Foreign Service

by

Farewell Juarez

Wow. I can hardly believe this, but I have departed Juarez. Let me write that again. I have departed Juarez. Yeah. This afternoon I drove across the Zaragoza Bridge into El Paso for probably the last time (always leaving room for that future possibility). For the last time, Customs and Border Patrol invited me into secondary. Yeah, I don’t know why either. I have been “invited” into secondary only three times in my two years in Juarez, but twice have been in the last two weeks. Thanks for the memories, CBP.

Thursday afternoon was my Despedida or farewell party. And suddenly this departure thing got REAL. Oh my goodness…I am leaving, actually leaving. I woke up Friday morning around 5:30 a.m. worrying whether all the things I have left in my house will actually fit in my car. Yet my daughter and I spent one final staycation in El Paso this past weekend. I could not stand the thought of spending the whole weekend in my nearly empty home. So instead I took my daughter to a children’s museum in El Paso and then we attended the El Paso Chihuahua’s baseball game. On Sunday morning we hit a few final places on my El Paso bucket list, including a trip up the Wyler Aerial Tramway for an “after” photo (we first visited in September 2012).

Then Sunday afternoon we returned and I had a panic attack. How was I going to get all this stuff in my car?? My daughter and my cats wanted to help, which means they made it absolutely impossible for me to pack up the car Sunday. At 11 pm I gave in.
Yet, obviously I got that car packed (though my nanny happily walked off with a LOT of stuff that just want not going to fit) and I departed. Here I am writing this from Fort Stockton, Texas, which does not have very much to show for itself, yet it is not Juarez.
Still, I spent two years in Juarez and I should say goodbye to it properly.

What I will not miss:
The lack of water pressure. In two years in Juarez I have not ever had an awesome shower. The miserable stream of water that suffices for my shower at full blast is laughable. Except I do not laugh. Every single time I went on vacation I looked forward to the shower. I wish I were kidding.

Pigeons. I have no idea why Ciudad Juarez, this dusty city in the Chihuahuan desert attracts so many pigeons, but it does. Several houses in the neighborhood have fake owls and eagles set atop their roofs to dissuade pigeons from landing. It does nothing whatsoever, other than providing the pigeons some fake roof companions. I disliked waking in the morning and hearing the cooing and clawing of little pigeon talons on my roof. It reminded me of a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Speed bumps. Though I have no exact data, I am fairly certain that at any given time 85 to 115% of Juarez roads are under construction. Besides constructing and reconstructing terrible roads, the Juarez government enjoys building speed bumps. Giant two feet wide speed bumps. One-foot-high, transmission-killing speed bumps. Stealth speed bumps with no discernible notice to alert the unsuspecting driver they are there. These are their specialties. Arriving two years ago, I was not in the city ten minutes before I heard a sickening scrape along the bottom of my car. I think my favorite is the one on the main road from the Zaragoza-Ysleta border crossing: smack across a three lane road with a 60 kph (37 mph) speed limit and no notice that it is coming. I might really miss that one.

Sand storms. Strong winds are always fun, right? So strong winds with gritty sand in them = extra fun! Especially, when this windy period seems to last for months on end…

Morning Mariachi. It happened only a few times in my neighborhood – the mariachi wake-up call – but it is an experience one cannot easily forget. Nothing like having your sleep interrupted by loud yip yip yip vocals accompanied by high-energy guitar and trumpet playing, and not for just a few minutes, but for two hours, starting around 2 or 3 a.m. I actually enjoy the sound of Mariachi or Norteño music. Just not in the middle of the night.

Border Crossings. When I first arrived in Juarez my mother joined us for the first three weeks to help with my daughter as we settled in and I looked for child care. While we waited for mine and my daughter’s SENTRI passes (it’s a long acronym that basically means rapid entry for trusted travelers) we traveled in the regular lane. The first weekend we waited in line approximately 30 minutes to enter the U.S.; the second, over an hour. Yet later, although I had SENTRI, the crossing became more and more cumbersome to do. It cannot say it was harder, only it felt harder. I know, I know. I have colleagues who are in some pretty difficult places far from home who might give their right arm or their first born to be able to travel to the U.S. for just a few hours of shopping. But all things are relative, right? I know in many ways I was spoiled as a Foreign Service officer posted to Juarez. Yet, over time, especially as the probability of being stopped, subjected to unfortunate questioning by the CBP or a car inspection by Mexican immigration authorities, increased, I simply found it less desirable to cross.

What I will miss:
Doctor’s hours. This might seem an odd thing to miss. Yet, when my daughter or I needed to see a dentist or a doctor and I did not want to cross the border, we went to them in Juarez. They were so convenient. The dentist’s office, located a five minute walk from the Consulate and ten minutes walk from my house, is open 10 to 2 and again 4 to 8. Yes, after work! She also had Saturday hours. Yeah. Think on that for a little while. The pediatrician, located in the same building as the dentist, is open 4 to 8 in the afternoons by appointment. Also, if I did not feel like getting an appointment, my daughter and I could head over to the drugstore, just a five minute drive from home, where a doctor sits for several hours for consultations for 150 pesos (about $11.50).

