Tag Archives: Ann Gaylia O’Barr

Fourth of July in an American Embassy

When I worked in U.S. embassies and consulates overseas, the Fourth of July was not a relaxing holiday for us. Embassies have national days, like Bastille Day on July 14 for the French, or a royal birthday for the British. The embassies and consulates usually celebrate their national days by inviting guests for some sort of feasting and perhaps entertainment.

Typically, we staged a formal gathering the night of the Fourth. The staff, American and national employees, worked on preparations—lists of the invited, the invitations themselves, security, parking, menu, program, and so on. Our guest list included former enemies, now staunch allies. I doubt any U.S. official mentioned to the British ambassador anything about 1776 or talked to the German ambassador about Hitler.

Invitations went out to other foreign embassies, as well as the host country’s high ranking politicians. We tried to include as many American citizens as possible who lived in the country. Obviously including everyone is easy in a country with few Americans, but not possible, say, in London or Paris.

American and national employees met guests, guided them to meet the ambassador or senior official at the entry, then guided them to tables or to the refreshment center. Then we mingled and talked with the guests. Drilled into the head of every new diplomat from orientation on is that embassy entertainment is for the guests, not the staff.

After an evening of meeting, greeting, and conversing, the introverts among us went home exhausted, hoping to be in the States on vacation for our next 4th of July.

A Republic If You Can Keep It

“Well, is it a republic?” was the question a bystander supposedly asked Benjamin Franklin after the Constitutional Convention in 1787. What form of government had been decided by these meetings, the person wanted to know, now that the colonies had gained independence from Great Britain?

Franklin is reported to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

It wasn’t a sure thing for those few colonies mostly on the Atlantic seaboard, wilderness throughout much of the interior. After all, only white men who tended to be well-off could even vote. It wasn’t exactly a country with a sterling history, either—much of the land was taken from native Americans. And it would be almost a century, following a bloody civil war, before slaves were emancipated, and a century or so more until real progress was made in giving all Americans, regardless of color, anything approaching equality.

Any group of people will have differences. No one agrees totally with another person. The problem is not so much the differences. It’s that too many of us assume that some of us can actually know what perfect truth is. Yet, as history from early civilization to today’s current events show us: no one of us knows absolute truth.

Many of our current differences are deep—what we should or should not teach in our schools, who can be married, who can terminate a pregnancy. The issues cannot be solved by tossing a coin. We must debate, decide, and accept that we will lose some of the time.

Figuring out reasonable solutions—not “right” solutions—will be a continuing, messy process. Some will lose and believe the loss was incalculable. Some of the time it may be. No person or country will get it right all the time. For the system to work, we have to recognize the impossibility of human perfection.

We have to learn to live peaceably and reasonably in an imperfect society. We should have the freedom to peaceably challenge the current package—indeed, we should have that freedom because it’s always going to need more tinkering. However, we do not have the right to hate or to demean someone because we think they are dead wrong. Sometimes they will be—but sometimes we will be, too.

Humility? A recognition of the imperfection of every one of us? We could start there.

The Parenting Dilemma

A survey finds that the more formal education a mother has, the more likely she is to opt out of the work force, or to work part time. This finding seems intuitive. Women with more education are more likely to marry better educated men. Their husbands are likely to have higher salaries and can support wives who don’t wish, at least at certain times in their lives, to work in a full-time career, or perhaps some prefer non-salaried work for a charitable group.

These women, however, have a greater choice of careers, if they want one, and of better paying ones. Their salaries would more likely pay for top notch child care. Why do some of them opt out?

Would more mothers of small children prefer to spend increased time with them if they could afford to do so?

We fear a return to the days when women were relegated to suburbia and made to feel guilty if they wanted to follow careers. Yet, if a mother wants to spend time with a child in the child’s early years, isn’t this worthwhile work?

Studies have shown the value of mothering in early childhood. What policies, both corporate and government, might encourage this kind of work for any mother who desires it?

But even here we are missing the truer picture. What about fathers who want more time with their children? Maybe a lessening of career as end all and be all for them, too, would allow them more time to father.

Perhaps in our emphasis on mothering, we’re in danger of losing the bigger need for parenting. Judging by our lowering birthrates, we certainly appear in need of this essential skill.

Reading as Fundamental

Provided the world goes somewhat as it always has, my children will have to decide what to do with all the books I’ve accumulated over the years. It’s not only that I read a lot and have read a lot for years. It’s that when I began reading, all books were print books.

