in high school and the information absorption rate was not great. But during the course of the recruitment fair, composed of a panel of speakers from across all Foreign Service career tracks and an impressive buffet spread, I instantly decided that this would be my path. My husband didn't see himself in any of the jobs described, but thought the life sounded pretty cool and encouraged me to go for it. 

On the car ride home, poring over the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) prep booklet they handed out, I decided to take the test in October and started making my study plan. At age 43, even if I had paid attention in high school twenty-something years earlier, I certainly hadn't remembered anything I'd learned about government, history, economics, or international treaties -- just about every subject on the study list. But I stuck to every point in that prep booklet and to my study plan and damned if I didn't pass the FSOT that October.  

And then I passed it the following October for the second time, as my initial application was not strong enough to move forward in the assessment process. Or, as I like to remember it, I received the "you suck" letter and had to start again from scratch. But I wasn't bitter; I just kept studying. Meanwhile, for the heck of it, I also applied to be Foreign Service Office Management Specialist (OMS) as it closely aligned with the work I was doing. 

In March 2011, I was sworn in as an OMS and our Foreign Service adventure began. Giddy with first day excitement, I took a photo of myself with my little flip phone in the Harry S. Truman building women's room mirror in my best suit, newly-minted Department badge in hand. I'd made it. I was proud, my husband was proud, and my mother was over the moon. Three weeks later, our class had our flag day. First stop: Bogota, Colombia!

Incredibly humbled to be included as part of this whole big place. 

Flag Day #1 with some of my FS specialist cohort. 

Skip forward to July 2012, I was sworn in once again. The second application and FSOT had born fruit and I was invited to attend the A-100 orientation as a consular officer this time. Our Foreign Service adventure would take a turn, but would continue. Six weeks later at our second flag day, we learned the next stop would be Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. 

Flag Day #2, now with my (upside down) Consular Affairs pin proudly on my lapel. 

The hundreds of posts on this blog have detailed what happened next, the following 13 years of this career and our lives, inexorably entwined. But on March 8 of this year, I decided it was time for another chapter and filed my retirement paperwork. There is still ink in the pen, blank pages to fill, and that insatiable curiosity for another life not yet lived running strong in my veins. So now it's time to see what's around that next corner. I am forever grateful to the Department for deciding twice that I had the stuff to represent our country overseas. 

My last assignment brought me full circle, back to the Foreign Service Institute's Orientation Division where we all start. I leave the Department with the names, faces, backstories, career hopes, and personal dreams of hundreds of new colleagues still fresh in my mind as I got to know them during the first leg of their own journeys. The Department is in good hands with these folks as our base and I will be cheering each of them on from the bleachers. I wish them all the adventures, insights, friendships, puzzles to work through, smells, tastes, sounds, crazy-looking birds, scary driving, and professional frustrations and triumphs that I know are coming their way as they came ours. There's no stronger feeling of being alive than having to rely on all your senses to figure "it" out afresh every few years, and these good people are up to the task. 

I also leave with detailed memories of the incredible people - both local staff and Americans - I worked alongside over the years. Funny, sharp, full of ideas, full of insight, often full of themselves - you all set a high bar for me to aspire to reach. You taught me immeasurably about diplomacy and consular work, about writing, about leadership, about inclusivity, and about generosity. Perhaps unbeknownst to you, you each mentored me in different ways as I observed and absorbed.  

Thank you all for reading, for humoring me in listening to my stories, for being interested in the career, the life, the people, and the places.  It's been worth it. 

Once again at the Departures terminal and heading out on the next adventure. 

Finding an Oasis in the Megamart

Just a 12 minute walk from our apartment, 25 minutes if I take the bike path winding through the forest, past the wetlands and along the creek, is Megamart, the Latino "supermercado del pueblo" serving the most international community I've ever lived in. Some mornings I head up there shortly after they open at 7:00 am while the air is still somewhat fresh and the day is still full of possibilities. Sometimes I actually need something, maybe a few bell peppers or a bunch of cilantro for a recipe, but just as often I go simply to return to a world I left behind and still miss. 