Parking spaces. Especially at the S-mart supermarket near my home. They were HUGE. I mean, you could easily fit 1 ½ cars or a car and a motorcycle or a tank in them. No precision parking skills needed, such as at the stingy spaces in many a U.S. parking lot. No worries about trying to extricate my daughter from the back seat.

Beauty. Many people might not think of Ciudad Juarez as beautiful. One of Mexico’s largest cities, it is flat, dusty, spread out. It is monochromatic. The few spots of green are hard-earned with lots of precious water. Otherwise even the green gets covered in a coating of tan colored sand. Yet, there is an incredible beauty to the Chihuahuan desert. The contrast and detail of the Juarez Mountains set between the crisp azure sky and blazing tan desert is stark and stunning and could be seen from just outside my neighborhood. I also never grew tired of the incredible sunsets. I have been all over the world and I am not sure any place can really rival the sunsets over Chihuahua.

El Paso and the Southwest. I know that some of my colleagues were less than impressed with El Paso, Texas, our neighbor to the north, though while it is no New York or Chicago or Washington, DC, it is a pleasant city. My daughter and I visited the Museum of History, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Exploreum (Children’s Museum), the Railroad and Transportation Museum, the National Border Patrol Museum, the Museum of Archaeology, the Magoffin Home State Historic Site, the Wyler Aerial Tramway, the Old Fort Bliss Replica Museum, the Mission Trail, historic Concordia Cemetery, the Zoo, and took a historic walking tour of downtown El Paso. El Paso also served as a gateway to the U.S. Southwest, a place that beforehand I had seen very little of. We traveled to Marfa, Alpine and Fort Davis, Texas. We also visited Mesilla, Roswell, Truth or Consequences, Albuquerque (for the famous hot air balloon festival), Santa Fe, Alamogordo, and Columbus, New Mexico. That last one the site of Pancho Villa’s 1916 incursion into the U.S. and the site of a small but high quality museum run by the National Park Service. I absolutely love history and this area is full of it.

I am sure that as time passes I will discover there is more that I miss about Juarez and our life there. It just has yet to sink in that I am not merely on vacation but rather will not be returning. This was my first posting with the Foreign Service. This is where my daughter grew from an infant to a toddler (she has spent more of her life in Mexico than in the United States – four times as long in fact). Juarez, the good and the not so good are part of me now. Farewell, Juarez.

by

Five days to go (is four too many)

Packing out 2 weeks (or more) before departure can make you crazy. You have packed up all of your personal belongings and yet you hang around. You hang around because you are shipping your stuff from one country to another and you need to wait around for customs shipments and the like. You need to hang around “just in case.”

Yet, I would think that most people when moving do not move all the personal things out of their home, leaving only impersonal borrowed furniture, watch all their things drive away in a truck and then sit around the rather empty house for two more weeks. Not ever having a “normal” move I am not really sure. But if I were to have a move that was not orchestrated by the government, I think I would leave the very next day if not that night. I daydream about such a move.

The first day or two after the pack out, I felt exhilarated. The pack out meant departure was near. And regardless of whether you are happy to leave or not, leaving brings about a sense of excitement about the next move. For me it meant I was soon to embark on my wild and crazy nomadic home leave plan. It meant nine weeks traveling with my daughter (and 2 with my cats – hush, I’m sure it will be GREAT). But then the excitement rather wore off. I just don’t want to be here anymore – coming home to the soon-to-be-someone-else’s home that is full of the same generic furniture found in all your colleague’s homes all over the world. I had much of the same furniture in Jakarta and I am sure I will have it again. With our own wall art and decorative pieces, we can make this furniture our own. Yet, when our personal pieces are stripped from the home, it feels empty even with furniture still inside.

At the beginning when you arrive at post the home is similarly empty. However at that time you are busy settling in. You are getting to know your neighborhood, your new city, your new job and colleagues. You figure out the way to the supermarket and the department store and you stock up. Maybe you buy plants or flowers, a few new local pieces to add a touch of local flavor to the new home? But now, I am not buying anything. Well, I should not be. Though I went to the supermarket last night and bought a block of cheese, a dozen eggs, a stick of butter, a head of lettuce, a bag of tortilla chips, 2 avocados, and a packet of bolis (icees) for my daughter. I have 5 days left and I am spending the weekend in El Paso. I already had 7 eggs at home…. I’m not sure what came over me.

On Monday night, the night before my home and furniture inspection, my daughter took my black eyeliner and drew all over one of the white bathroom walls. She has never drawn on the wall before and I could only think it was part of some terrible cosmic pack out too early joke that she would choose to do so that night. Friends on Facebook suggested I use the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. I am sure it works great in most circumstances. My circumstances unfortunately were it was 9:30 pm at night, I live in Mexico, and I am packed out. I found I still had some first aid kit alcohol wipes, tiny sized, about an inch square. So I painstakingly rubbed my daughter’s first abstract art piece in charcoal off the bathroom wall. Some of the paint came off as well. Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone, I did pass the house inspection the next day.