I began my career with the U.S. Foreign Service in 1989 and was stationed in various countries, retiring in 2004. All books were in print when I began my first assignment in Saudi Arabia, and a lot of heavy boxes followed me there. Since I didn’t have access to a public library, I bought enough print books through the mail to fill several more boxes while I was there and throughout my career.

In a sense, my career paralleled the development of wide internet use, including email, but even when I retired, most books were in print.

Now settled within walking distance of our public library, I continue to walk over and check out print books, as well as add library eBooks through my iPad. I also subscribe to several periodicals, most in print and digital format.

Looking around, however, I notice a lack of deep reading by many Americans. Yes, cell phones are a wonderful invention for keeping in touch, checking on products to buy, and finding quick information about whatever we want to know. It doesn’t require much thought, however, and it’s open to just about anybody, with few checks as to their credentials for what they present.

For our communities not only to flourish but simply to survive, we require knowledge. We are no more able to grow beyond mental babyhood if we depend on internet offerings than a child will grow into a healthy adult on a little pablum and a lot of junk food.

We cannot overcome the myriad problems that threaten us, from nuclear weapons to political lying, without hard thinking and a disciplined approach to taking in knowledge.

If you haven’t already, grow your mind through a bit of dedicated reading and mental roaming and deep thinking. Your country will thank you.

“Up Close” in the Soviet Union

“Up Close with American Exhibit Guides to the Soviet Union 1959-1991,” traces an American cultural adventure in what seems an almost bygone age. (The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023)

The Soviet Union allowed the United States Information Agency (USIA) to set up cultural exhibits in various Soviet cities. The exhibits were staffed by Russian-speaking American young people. They answered questions by Russian citizens, most of whom at the time had little or no access to media not controlled by their government.

Two visitors were Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who engaged in their famous “kitchen debate” in 1959.

The exhibits included examples of “American ingenuity, technology, and daily life—from graphic arts, photography, and agriculture to outdoor recreation, technology for the home, and medicine.” Visitors to the exhibits included a broad swath of Soviet people.

The American young people profited from their experience as guides. “Many went on to careers in diplomacy, business, law, academia, and the arts where their language skills and overseas experience were a plus.”

John Beyrle, one of the American guides, later joined the U.S. Foreign Service. His long career included an assignment as ambassador to Russia.

He wrote: “What we learned from the exhibits program, and what I think is still relevant to today’s Russia, is that people’s desire for the truth grows in direct proportion to the extent to which the truth is denied them. We need to offer our strongest support for the hundreds of thousands of Russians who now live in exile outside Russia . . . who seek a different future for their country, and have both the skill and the will to ensure that the truth continues to reach the largest number of people inside Russia as possible.”

Abolishing Retirement and Taking Sabbaticals

The average age of retirement from the work force in 1910 was seventy-four. Now it’s more likely to be around sixty-two, even though we live longer.

In generations past, the majority of Americans worked on farms or in small businesses for their entire lives. The farms and businesses tended to be run by families and passed down to the next generation. As work became less personalized and more repetitive for many, the idea of a rest in the last years of one’s life gained in popularity.

What if, instead, we required a slightly bigger chunk of current salary to fund a system available for us to draw on at different periods of our lives, not just a set amount at a set age? Some already accept less payment to retire at sixty-two. These early retirees sometimes reenter the labor force in new careers, perhaps with lower salary, but doing work they enjoy.

Obviously, payments at an earlier age for what could best be called a sabbatical would be much lower at forty-two than at sixty-two.

Perhaps we need a more flexible pension system that would operate more like annuities. What if we had the option of dropping out for a year or so during our early and middle years, using small “pension” payments based on what we had already paid into the system? Some professions already include a sabbatical within their careers.

Pension systems could be tweaked to allow one to drop out at, say, thirty to raise children. Or at forty to finish a college degree. Or at fifty to work on an invention or direct a non-profit.

One would take a much smaller pension, of course, at a younger age, to reflect the lesser amount put into the system. A younger person, however, could work at a part time job while drawing a small pension and taking college courses or writing a novel or raising children. Or just exploring and searching for a clearer purpose for one’s life.

Retirement would become a graduated process. Retirement would cease being “retirement” and become another opportunity for change.

Mistaking America for God

Jon Ward concludes his book Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation with a testimony of his own calling: “My faith has been sparked by seeing that the real Jesus beckons me to follow him into a life of vulnerability that threatens the false gods of comfort and ease. Like many others, I’m trying to figure out how to walk that path. It’s daunting and scary, and most days I don’t feel like I’m doing a very good job. But it does at least have the ring of truth.”

