Month: May 2022

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Our Nanny Heads Home

JMC and C on the Virginia is for Lover’s Sign at Luray Caverns

Last week our nanny, JMC, headed back to Malawi after nine months with us in the United States. It was a bittersweet moment at the airport as JMC and my daughter C sobbed as they hugged goodbye just outside of airport security. We didn’t have a whole lot of time as it had taken a bit longer to check in as one checked bag and one carry on bag were too heavy by Ethiopian Airlines rules and we had to make some last minute adjustments on the floor in front of the check-in counter that ended up with JMC checking FIVE bags. There was a lot to take back home to remember this time in America by.

JMC kayaking with me on Lake Malawi Sept 2020

We met JMC in the Spring of 2020 just as the pandemic was beginning. She lived with her mother (also a single mom) and her sister in the staff quarters at a close friend’s house, where her mother worked as a housekeeper and nanny. My friend had hired JMC, who was set to finish high school shortly, to start tutoring her young daughters in several subjects. When the pandemic first hit, I juggled home schooling and teleworking, but when summer arrived I hired JMC to help C with reading and preparing for the new school year. JMC and C really hit it off. Maybe because they were closer in age than most kid/nanny relationships? And JMC was also just a really good, thoughtful, and helpful person. By November JMC had finished her national high school exams (which had been postponed from the previous Spring due to COVID) so I asked if she would like to work for us full time to make some extra money until she received her exam scores and decided on her after high school plans. A few months later, I also asked her if she might be up to joining us in the US for the time I would be in training and she enthusiastically said yes.

Bringing a nanny to the US is not a super straightforward process. There are a lot of steps! Passport, visa, plane ticket, employment authorization, health insurance, social security number, payroll, taxes, and more. Sometimes the administrative parts felt overwhelming, but I felt it was worth it, and I know now how very much it was.

Celebrations on the day JMC’s US visa was approved

JMC is an extraordinary young woman. At 20 years old she agreed to head nearly half a world away to a place she had never been to help my daughter and I navigate school and home life during the ongoing pandemic. She approached absolutely everything with a positive attitude and a willingness to try new things. As we took off from Lilongwe on her first ever flight, she told me she could feel her soul leaving her body as the plane climbed to its cruising altitude. When we drove from Virginia to Florida for Home Leave at the beginning of our sojourn and I asked her her first impressions she told me that the highways of America were amazing! (So clean, straight, wide, with few potholes, and often lined with so many, many trees). At Disney World as we rode the Barnstormer, her first ever rollercoaster, she screamed in delighted terror, but never once said she wished she had not tried it. She coined what would become her signature phrase “America has done it again!”

If we went to a restaurant and she ordered a hot dog and a milkshake and they brought out a foot long dog and a milkshake a foot tall, she would laugh, shake her head, and say, “America has done it again!” When we went trick-or-treating at Halloween along a top decorated street in Arlington, where the neighbors compete hard for the biggest and best decorations, she once again said, “America has done it again!” She might say this when riding the metro (“Are you telling me this train is going under the river? America, you have done it again!”) or when she saw the swimming pool on the roof of our building or ate at a teppanyaki restaurant for the first time (which, I had to point out, was actually something Japanese).

When we moved into our apartment in Arlington, Virginia, where we would reside through my training, we discovered it was probably the most dog-friendly building in an extremely dog-friendly area. JMC, however, has a huge fear of dogs that stems from being attacked and bitten as a child when she lived in South Africa. Owning a dog as a pet is not common in Malawi and often when Malawians own dogs it is for security, not companionship. While there were some stray dogs in Lilongwe, I found it a much more rare occurrence than in other countries where I have lived or visited like Indonesia and Romania, the latter where I myself was attacked by dogs. While I am not 100% comfortable around large dogs, JMC was downright terrified. Imagine when on one day we visited my aunt out in Winchester and strolling along the walking street came across an Irish Wolfhound, a Tibetan Mastiff, and a Great Dane. Then in our building in Arlington people are riding the elevators and casually strolling through the lobby with dogs big and small. I felt badly that our building posed so many opportunities for her to feel scared. But like everything, she took it with a huge dose of humor and grace.

Strolling together in Arlington

She really was game to give nearly everything a try and to approach it with excitement and wonder. When we went to see Disney on Ice she cheered and laughed with unbridled joy (with far more enthusiasm than my daughter). In late November, we met my friend CZ and her son Little CZ at King’s Dominion on a Winterfest evening, JMC agreed to ride the Delirium, one of those pendulum rides that also spins, with C and DZ, while I sat it out with Little CZ. (I never liked those kinds of rides, ever) Breathless after the ride, her eyes sparkling, JMC again reported her soul temporarily disconnecting from the rest of her. Later when she and our kids were invited to join in the dancing of a winter parade float, JMC grabbed the proffered tambourine and started dancing while C hid behind me refusing to participate. Experiencing her first snow fall, she agreed to head out to play with C though she really dislikes cold weather. I watched them from apartment window making snow angels and throwing snowballs. She willingly tried ice skating (and quickly got good at it) and indoor skydiving (she kept trying to swim toward the exit).