On Tuesday I went to pay my final phone bill. The Consulate staff at the General Services Office (GSO) recommended I did not pay my final bill at the bank but rather at the TelMex kiosk in the store located in the mall across the street from the Consulate. Unfortunately the ATM in the lobby of the Consulate was not functioning (a somewhat regular occurrence) so I went to the mall to use an ATM there first. Except there, the first ATM would not accept my card, despite three tries. So I thought I would go to the TelMex store and see if I could pay with credit card. I was informed that was impossible as it was “not compatible with their systems.” Sure, I could understand that given it is 2014 and credit cards are used by only a handful of people in the world. (heavy sarcasm here) So I went to another ATM on the other side of the mall only to find it charged $3.50 for the privilege of withdrawing my own money (compared to the usual $2.40 charge at my usual ATM). I circled back to the first ATM to find someone using it successfully! However, three tries later, I still could not withdraw money. One more ATM left in the mall and it charged $6.30 to withdraw money! I returned to the Consulate without pesos and without paying my bill, exhausted and dejected.

I was able to pay the phone bill today (hooray!) but came home to find my daughter had an unexplained rash. The nanny showed it to me as soon as I walked in the door but explained it was only on her upper back. Except it wasn’t. It was also on her lower back, and chest, and tummy, and shoulders…and within 45 minutes it was also on her arms and on her cheeks. As I write this she is happily watching her Cat in the Hat DVD and seems to be in good, though itchy, spirits. A plus of being posted to a US-Mexico border post is I can take her to a doctor in Mexico or drive across to a pediatrician in the US. I’m in a wait and see mode right now.

Tomorrow is the Consulate farewell party for me and two other departing officers. After which I will have four days left in country. It will likely be three too many.

by

The 10,000 Club (or What Do I Do Exactly?)

The other day a colleague mentioned we should hold a small party for a someone who would be leaving our section of the Consulate for another and in the process toast “the 10,000 club.” I must have had a quizzical look on my face as she went on to explain that surely I too am a member of the 10,000 club – the club for Consular Officers who have adjudicated at least 10,000 visas. She mentioned it’s a pretty big deal to be a part of this club as not all officers get there.

I do not think this club is a real club. I doubt there are secret handshakes and induction ceremonies or even awards and recognition. (Or I have yet to receive my engraved invitation!) It is just a way for some of us to participate in a little self-congratulation for having reached a milestone, an often unsung one, in our Foreign Service Officer careers. So yes, I am a Foreign Service Officer. And yes, that means I am a diplomat. Right now though my specific position is that of Vice Consul and what I do is interview visa applicants and adjudicate their cases.

All U.S. Foreign Service Officers spend at least one year of their careers adjudicating visas. Often officers spend a full two-year tour doing so and increasingly, as there is a rising demand for visas to tour, work, study, and live in the U.S. particularly from countries such as China or Brazil, some officers spend three or four years of their careers adjudicating visas. That is what I will be doing. I have spent two years here in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico adjudicating visas. I spent my first 14 months working in the Immigrant Visa (IV) section and then my last nine in the Non-Immigrant Visa (NIV) section.* I head next to Shanghai, China where I will work my entire 2 years in NIV (unless I am the lucky recipient of a rotation to another section such as American Citizen Services). I will work in two countries with a lot of demand for visas. Basically, I am going to adjudicate A LOT of visas.

Did I join the Foreign Service to adjudicate visas? Well no, not exactly. I joined as a Political-coned officer right from the test registration. However, adjudicating visas is part of the process of becoming one. I’ll be honest here, no need to sugar coat it, there are days this is hard to do. Day in and day out interviewing people “on the line” can be mentally and physically draining. On the IV side, the cases can be emotionally draining as well. I have cases from the IV side I will never forget – some because they were so heartwarming and some because they were so heartbreaking. With IV cases, which are very paper intensive, we are generally expected to conduct 5 interviews an hour. With a 5-6 hour interview day, that is 25-30 interviews a day. Mission Mexico standards for the NIV side are 80 interviews and 40 interview waiver cases per day, though in many posts other than Juarez the sheer volume of applicants is so high that officers are interviewing more like 120 or 150 applicants a day.

Soon after my arrival in Juarez, just before the end of the fiscal year 2012, Mission Mexico reached 2 million visa applications (and issued about 1.3 million NIV visas)! The only other countries to currently issue more than a million visas a year are China (Hello, second post in Shanghai!) and Brazil.

And so today, yes the very day that I am posting this, I reached and surpassed 15,000 NIV visa adjudications. From my IV time I adjudicated just a few short of 4,000 and exactly 100 fiancé visas. I have only a few days left in Juarez but I have two more years in Shanghai – so the 10,000 club is just the first of many milestones I will reach.

*Yeah, so 14 months and 9 months do not equal 24, but rather 23 months. It’s true. I have not lost all my math skills since joining the State Department. I arrived in late July 2012 and I depart 1 July 2014. It is all perfectly legit.

by

Packed Out!