This is not the tale of a man who left a conservative evangelical way of life but rather one who redeemed it, finding a more loving evangelical way of life, and is still going forward.

The message he was raised with is one known by many of us: God loves the world and has worked through Jesus to reach all of us with that love. The message can be powerful and life-changing, speaking of love and care and nurture.

The problem is not the message but some of the messengers. Unfortunately, some Christian leaders have been unspeakably corrupt as they used their leadership positions to glorify themselves and in a few cases used power for corrupt practices.

More often, some evangelicals have worshiped America more than God and turned the church into a “make America great again” pep rally. Some used church for spiritual highs, leaving out the calling of service to the world.

Their emphasis was not on Jesus’s call to serve him in meeting spiritual and physical needs of the world but on glorifying America. Completely absent was any call for repentance for slavery and a century of segregation.

It shouldn’t be hard for a Christian to reflect on Jesus’ example when he said that he himself, the Son of God, “ did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

 

American Problem: Who Are We?

U.S. diplomatic families sometimes take part in “international days.” These are celebrations by diplomats in a particular country of all the countries with representatives there. Each country serves foods of their particular nation.

The question by one American diplomatic wife relates to the difficulty of finding foods representative of the United States. Laura Keys Ellsworth , a U.S. diplomatic family member, asks “. . . each year I desperately wrack my brain to come up with something beautifully American to present.” (“International Day: The American Problem,” The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018)

So far as I know, most of my ancestors immigrated from the British Isles. However, I love Mexican tacos, Near Eastern/African stews, and Japanese teriyaki. Add to that, a Chinese meal or maybe a dessert of French crème brûlée.

Perhaps nowhere are our melting pot origins more evident than in our foods. Our various menus are a delectable variety. This variety is one example of the advantages we have enjoyed by welcoming immigrants from every country on earth. Of course, we welcome more than additions to our culinary menus.

We welcome laborers and professionals and students and refugees. Yes, sometimes the number who wish to come challenge us with the need for orderly ways to manage the flow. Yet, isn’t it better to live in a country where people want to come than living where people want to leave?

If We Care About Children

Often ignored in the controversy about the U.S. Supreme Court decision to allow states to forbid abortion, is the cost of having a child in this country. If we care about children, perhaps we ought to make it easier to have them.

Rose Marie Berger, an editor at Sojourners magazine, visited the issue of free births (Sojo.net, May, 2023.) She quoted extensively from an article by Elizabeth Bruenig (The Atlantic, “Make Birth Free,” July 9, 2022.) According to the article, a birth in the United States costs an average of $18,265. The average not covered by insurance, the article states, is about $2,850. Presumably, poorer mothers tend not to have any medical insurance.

Raising a child continues to cost, of course—food, adequate shelter, clothes, doctor visits, and so on. In addition, unusual medical conditions can render more expenses than any normal household can cover. Some parents have family medical insurance through a job. Having a job, however, is not a guarantee of medical insurance. Lesser paying, more seasonal jobs, often have no medical insurance.

While Medicare provides medical insurance for older Americans, medical care for children often depends on what kind of job their parents have.

If we want to save children’s lives, both those unborn and those already born, we could start simply with making children more affordable for average Americans.

Evacuation

During my orientation to the U.S. Foreign Service, one of the presenters confidently told us that, for sure, given a normal diplomatic career, we’d all be evacuated, due to war or civil turmoil, at least once from the U.S. embassy or consulate where we were assigned.

Actually, I was evacuated twice, upping the odds. Before you have visions of my being airlifted to safety by a U.S. military helicopter, however, I must confess that both were blessedly uneventful.

In Algeria, my tour was curtailed early because of ongoing strife in the country and increasing threats against diplomats and other foreign nationals. I left on a crowded Air Algérie flight to Paris where I enjoyed an afternoon and evening before flying out to Washington the next day.

In Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, terrorist attacks against Americans led to another embassy draw down of embassy personnel. This time I flew out on a crowded flight to Amsterdam and enjoyed an evening in another pleasant European city.

I was quite fortunate. Recent evacuations are more likely to mirror the kind recently carried out in Afghanistan and Sudan. In Sudan, the more recent, American embassy staff were brought to safety by helicopter, as chaos descended on the country.

The evacuations in Sudan followed dangerous battles between two strongmen, each wanting power and apparently too selfish to care about what they were inflicting on the citizens of their country.