Today was delivery day and the crew was busy unloading pallets from the large truck parked alongside the market. There doesn't seem to be much of a warehouse at the back of the store, so all stock is brought into the market and non-perishables are stacked out of reach on high shelves lining each aisle. A young man, Guatemalan if I had to guess, balances near the top of a ladder up close to the ceiling. His coworker on the floor grabs a box from a stack and tosses it up where ladder guy snatches it, pivots, and stacks it in unspoken, perfect synchronization. I pause to watch and try not to disturb their rhythm. It helps that the market, as every supermercado I've ever shopped in, is playing Latin music at clear volume. Not that whispery instrumental version of decades-old hits heard in other grocery stores, this is a mix of cumbia, ranchera, bachata, merengue, and boleros pouring out their hearts for lost love. The music sets the mood and beat not only for the shoppers, but also for the stockers moving the boxes in a choreographed bucket line from parking lot to shelves. Employees call out in Spanish, getting their work done while laughing and teasing each other. I wish I could catch more of it, but they speak too fast for me and my ear has gotten rusty over the two years in Virginia. The store has more staff than customers at this hour and they're free to let loose a bit. It's infectious and I find myself smiling and moving to the music. I stroll through aisles of familiar brands of caldo de pollo or res, a wall of Badia brand spices, packets of horchata mix, and jewel-colored bottles of Fabuloso whose heavy perfumy scents bring me immediately back to living in Colombia, Mexico, and El Salvador. 

At the pastry case, I stop to consider a flaky pineapple-filled turnover. Or maybe a pan dulce with brown or pink sugar frosting? These can be lovely when freshly baked but also disappointingly dry shortly thereafter. I resist temptation and move on. I'm balancing two mangos and a nectarine in the crook of one arm and a pack of six mini-flans in the other. A passing staff member hands me a basket with a smile, reading my mind. 

I didn't need much today, just the fruit for breakfast. The flan was an impulse buy, as often happens. I head to the register and greet the young woman checker with a buenos dias. I'm pleased when she responds in Spanish, asking me if I need a bag. 

"Necesita bolsa?"

"No gracias, ya tengo una" I respond and hand her my reusable bag. 

It feels good to be back in this environment with the energy, laughter, music, and a smile from a stranger. It's in contrast with the homogenous chain stores where I do the bulk of my shopping, ringing up and bagging my own purchases without a word to anyone, using our loyalty points to reduce the prices. But I recognize that being in Megamart is just a happy oasis and doesn't tell the whole story. At the register I read a sign taped to a small cardboard box next to the machine where I tap my credit card. It's a request in Spanish for donations for a young man with no insurance who was just diagnosed with kidney disease. I look at the photocopied picture of him waving from his hospital bed and fold a dollar into the slot on the top of the box. There's always a box like this at the register. Each week, a different box it seems. Sometimes the plea is to help repatriate the body of someone back to their family in a village in Honduras or El Salvador. The handwritten stories spell out the realities behind the smiles of the lives of the other shoppers. They speak to - and of - an audience who understands these difficulties and has an engrained sense of helping their community. Beside me in the front corner of the store, a few customers wait their turn to send money home at the MoneyGram window. A young woman wipes out a glass case that later she'll fill with freshly made grab-and-go $5 lunches. Three types of pupusas to choose from with curtido and salsa, tamales wrapped in banana leaves, and sometimes, hot yuca fries. Perfect to take to a job site where lunch will be eaten balanced on a knee while sitting (hopefully) under a shade tree or in an air-conditioned work truck. 

I thank the checker, wish her "que le vaya bien," and leave the store. The heat is already starting to radiate off the paved parking lot, making me squint and pull my sunglasses out of my bag for the walk home. Back in my apartment, out of habit I turn on a news broadcast. Trade and tariff wars, ceasefires made then broken, alliances realigned, numbers of migrants rounded up, deportations to countries nowhere near home. I sigh in resignation as it all comes back.

(Note: Normally, I use my own photographs in this blog. These images, however, I found online from a Columbia Pike documentary project. It didn't feel right or like even a slightly good idea to go into the Megamart as the only non-Hispanic person and photograph the store and its customers.)