On Monday morning I was out of bed at 6 am. I have trouble sleeping the night before a pack out. Once up I popped open my Diet Coke (I am not a coffee drinker – have never had coffee actually – but I do love my caffeine in the form of the ambrosia that is a nice, cold can of DC), and I put on my pedometer. I had some breakfast and then I got to work.

At 7 am the nanny arrived. I had thought I would not want her to be there just yet, I liked the quiet solitude of working in the house with my daughter sleeping, no one else there. But my nanny, besides the times she drives me absolutely nuts, is actually not only a great nanny but a helpful person. Also once the movers arrived she took my daughter out to the park and a neighbor’s house so she would not be bothered by all the packing.

I could have sworn from the pre-pack out survey that the movers were arriving at 8 or 9, but they did not show up until 10:30. All the better as I was still puttering around preparing piles and hemming and hawing over my clothes – I would need work clothes for two more weeks but I am about to head out on 9 weeks of travel / Home Leave, so I did not want too much.

When the movers showed up I felt a little disappointed and concerned. Again, the boss at the pre-pack out survey (when they look around at all your stuff to get an estimate of weight and volume) had implied it was going to be a long day, but they would surely be finished by 5…or 6 pm. And here were the packers, just 1 man and 2 women, arriving at 10:30.

But they exceeded my expectations. They got right to work and worked quietly and efficiently, taking only one short 30 minute break around 2 o’clock, when two more men arrived with the truck to start loading the boxes. Imagine my surprise, dumbfounded surprise, when all was done, the truck driving away with almost all of my worldly belongings at 3:30, a mere 5 hours after the movers had arrived. This is my fourth “pack out” (move with the government) and only the one from DC to Mexico had taken less time. That was due entirely to the vast majority of my things already packed and in storage in a warehouse in Maryland after my return from Indonesia. My pack out to Indonesia and the one return both took two days.

Of course later that night I started thinking maybe they were too fast… Maybe I will open up my boxes of things in Shanghai 8 or 9 months from now and find some of my things did not survive the moves… Well, nothing I can do about it now. I tell myself that to try to calm myself down.

So yeah, my fourth pack out is complete! I would say they do not get easier, only different. Departing from DC to Indonesia I was a single woman living in a three bedroom, one bathroom rent controlled apartment in Washington, DC. I did not own a lot of things, but I did have some furniture I put into storage. Leaving Indonesia 2.5 years later I had acquired two Jakarta street cats and was 8 weeks pregnant and a tad ill to my stomach at pack out. At my third pack out from DC to Mexico, I was leaving the one bedroom temporary housing provided during my training, but with a six month old baby. I now leave Mexico with a 2 ½ year old. I think I prepared better, but I still was not all ready when the packers showed up. I’m not sure I will ever be completely ready. The next pack out will be sometime early next year, hopefully in January if I successfully pass the first attempt at my Mandarin Chinese test. We will again be departing from temporary quarters during training, the majority of my things awaiting sea transport from a Hagerstown, MD warehouse.

At 3 pm the Consulate brought over the Welcome Kit – this is generally a large trunk of items such as bedding, towels, plateware, silverware, coffee maker, pots and pans, TV, etc., the items that should help you get along when you have only what you could pack in your suitcases (or in your car in the case of border posts). We received the Welcome Kit when we first arrive at post, and again after our pack out. I waved goodbye to the truck, or rather my things, as it pulled away.

At 4 pm my nanny returned with my daughter and I braced myself for her reaction. I had been feeling like a rather wicked mommy not buying her anything new recently (with the exception of toys that were inflatable!) and many of her toys recently had been sold, given away, or packed up. I should not have worried! My almost 2 ½ year old daughter is a travel pro! She has, by the way, already lived in two countries (US and Mexico) and traveled to five other countries (UAE, Trinidad and Tobago, Panama, Ireland, and the United Kingdom twice). For her second birthday I signed her up for her own United Mileage Plus account. In May, after flights to Cancun, Ireland, Salt Lake City, Cincinnati, and Manchester, England, she is already a Silver level member! My little Diplotot!

She entered and started cantering (she loves horses and pretending to ride them) and whooping and hollering Yeehaw! to hear the near echo quality in our now almost empty house. She pulled the cushions off the sofa to do some jumping. She played with her few toys still in the house with extra gusto. And she found the fly swatter in the Welcome Kit to be an amazing new toy (If you see my earlier post about Mosquito Terror, you may understand why. She is taking on her fear and conquering it!).

Still, it has been only three days since the pack out and though part of me likes the very minimalist style of the house and my closet right now, the pack out is the harbinger of my impending departure and though there is much I will miss, I am ready to go.

P.S. By the time the movers left the pedometer was over 13,000 steps. That’s over six miles IN MY HOUSE.

P.S. P.S. My UAB only weighed 324 pounds total!

by

Pack Out Eve (2014)

It is the night before pack out. It’s 10:30 pm. I am exhausted. I have spent all this weekend preparing my things for the arrival of the movers Monday morning. Tomorrow. TOMORROW!