Yes, U.S. diplomats are sometimes killed. Their names are inscribed on walls in a lobby of the U.S. State Department in Washington. Fortunately, however, most American and other foreign diplomats usually make it out. Left behind are ordinary men, women, and children facing civil war, including not only physical attacks but also starvation as basic goods run out and cannot be replaced.

The diplomatic world is perhaps chastened again by its helplessness, as its members leave carnage and perhaps memories of local friends and acquaintances who have no U.S. helicopters to bring them to safety.

 

Where Are the People?

Increasing internet use combined with Covid-19 has devastated our time with each other.

Restaurants closed as people ate at home. Workers met on Zoom. Shoppers avoided stores to buy over the internet. Town halls and religious groups experimented with hybrid meetings. Today, schools struggle to cope with returning students after two years of attempts at remote learning.

Covid led us through separations resembling a time of war. We are struggling to adjust. A lifestyle already dictated by automobiles and suburbs was upended further by the pandemic.

How do we relearn our people skills? How do we learn to meet together again? How do we come out from our home burrows?

How do we integrate singles back into society again? How do we help those caught in the drug epidemic to find restoring community? How do we overcome the easy use of guns to interrupt peaceful gatherings?

We are in search of community, of people gathering safely to share lives. We are in search of those willing to commit to each other and to care for one other.

As we confront our changed society, may we have the dedication, patience, and discipline to persevere and overcome the currents that would tear us apart.

May we grow the communities we so need.

Unhooking Illegal Drugs

That illegal drugs are a problem in the United States is obvious to many Americans. Finding ways to deal with the problem, however, is something of a problem in itself.

Alexander Ward listed in Politico some suggested solutions by various members of the U.S. congress, including at least one suggestion to bomb Mexico. (“GOP embraces a new foreign policy: Bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl,” April 10, 2023)

Targeted strikes against drug lords, labeling drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and other ideas have been suggested by members of congress.

I’m hardly qualified to suggest ways to defeat drug cartels. However, I suggest that one way of battling illegal use might be to examine why so many Americans fall into the illegal drug trap in the first place.

After all, if Mexican cartels disappear tomorrow, other cartels in other countries will step into the market. If the market is there, sellers will rise to meet the demand. All sorts of different ways exist to overcome U.S. efforts against drug sellers.

What can we do to unhook Americans off drugs?

We could begin by exploring the question from a different angle: Why do some Americans, especially young Americans, avoid drugs?

I would think that families and care givers who love and support their children are the most important factor in raising drug free children. That is not to say that such families will never have children who become drug users. It would be of no help to parents who dearly love and support their children when a tough world finds a way to warp their children’s lives.

It is merely to say that parents who are able to love and support and spend time with their children are the best defense against habits that might destroy those children.

What can we do to encourage parents to be parents?

Begin with the basics: no child should go hungry or not have a secure place to sleep at night. As some cities try to help the homeless, provide special care to families and to parents.

This includes safe spaces to eat and sleep, but it also can include support to parents who might have a problem with drugs themselves to stay drug free. It can support as well any programs to help parents find jobs and learn useful skills.

The goal is a society which rids itself of harmful drug use by becoming a productive society and one less likely to seek harmful drugs.

Parent Early

Beginning in the later twentieth century, women with small children began increasingly entering the labor force. Some were fortunate in being able to afford adequate child care, or perhaps a grandparent enjoyed keeping the children during the day.

Many women found their jobs to be stimulating and affirming. Many more worked simply because their families could not survive without the money their jobs brought in. This segment included, obviously, many single mothers.

Regardless, working at a paid job is now a major part of life for many young and middle-aged women. Many of these women also want to be parents in a world which increasingly separates parenthood from paid work.

The great separation between jobs and homes began centuries ago. The laboring world became largely male while the home world was mostly composed of mothers and other women. However, this began to change for many reasons, including the need for women to hold civilian jobs during World War II. Regardless, women became a major part of the work force, even while jobs became increasingly performed outside the home.

One effect of the Covid pandemic was the realization that work done through computers could often be done from home. After vaccination against the disease made office work again feasible, some newly home based workers resented returning to the office.

While adjustments are still being made in work/home arrangements, the birth rate continues to fall in developed societies, where a significant percentage of adults work outside the home. Obviously work/home separation especially affects mothers or potential mothers, since they are the ones whose wombs carry the babies and who usually are most important to children in their first years.

Surveys show that many women desire more children than they actually have. For families able to survive on one income for a few years, women might consider reversing the career model: children in the early years of their lives, then beginning a career in their thirties.