JMC and C in Colonial Williamsburg (they even switched shoes as they wear the same size)

I tried to have a mix of activities this whole nine months in the states — mixing American history (the National Air and Space Museum, the African American History Museum, Mount Vernon, the National Mall, Jamestown, Williamsburg, Savannah, St. Augustine, Harper’s Ferry), and culture (Cherry Blossoms, the Nutcracker ballet, a baseball game, a small town Christmas parade), to fun activities (Disney on Ice, ice skating, indoor skydiving, the International Spy Museum, the Baltimore Aquarium) and Americana (like a massive corn maze, trick or treating, Disney) and more (see here, here, and here). It is wonderful to experience America with my daughter who has spent far more time abroad than in her home country (and this was her longest time in the States), but to experience it with JMC made it all the more special. Sometimes my daughter just took some things for granted. But JMC did not ever. She regularly reminded me of all the wonderful things that America has to offer – not by saying so, but by just living her experience to the fullest.

It feels strange without JMC – she has been a big part of our family the past two years, in both Malawi and the United States. Her departure is another reminder of how our interregnum in the US is coming to a close and we soon head off to our next overseas adventure.

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The Final Stretch: PCS Preparations and Making the Most of America

The sun is setting on this sojourn in the US (I caught this amazing sunset from a northern Virginia parking lot!)

Preparing to Leave Again

Sigh. I really and truly just let out a big sigh as I began to type. Here we are about to move yet again. Sigh. There is another one.  You might think we would get used to it – the constant moving – in this career. However, I think it is only getting harder the older I become. And as my daughter gets older too.

When we arrived in Arlington, Virginia last September for my training, we met another single parent Foreign Service Officer. Her older son and C became fast friends. They walked to and from the bus stop together, rode the bus together, and had hours and hours of playdates, and even more hours online chatting and playing Roblox. He and his family moved to the Dominican Republic a month ago. It was the beginning of the end.

This happens every year. Even when we are not moving, there is always someone in our Foreign Service Community who is leaving. Unfortunately, the frequency of people coming into and out of our lives does not make the goodbyes any easier.

We too are focused on our own approaching departure. I am always saying that in the last few months before our PCS (permanent change of station) that it’s like picking up a part time job with terrible, unpredictable hours. While trying to keep doing one’s day job, whether that is serving as a political officer or a French language student, you must also take care of other things related to the move. These tasks include enrolling your child in school in the next country, applying for visas, preparing to move your pet, having final medical appointments, hiring childcare in the new country, and purchasing a vehicle for the next Post. These tasks require leg work, internet research, emails and/or calls, filling out forms, and so on.

We have received our housing assignment for Guinea.  C and I are very excited about our new place and have been working on decoration planning.  But it is not easy working out what all to buy now and have shipped as the global supply chain slowdowns mean what might normally take three months could take up to six months (or longer) to reach us.  There is our HHE (Household Effects) shipment from the U.S. but also the HHE shipment from Europe, where most of our things from Malawi have been sitting in storage for nearly a year.  Will what we had in a three-bedroom house in Lilongwe fit into a two-bedroom apartment in Conakry?  The moving company that packed us out from Malawi left me a cryptic list of our belongings, and my own memory of everything I own is most definitely flawed.

There are also the “consumables.”  Guinea, like Malawi, is a consumables post. The definition is: “a post at which conditions make it difficult to obtain locally the consumables required by employees and their eligible family members.  Consumables are referred to as expendable personal property because they are used up as opposed to wearing out.” Working with a list of provided by the Embassy’s Community Liaison Officer (CLO) of consumables families typically bring to Guinea, I am making purchases and creating piles of stuff in our current apartment.  These include jars of Vlasic dill pickles, containers of lite pancake syrup, and bottles of shampoo and conditioner that work best on my daughter’s hard-to-tame hair.  And like in Malawi, I will be buying four brand new tires for our Conakry-based car because it is reportedly difficult and costly to find quality replacements. 

Perhaps this does not seem like a lot?  Even as I write it, I note that the words completely belie the amount of time and effort and cost that goes into preparing to move internationally.  I am, frankly, exhausted by the effort, but keep trying to rally myself because I don’t want to forget something important.  I do not know how married couples manage the division of labor, but in my case, it is just me managing the move. 

I feel at odds; I am being pulled in two directions.  I am here, still in the US, but also very much focused on getting to Guinea.  I am in the final weeks of a long, exhausting language program, but I also must obtain plane tickets and apply for visas and manage the logistics of moving.  There is a lot of excitement, but also a lot of anxiety.    

 Making the Most of Our Time in America

I have found it difficult to balance the pandemic and my language study with activities, but all in all I think I did a pretty good job giving both my daughter and our young nanny a wide range of experiences in the United States. Since my halfway post, we have managed to squeeze in a good number of events. After trying for months to score tickets, we were finally able to visit the National Museum of African History and Culture in early February. I however had completely underestimated the time it takes to see a good portion of the exhibits and after 3.5 hours we left having only scratched the surface. In February, we headed to iFLY to give indoor skydiving a go. I had initially reserved for January for C’s birthday, but a snowstorm had forced me to reschedule.

We drove up to Baltimore to visit the National Aquarium and when my good friend CZ and her son Little CZ came into town, we all visited the International Spy Museum and strolled around the tidal basin to see the cherry blossoms. Both our nanny JMC and I served as chaperone’s for C’s school field trip to Jamestown and we stayed an extra night so we could visit Williamsburg and my alma mater, the College of William and Mary. We caught one of the season opening weekend games at Nationals stadium, visited Luray Caverns, and also met up with my aunt out at Harper’s Ferry.

But now here we are closing in on the last month and a half of our U.S. sojourn sandwiched between our Malawi and Guinea tours. I do not know what else is in store for our time here, though I have some ideas much depends on the results of my French exam. There is an incredible amount of stress placed on U.S. diplomats to pass the exam on the first go, but it is by no means guaranteed. Here’s to hoping for the best outcome, whatever that may be. And then, on to Guinea.