I took several boxes across the border to Goodwill this afternoon. By my calculations, I donated $472 worth of goodies. In addition, I took two other donations, to Goodwill and an El Paso children’s home, in the past month. I am now close to $1000 in donations. I also took several bags to recycling and several more to the trash. I have made a large pile of items near the front door that will all go into the air freight or unaccompanied baggage (UAB) that we will receive in late August to have at our temporary housing in Virginia during my training. I am given 250 pounds of UAB for myself and an additional 200 pounds for my daughter. Four hundred and fifty pounds total. I have no idea how much my pile by the door may weigh.

Then all the items I have piled in the guest room are for the ocean freight or household effects (HHE) that we will not see again until a month or two after our arrival in Shanghai, some 8 or so months later. All Foreign Service families receive a maximum of 7200 lbs of HHE regardless of family size. I am not worried about that weight. I arrived in Juarez with 4800 lbs and my goal has been to depart with at least 1000 less. I’m pretty sure I have done it, though I will not find out for sure until the truck pulls away tomorrow.

Unfortunately I have a bunch of little odds and ends still tucked away in drawers. I expect those drawers will be opened and dumped into a box and then wrapped up. Despite my best efforts, and I have really done a good job here (much better than my pack out of Jakarta, Indonesia three years ago), I am going to open up some boxes in Shanghai and wonder, “what was I thinking?” It is inevitable. It is a time honored Foreign Service (or any situation where one constantly moves) tradition to pack up random things. When I arrived in Jakarta I found the movers had packed up my bedroom trash can complete with all the trash contents still inside!

I am worried though how this pack out will affect my daughter. Tonight, I carefully selected 10 of her 35 DVDs (we do not have “television” here, i.e. no cable or antenna or anything of the like, just DVDs) to remain with us the last two weeks and then be packed up in the car. The other 25 DVDs will be in the UAB. I tried to pick the 10 DVDs she has been requesting the most in recent weeks. But what if she asks for the “snow” episode of the Backyardigans and it is not among the favorites?

My normally pretty easy going two year old has been a little more prone to temper tantrums in the last few weeks. I cannot be sure if this is the result of the packing process or because she is nearly 29 months old. All I know is that I am taking a huge heaping dollop of mommy guilt right now on top of already being in an irritable pack out eve mood.

Maybe it is not my two year old that has been more temperamental? Maybe it is me? Though moves are a regular part of the Foreign Service and have been a regular part of my life for some time (approximately ten moves in the past ten years, probably at least twenty in the past twenty), it does not mean that I enjoy the actual process of moving. With the Foreign Service at least a bunch of movers show up to help me do this. Though to be honest in my pre-Foreign Service and Defense Department moves, I never really had a house full of things to move. It was whatever I could carry on the plane or ship ahead of me. That was it.

I’m not even sure if I am making sense anymore. I am just so tired. Unfortunately I will have to wake up early tomorrow before the movers arrive to try to do some more last minute preparations. I still have not decided on my closet full of clothes. What stays with me for two more weeks and then goes in the car? What goes in UAB and in HHE? No idea right now.

I guess the bright side is that by tomorrow evening, probably by 5 pm, this will be done. The decisions, for good or bad, will be done.

by

Three Weeks to Go

So what is it like to have just three weeks left at post?  It is stressful.  Apparently so stressful that it can cause you to fall off the treadmill.  Well, that is what happened in my case at any rate.  Yes, last night at the gym while on track for one of my faster 5Ks I made a misstep resulting in an Oscar-worthy fall, scramble on my knees, and finally a had-to-be-funny-to-watch slide off the end of the treadmill.  I cannot be sure it is correlated to my impending departure, but since I have never fall off a treadmill before I cannot but find the two are related.

Three weeks left at post mean that shopping trips have become boring espisodes in my life.  I am duty-bound to do them but they hold little interest.  I buy items because we need things like eggs or milk.  I do not buy extra things although the temptation to do so grows ever stronger knowing it makes NO SENSE to do so because anything extra I buy today I will not see after pack out for 2 months (if in my unaccompanied baggage – UAB- which will be sent to DC during my training) or 8 months or more (if in my household effects – HHE- that I will see again only after we have arrived in China).  When previously in Indonesia, yeah, I may have bought a few extra handicrafts that were on my “must-buy” list for awhile and I wanted to remind me of my time in country.  Yet in Juarez the handicrafts sold here are generally from elsewhere, like Oaxaca, and if I am going to buy Oaxacan handicrafts I would rather buy them in Oaxaca.  And to be honest, the things I want to buy now are in Target in El Paso.  These are not things I need now by any stretch of the imagination.  Wants must be surpressed.

Three weeks left at post mean every single time I look at any item in my house I am thinking whether it will 1. go in the car with us, 2. go into UAB, 3. go into HHE, 4. go to Goodwill, or 5. be thrown out?  Every single time I look at ANYTHING!  All of my “stuff” is under scrutiny.  It is mentally exhausting to do this.  As a daughter of pack-rats I find the purging that comes with regular moves to be carthartic.  That doesn’t mean I like it, but it can be helpful.  Cartharis is defined as “the purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art.”  And there is an art to the pack out.  I’m not saying I am particularly good at it, but I have my own mad, crazy technique.  And in the end when the pack out day comes, regardless whether my technique is good or not the movers drive away with my stuff in boxes headed for the next post.