This would mean more time to think about career choices. It might also mean time to take academic classes, which can more easily fit into flexible schedules than a job.

We also live longer now. Starting a career in the thirties, or even the forties, may mean choosing with more wisdom than we might have at an earlier age.

 

Healing Before Leading

This week a school killing in the city where I grew up, Nashville, Tennessee, brought the tragedies of my country a little closer to me.

How can we expect to live up to our world leadership status when we can’t even protect school children? How can we lead the world against tyranny when we lack money for adequate water systems in some American cities? How can we support democratic movements in other countries when our own country experiences rising income inequality?

To lead the world does not require that we think we are better or more superior to other nations. It does require that we practice respect for each other and for differing opinions. No one person, government official or private citizen, has all the answers.

Democracy requires that some win elections and some lose elections. The winners have an obligation to listen to all opinions while carrying out their programs. The losers have an obligation to respect the right of the winners to govern even while respectfully disagreeing with them on some or many issues.

To squander the blessings given us by withdrawing into our corners and waiting for an opportunity to knock the other unconscious hardly produces a well governed country.

Perhaps a country governed by the people is more like a continuing race in which different teams hand off power to another team who performs better. Nobody is annihilated. The losers rest and enter the contest at a later date.

Where Do We Work?

When my children were very small, I was fortunate that I could work from home. That’s because my vocation was free-lance writing.

Of course, for generations almost everyone, both men and women, worked from home. Our work was there—farms, woodlands, preparing food. Our work activities were in our homes or close by.

The industrial revolution changed the location of jobs in developed countries and led to a larger separation between home and work. Some factories produced unhealthy waste. Businesses searched for efficiency and created job centers for workers only.

For those who could afford it, the men mostly worked at paying jobs in the cities while more women and children moved further out into the suburbs. Women no longer were a significant part of providing income or producing goods for the family.

Gradually, women came back into the labor force, but children generally were taken care of elsewhere—sometimes adequately, sometimes not. The birth rate lowered as some adults solved the problem of childcare by not having children at all.

The ability of some to work remotely through computers raised the possibility of more work done at home—if our office culture could adjust to this practice. The Covid pandemic, of course, quickened the amount of work done remotely.

Questions are still debated: Did this reduction of shared office space affect the quality of work done? Restrict needed worker interaction?

But what about our city centers and the jobs seemingly dependent on a work force spending five days a week there? Or can city centers reinvent themselves to be family friendly? Places where families can live as well as work and go to school?

How can we connect social need for close relationships with economic need for work places?

What Size Houses Do We Need?

Somebody has suggested that the country has plenty of space for housing. The problem, they believe, is a perceived desire for large lots and houses versus smaller lots and houses. Large houses make more money for builders and perhaps for sellers later on, it is suggested. Yet few families need large houses (unless they are the increasingly rare multi-generational family.)

The ability of some to work online while living physically away from traditional job centers adds to current ideas about where a home is supposed to be.

My housing history has included a variety of housing. I grew up in a close in city suburb with varying size houses and lots. My father commuted to his job in the city by bus. Our house was on a small plat, but my parents kept a lot on one side as a possible investment. It’s still there with the current owners of my childhood home.

Since then, I have lived in about as many varieties of built housing as is possible in a life time. I have lived in a typical suburban small house as well as in apartments and in a condo.

After joining the U.S. foreign service, my housing varied even more. In less developed countries, I sometimes lived in a compact embassy housing compound. In a first world country, I rented my own housing, a small apartment. In a failing north African country, I lived in a mansion because the U.S. embassy was able to rent it cheaply when the country’s well-off fled political turmoil. (I only stayed a few months before the embassy was drawn down due to the turmoil.)

Currently, my husband and I live in our own home, on the top two floors while we rent the bottom apartment. It’s on a small lot, close to our small town’s restaurants, stores, churches, city hall, and post office. Near our house, a community group is building small housing intended for those working in the lesser paying jobs of the area.

I consider the current location the best of any we’ve lived in. The answer, I believe, is community, encouraged by smaller housing.

We often are fixated on housing when perhaps community is a more important need.

Dominion, by Tom Holland

The recent book, Dominion, by Tom Holland, is a thought-provoking history of Christianity. For me, it comes in the back door of secular journalism toward an unusual defense of the religion. I saw Dominion not as the work of an apologist but of a bare-knuckled but admiring observer.

I gained a sense of the revolutionary teachings of Jesus and the very human capabilities of those attempting to follow those teachings.

