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. 

Many, Many Flag Days: A Year in Foreign Service Orientation

 Two hundred and thirty new State Department employees sit uncomfortably close together in a large auditorium. They're assembled in three large blocks of chairs, separated by two aisles leading to a low stage in front of the room. Seated behind them, also snug in rows of chairs, are two guests for each new hire. In total, that's nearly 700 people dressed in graduation-level formality. It's August in northern Virginia and some are cooling themselves with American flag-themed paper fans as the auditorium's A/C strains to keep the room habitable. Or it's February and all arrived in heavy coats and winter shoes. Or for the fortunate, it's May or October and they're comfortable. Either way, the invited spouses, siblings, parents, children, and friends wouldn't miss witnessing this day when new Foreign Service professionals have their misty horizons, full of possibilities, dreams, and what-ifs, come into undeniably clear focus. By extension for many of the guests, their own lives are about to take the same turn. Seated or standing along the edges of the auditorium are Orientation staff - people like me who have been shepherding the students over the past five weeks through the rigorous Foreign Service Orientation course. Also lining the walls are the students' Career Development Officers (CDOs) who have acted as agents for the class members. Over the first ten days of Orientation, the CDOs met with their clients as they took on the task of aligning available assignments and Department staffing priorities, with career wish lists, must-haves, and red lines. 

Today, Flag Day, all will be revealed. 

Photo grabbed from a FS professional's blog (thank you) written in 2010. We still use these flag holders 14 years later and lemme tell you it's a LOT harder to keep them from spilling onto the floor than one would imagine. 

After a Department official and the selected class speaker deliver their remarks and step down from the podium, the main event begins. The announcer, someone with the unenviable job of reading out over 200 assignments in clear, measured voice, enunciating Ouagadougou, Podgorica and Antananarivo as easily as Toronto, adjusts the microphone and begins. The auditorium falls silent save for a baby's squawk from the back of the room - it's okay, it's a family affair. The students, some with ears pricked towards the speaker and eyes focused forward, some dropping their gaze to their laps to blur their surroundings or perhaps brace for impact, wait for their names to be called. The country flags, city names, and job titles are projected one by one onto a huge screen at the front of the auditorium. One Orientation staff member stands at a lectern to the side of the stage, controlling the painstakingly created presentation. With a steady, but undoubtedly cramping index finger, they advance the presentation in synch with the announcements, four clicks per assignment, 920 clicks total.

A flag appears on the screen - some easier to recognize than others - and a mixture of oohs and ahhs rises from the audience. 

Tirana, Albania

Human Resources Officer

(Name)

A student from somewhere in the middle row jumps to their feet and makes their way to the center aisle, stepping across seated colleagues, usually smiling, but just as often blank-faced as their bodies react with movement before their brains process the meaning of it all. They arrive at the front of the auditorium where they receive the tiny flag of their assigned country or U.S. state, shake hands, pause only a beat for the official photographer, and then make their way to the back of the auditorium past staff lining the walls, accepting hugs, high-fives, congratulations, or just smiles and claps. Sometimes the CDOs get passing thank yous and little flag waves from those assigned to "high bid" (favorite) postings, but more often the students cruise by, just trying to remember where they're supposed to walk. Behind their dazed looks their minds are reconfiguring their lives as they knew them just minutes before. Some turn the wrong way in the auditorium, and with a quick but gentle hand on a shoulder, Orientation staff redirect them to the right track. At the back of the auditorium they pose for more photos with their class mentors in front of a formal backdrop of U.S. and State Department flags. The class mentors, senior Department officers, are excited to be at this culminating event after having shared their time, personal and professional greatest hits, and career guidance with the class over the preceding weeks. The adrenaline subsiding, they then return one by one to their seats to cheer on their classmates. 

Some consider Flag Day to be Foreign Service hazing given the high stakes and potential for public expressions of joy, disappointment, or shock - both positive and negative - in front of over 600 people. To others, Flag Days are career highlights. Either way, even years or decades later, everyone can tell a Flag Day story, whether it was theirs or another's.  

For me, each Flag Day refuels my enthusiasm for my work. The ceremonies water my internal daisy, its petals drooping and leaves wilted by the minutiae, deadlines, bureaucracy, and continual decision making and second-guessing to get things just-right that occupy my days. There are times when all I want to be responsible for is myself; my schedule driven purely by personal inspiration, the results judged only by me. Thirteen years into this career with retirement teasing me from the horizon, these times of wishing I could just go weed a pea patch all day are hitting me with increasing frequency. 

But then I turn my focus back to those students in that auditorium. I rewind the film a bit more to the start of my time working in Orientation. A montage of faces and names scrolls across the screen in my mind, a year's worth of new colleagues and friends. Beyond the visual, I also hear their voices and replay snippets of personal stories: their motivations and aspirations for this career and their earnest questions and commentary about the road ahead we all shared in the classroom. More than just watering my daisy, the time spent absorbing our newest colleagues' energy, enthusiasm, capability, and genuine optimism for this career revives that flower so that each morning I can once again stuff my lunch bag, tea thermos, laptop (and charger!), and spiral-bound to-do lists into a few shoulder bags and head out the door to face another day. After all, I've got my own bidding and assignment season coming soon and with it the inevitable spinning of the giant wheel of possibilities. Feeling animated, I conclude that heck, one more overseas tour will be exciting, just think of the adventures we'll have and stories we'll tell. I step outside; the mornings are still fresh; the birds singing their little hearts out in the trees and the magnolias so scented I'm certain I've walked into the wake of a perfumed woman. It's a beautiful day.