Three weeks left at post lends itself to going without some things.  Like when your vitamins or your favorite tea run out you do not buy more because what would be the point?  You’ll just end up with one more thing to pack and you cannot stand the idea of one more thing to pack.  Or you ration items, like, say, cheese.  While maybe in the past you were more generous in your cheese portions you are not now because you don’t want to buy more and end up having to give it away.  I mean, a half a bag of shredded cheese is not the kind of gift most people ask for.  Or you hide items, like salt.  If you have perhaps a nanny who has a tendency to use up your staples without asking and you are down to the last bit of salt, you might find yourself hiding the salt container high up on a shelf behind a gift box of Starbucks expresso cups.  I’m not saying I know anyone personally who has done this, but it could happen. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Three weeks to go mean I become that person at work who when someone asks me a question like “how do I do blah-blah-blah?” I respond with an answer that invariably ends in the annoying phrase “and I have only X number of days left.”  I don’t want to be that person but I have become that person.  I cannot help myself.  It is as if it is my moral imperative to become that person.

Three weeks mean it is too early to change your address although you do not receive mail at post anymore.  It means you are on your way out but you still have enough time left at post for it to not quite feel real yet.  It is a weird and stressful and exhilarating time.  And sometimes even when you think you got a handle on things you stumble.  On the treadmill.

 

by

Working out in Juarez

So yeah, just a two days ago I finished a four hour spin-a-thon here in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.  FOUR HOURS on a bike in 90+ degree heat.  And I did it!  I rode every single second of that four hours and lived to tell the tale.  I could even walk just fine the next day. How about that?

Yet when I arrived in Ciudad Juarez nearly 2 years ago, I had no idea how exercising was going to go here.  I was a single mom with a 6 month old baby moving to a post with 15% danger pay.  Trying to find an exerise routine while overseas in the Foreign Service or otherwise can always be a challenge.  For example, when you are in a country where exercise may not be the norm because it is a leisure activity that the vast number of people do not have time for.  Gym facilities, if existent, are quite different from home.  Running outside may not be advisable due to security or other reasons.

My previous assignment, when I was with the Department of Defense, was in Jakarta, Indonesia.  In my apartment complex we had a treadmill, a bicycle, and an elliptical in a glassed-in gazebo in our parking lot.  You can imagine in a tropical country that a glassed-in gazebo surrounded by black top might get a bit warm.  It did.  Also, perplexingly, there was also a grill in the gazebo, though I never saw anyone use it.  I also belonged to the gym at the hotel located three buildings down from my complex.  I even had a trainer there.  The gym had some pretty good equipment, though the air conditioning never seemed to be working, so it was like exercising in a sauna.  And though there was a television in front of each of the machines they were not connected to the machines, so if others were excercising and watching television you had dueling volume issues.  Running outside was difficult.  Jakarta is hot and humid, the sidewalks, if there, are uneven and full of open holes, and are often used as an additional lane by motorcyclists.  On Sundays though it was “car free Sunday” when the main drag was closed to traffic for a few hours.  So if you wanted to battle the crowds it was possible to run.  I did once, but imagine my surprise when without warning the lanes re-opened to traffic and I found myself in the middle lane of a 4 lane highway with cars suddenly driving around me!

But that was in Indonesia and now I was in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico with an infant.

Ciudad Juarez is located in the Chihuahua desert.  It is a high desert climate.  It is dry and very hot in the summer.  In the winter it is generally in the 30s (farenheit) in the morning but there might be as much as a 30 degree increase by afternoon. The altitude is close to 4,000 feet above sea level.  In the Spring, starting around February, strong winds blow through the city kicking up sand and dust and all manner of things I am apparently allergic to.

So I had exercised abroad before.  I had even exercised thus far as a mom – but in the nice apartment gym in Falls Church, VA while my mother watched my daughter or running with the jogging stroller on lovely Northern Virginia running trails.  But here I was in a new city as a new mom.  I wanted to get back into running, wanted to lose the rest of the baby weight, and wanted to be a role model to my daughter.  How was I going to do that?

I started off going to the Consulate gym where I had access as a member of the Employee Recreation Association.  With a six month old, I would go when it was her nap time and she would snooze happily while I ran on the treadmill.  I also set up my bike on a trainer and rode for an hour or two on Sundays while my daughter napped. I ran my first 5K in September 2013 in Marfa, Texas as part of the Marfa Lights Festival over the Labor Day weekend.  It was hot, I was slow, and I finished the run with a flat tire, deflated completely by a giant desert thorn.  But I did it.  And I kept going.