We are right to condemn atrocities in the name of any religion, including Christianity. Give Christianity its due, however. It’s difficult to find a religion having more influence toward the uplifting of women or the abolishment of slavery.

In the name of Christ, despite the failings of some who go by that name, the hungry are fed, the thirsty have wells built for them, the homeless are given shelter, hospitals are built for the sick, clothes are gathered for the raggedly clothed, and ministries are begun for those in prison.

One of the miracles of Christianity is its call to the weak, its raising of hope that we, though sinners, can change and become healers.

People Versus Machines?

“Machines are not better at personal care, machines are not better cooks, and machines will not necessarily be better than people at driving trucks.”

Lant Pritchett, the author of these words, is a research director at the University of Oxford and a former Wold Bank economist. Pritchett makes the case for immigration over automation in “People Over Robots,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2023.

He points out that some automation replaces the work of a laborer with the work of a customer, as when a customer must use a self-checkout machine. Pritchett doesn’t mention it, but I suspect some of us may miss the human interaction with a live cashier as well.

The dramatically lower birth  rates in developed countries, as well as the increasingly higher education levels, have led to a shortage of workers for “manual, nonroutine tasks,” Pritchett writes. We are, it seems, in need of workers while less developed countries have a surplus of potential workers. Pritchett sees as a waste of time and resources the efforts to develop machines for work better done by humans.

A lack of agricultural workers may result in less than beneficial results, Pritchett writes. Farmers relying on machines may prefer genetically modified products that can be better harvested by machines such as thicker-skinned tomatoes. Automation may tend to eliminate foods that can’t easily be harvested by machines, such as asparagus and strawberries.

As Pritchett points out, the movement of labor happens with or without legality. The problem with illegal movements is their tendency to exploitation and abuse.

It seems a waste of both people and nature not to provide for people-oriented immigration policies.

Inviting the Poor to Our Good Times

Apparently, Jesus enjoyed a good time. He was no killjoy rabbi but was often invited to feasts and gatherings.

His only rebuke about such gatherings had to do with who was invited: did invitations to the feasts include even the poor and unfortunate of society?

No one of us is wealthy enough to erase all poverty or hunger or sickness. As far as I can tell, that is not the point. The point is that, if we are following Christ, one of our tasks is ministering to people in need.

In fact, Jesus taught that those invited into the kingdom at the last judgement are those who ministered to the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the poorly clothed, the sick, and those in prison.

We aren’t just saved from our sins; we find a new vocation.

As we are blessed, so are we called to bless others.

Stepping Out

The Pan American Boeing 747 taxied down a runway of the JFK airport around 9 p.m. on December 4, 1990, and lifted off. I watched the New York City metropolitan area spreading out in a vast sea of lights. It was the first international plane trip of my life. I was beginning my first assignment as a U.S. Foreign Service officer.

The takeoff began my trip to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a change of planes in Frankfurt, Germany, then to Riyadh. In Riyadh, I was to change planes again for a final short flight to Saudi Arabia’s port city of Jeddah.

Looking back, I have to laugh at all the mistakes a hyped up newbie Foreign Service officer could make. I had packed my suitcase too full, and it was obvious, once I landed in New York City for consultations, that it wasn’t going to last out the trip.

Fortunately, a kind officer in the New York office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service took me to a luggage store for a better suitcase.

Of course, the new suitcase was possibly the reason I identified the wrong one when I, seriously jet lagged, changed planes in Riyadh. Eventually, the luggage was sent back to the right person in Riyadh, and mine returned to me in a day or so.

However, due to the fact that I had no luggage for my first evening in Jeddah, I had to attend a welcoming reception wearing the travel-stained outfit I’d worn for several days. I also developed a blister on my foot from walking around in my travel shoes.

My first assignment began a few weeks before the the start of the First Gulf War. It pitted Iraq against Saudi Arabia, with the United States and other allies supporting Saudi Arabia.

Due to new assignments and training, the former officer had been transferred to another job before I arrived, so I missed training with the one I was replacing. I fell into my visa services job with no overlap as the war began.

After daytime duties in the visa section (overflowing with foreign nationals seeking visas to leave the country now coveted by Saddam Hussein), I worked in the control room in the evenings. This operation was a command center overseeing American wartime activities, including supervising high level U.S. officials coming to confer with Saudi Arabian officials on the war efforts.

I not only survived but treasured that first foreign assignment as a time of comradery with fellow Americans seeking to serve our country in a time of crisis.

I had joined the Foreign Service with the hope of living in other countries and enjoying an exciting and meaningful vocation. I was not disappointed.