I have had to make adjustments, of course.  When my daughter stopped taking a second nap or even a very long nap, I had the nanny or a friend watch her after work or on weekends.  And when an off-duty police officer was shot in his truck along my running route (he survived and drove himself to the hospital) or when there was a quadruple homicide at a garage I sometimes ran by, I changed where I ran.  When the dust storms of Spring made it very difficult for me to run, I joined a gym with childcare, though still had someone watch C on Sundays (gyms in Juarez are only open until noon or 1 on Saturdays and closed on Sundays).

And here I am at the end of my tour and I am so psyched to say that I finished:

Three 5Ks (1 in Marfa and 2 in El Paso)

Two 10Ks (two years running of the “World’s Fastest 10K” in El Paso)

One dualthon (Mission Valley Duathlon in El Paso – my first duathlon ever!)

Two spin-a-thons (in Ciudad Juarez, one was 3 hours, the other 4)

Eight half marathons!  (El Paso, TX; Indianapolis, IN; Santa Fe, NM; Boston, MA; Ciudad Juarez, MX; Las Vegas, NV; Salt Lake City, UT; and Cincinnati, OH)

Changes are ahead for us with home leave, training in DC and then on to Shanghai.  I’m not sure how I will work out, but I know I will find a way.

 

by

Mosquito Terror

In the last week my 2+ year old daughter has developed a sudden irrational terror of mosquitoes.  Until now the only other thing I have discovered she is terrified of are adults dressed in mascot costumes…  Anyway, it started the day when the water pressure in Juarez was so ridiculously low that it took me 20 minutes to fill the bathtub, and this included me alternating between filling two of my larger cooking pots with water in the downstairs sink and carrying them up while the tub filled itself.  While finally lying in our bath at 10:30 pm at night, my daughter lets out a terrified shriek.  Just jumps up and begins thrashing about the tub as if she were in a shark attack.  She points to the ceiling and screams “Mosquito!”  First, I am rather impressed she even knows the word “mosquito” but my proud humor soon turns to concern as the screaming does not abate.  I look up and do see a mosquito flying about.  I tell her it is okay.  However, my calm words have no effect whatsoever and so I have to get out of the tub and chase it around and kill it.

Here in Juarez we are not actually abound with insects.  I’m not saying there are no insects, of course there are, but we don’t see many in our house.  I was rather surprised to learn after my arrival that this desert landscape would be of interest to mosquitoes, but it is at some times of the year, though not really right now.  With a water shortage and the Rio Grande river near our house a dry, dry, desiccated bed of sand, there isn’t exactly a lot of water around to attract mosquitoes.  I have found little brown scorpions in the house, which is disconcerting in and of itself, but they are small and infrequent.  Sometimes a small beetle and occasionally those scary looking black flying sprickets (part cricket, part spider).  However, overall, not much in the way of insects.

Sure, mosquitoes are worthy of fear.  They carry some pretty bad diseases.  I was once terrorized a long sleepless night in a cheap guest house on the island of Bintan in Indonesia by probably hundreds of the buzzing beasties.  The next morning I left bright and early and took the first ferry back to Singapore covered in at least 80 bites.  It is a wonder I did not come down with something.  When I last worked in Jakarta, Indonesia, a country where they regularly fog for mosquitoes, one co-worker and another’s daughter both came down with Dengue.  But this isn’t exactly what I would expect the average two year old to grasp.  Not that I don’t want to proudly boast that my daughter is smart, she is, but understanding the disease carrying properties of insects might be a bit beyond her.

And still she screams.  The second time she screamed I was downstairs and I heard a terrified “Mama!  Mama!” followed by loud terrified bellows as she quickly came down the stairs.  She told me it was a mosquito.  I went up to check and found nothing.  Yet, not five minutes later the same thing occurs.  I go up and discover there is a fly in the house.  She has said the word “fly” before, but she will not accept that this particular insect is a fly.  She screams and clings to my leg yelling “mosquito!”  And so I kill the fly.  I try to show her that it will not hurt her now but that only results in her running to her room, standing in the corner, screwing up her face and screaming in her best horror picture impersonation.

This has happened two additional times since.

At first I was perplexed.  What would cause this sudden change?  Where would she get the idea that mosquitoes were something to fear?  Then it dawned on me.  She has a Go Diego, Go! DVD in which Diego goes to Africa to help a friend with a perplexing problem: all the elephants have disappeared.  Through some kind of magic a mosquito has been transformed into a magician and she flies around taking revenge on all the animals.  This magician has a particular dislike of elephants so she has turned them all into rocks.  She also makes the giraffes have short necks and shrinks hippos to tiny versions of themselves.  All the while flying around and cackling.  Okay, it is kinda scary.  However, my daughter has actually watched this particular DVD approximately one bazillion times before developing this terror of mosquitoes, so I am not sure this is really the source of the fear.  But it is all I got.

But here is the thing: after Juarez and home leave and five months of training in DC my daughter and I move to Shanghai, China.  To Asia.  I am pretty sure there are going to be LOTS of insects in Shanghai.  I know I have been terrorized by giant flying cockroaches in more than one Asian country.  Want to see me get really really wigged out and reduced to a whimpering mess?  Put me in a room with a giant flying cockroach.  That will do it.  I have also seen the largest spiders ever – as large as my head – in Asia.  I have a particularly vivid memory of watching a large tan colored spider the size of a crab run across a street in Bangkok.  It’s legs clicking on the pavement.  I know, you are thinking to yourself, hmmmm…maybe because of the color it actually was a crab?  NO!  It most certainly was a spider.  And I have the traumatized memory to prove it.

And so, I worry how my daughter and her new found fear of insects is going to handle this?  Perhaps this fear will already have faded by then?  I am hoping our housing will be so amazingly wonderful as to be almost as bug-free as here in Juarez.  I am hoping the only insects we might see are in the Shanghai Natural Wild Insect Kingdom, safely behind glass.

by

Spintencity en la Ciudad

So last night I participated in a four hour spin-a-thon in Ciudad Juarez. I’ll leave why I subjected myself to that particular kind of fun for another post, but the amazing thing is that the event was held in downtown Ciudad Juarez, in an open plaza, with approximately 200 participants.

When in August 2011 I was assigned to Ciudad Juarez for my first post, the city had a per capita murder rate that gave it the unfortunate distinction of the murder capital of the world. The rate had however dropped enough from the previous year to warrant a drop in the danger pay from 20% to 15% by November 2011. I had heard that officers in Ciudad Juarez during that time period generally stayed indoors and outings were reserved for border crossings to El Paso, Texas.

By the time I arrived at post in late July 2012, the city was already experiencing further improvements in security and a sort of rebirth was occurring. This has only continued throughout the time I have lived here, with families venturing out to visit family and friends regularly and filling restaurants and parks. The Plaza de la MeXicanidad and La Rodadora, a world-class children’s museum, both opened in Juarez last year.

This is not to say that all is well in Juarez. During the time I have lived here, there have been at least four armed incidents at the shopping mall just across from the Consulate and an easy 10 minutes walk from my home. This included a robbery of a jewelry store, a robbery of one of the parking attendants, and a shooting of a local employee at a gym. I twice adjusted my regular running route when shootings occurred along it. One morning as I prepared to head to work, I heard what distinctly sounded like gunshots as I prepared to head to work one morning. Even one from our Consulate community–a locally employed staff member–was gunned down in front of his family by armed men who burst into a children’s party.

But, when I see people taking control of their lives and participating in healthy activities, I think that it is a sure sign of a healthier community too. When out running I have always run into other locals running. Not a lot mind you, but if the prospect of insecurity wouldn’t keep people from running, then the harsh desert climate (hot, dry, dusty) with few running-friendly places ought to – and yet people are STILL out there running! Gyms have been sprouting up all over the city and these gyms are sponsoring events such as the spin-a-thon. Last October I took part in the 4th Maraton Internacional Gas Natural de Juarez. Despite a less than scenic course, I was impressed with the organization and participation from both runners and spectators. A local gym also organized a year-long series of 10Ks for this year and our Consulate organized the first Green Race held in May.

So there I am last night, some time into the third hour of the spin-a-thon and I start to feel a bit misty-eyed. I think about how far Ciudad Juarez has come in the two years I have lived here and what an honor and privilege it has been for my daughter and I to experience the city at this pivotal time. It could have been because the spinning instructor, waxing on at length over the physical and spiritual benefits of spinning, suddenly yelled “Viva Juarez!” or because my bum and palms were losing all feeling, but I felt extremely grateful not only to be participating in the event but to be in Juarez.

Viva Juarez indeed.

by

Here we go…

Yes, here it is.  My first blog post.  I am finally taking the leap and starting a blog.  Back in the days when I backpacked and sent back email stories of my trips to friends and family members, many encouraged me to start a blog.  I thought about it.  A little.  But I didn’t start.  And then life got in the way.  I started working more.  Then the same month I accepted an appointment to the Foreign Service I found out I was pregnant.  And here I am 3 years later, about to depart my first post as a Foreign Service Officer, FINALLY starting a blog.  Well, better late than never I suppose.

And so, yeah, here we go.  Here I go a-writing.  And in less than 30 days (23 to be exact, but who’s counting?) my daughter and I depart Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, my first Foreign Service post, to start the next phase of my Foreign Service career and our Foreign Service life.

It will be bittersweet.  I arrived here nearly two years ago with a 6 month old baby.  I will leave here soon with a 2 1/2 year old toddler who speaks about as much Spanish as she does English.  She has spent more of her life in Mexico than in the United States.  Just this past week two neighbor kids stopped by three times to ask if my daughter C could come out and play.  If we were a normal family and stayed in the same place, my daughter would grow up with these kids – who at 4 years older would soon grow pretty tired of playing with her – but they would grow up together nonetheless.  However, we aren’t exactly your normal kind of family.

In a few weeks we will begin approximately nine weeks of travel.  Five days are allocated by the government for our drive back from Ciudad Juarez (just across the border from El Paso, Texas) to Washington, DC and then 8 weeks of the Congress-mandated Home Leave, during which I will reacquaint myself and my daughter with our country.  I have a pretty crazy plan in mind.  But I’ll leave it for future posts.

Here we go….