Foreign Service Friday…lets try this again

he had applied to hundreds of jobs and received several offers, but he had also begun the process to join the Foreign Service. It has always been his dream to work at Embassy’s all over the world and represent our nation in foreign lands. We both knew it was extremely rare to be accepted as a foreign service officer (less then 3% of people who start the process are hired) so Chris began the process fully expecting to get a rejection a long the way. It is a lengthy process. First you must take a written exam which I hear most people compare to being on Jeopardy. You have no idea what questions are going to be asked since they can be on any topic, I mean literally ANY topic. One of the questions on his test was “Who was the first African American to read a poem at a Presidential Inauguration?” See? Totally random. Once you have passed this part there is a written part with essays etc. Once you pass that part there is the formal review. This is where they look at your background, interest, references etc. and decide if they want you to go any further. Once they give you a chance you are invited to what are called the “Orals”, where you are put into a group with several other candidates and presented with problems and then watched by “graders” to see how you all fare. You have to fly in to attend and stay over night all on your own dime. Chris studied like crazy for this. He drove up to DC about five times to meet with other candidates and practice. He drove to North Carolina to attend a seminar on the topic, he was dead serious about passing.  What is crazy is that after an entire day of this “judging” you are let out of the building and told to return in an hour or so, upon returning you are told if you made it or not. Chris was pretty much wandering the National Mall in a haze. He did make it and couldn’t be more thrilled… except thats not the end of the process. Just because you passed the orals doesn’t mean you have a job, oh no that would be to easy. Then you are placed on a list. This list is ranked according to your score at the orals. You have one year to be selected off the list before you are booted and have to start the process all over again. Luckily for us Chris scored extremely well on the orals and was offered a position the day Evie was born (that was a VERY happy day for our family, it ironically enough was also the day after Chris took and passed the Virginia bar). We were told to pack up and report to DC in September. This is where the real fun begins. If you live outside of DC when you are hired then the government pays for all your moving costs, plane tickets and temporary housing (which, if you live in the gov’t temporary housing, also includes a housekeeper once a week, cable TV, electric etc. all paid for). Now is also the time to say good bye to rent since anytime you live outside the US the government pays for your housing, furniture, electric bill, your children’s school tuition at private international schools etc. These were all pretty big perks I didn’t really understand before working for the State Dept. I of course was pretty darn excited to be back in DC. I love DC and had lived there while Chris was in Iraq with some fantastic roommates. Plus one of my best friends from law school times was living in Fairfax. At first I was sort of in a daze, not really knowing what was in store, meeting people on the complex playground who named off countries they had lived in like a laundry list. Chris had started what is refereed to as A-100. This is basically Diplomate bootcamp. You are a group of new hires all being trained how to represent the US Gov’t abroad. Then bid list day came. This is the day when your A-100 group receives a list of over 100 places you could be sent. You are expected to rank them and give explanations for your top 10.  I still remember clear as a bell Skyping with Chris’s parents that day. My microphone on our computer wasn’t working so I was literally scribbling on a pad of paper. They asked where I thought we would go. I scribbled “East Timor” and held it up. They were a little shocked as most good Grandparents would be. I mean, when you google East Timor you basically get a horror story of Indonesian violence, civil unrest and UN peacekeeping troops. I have to be honest and say that neither Chris or I were super gun-ho to come to East Timor. It DID look scary and we had three tiny children. So when we made out list we made sure that Timor was NOT one of our high bids. When we met with Chris’s Career Development officer to discuss our list she immediately assured us that we would not be going to East Timor because the position was not what Chris had been slotted to do. We were a little shocked as there were only 3 proficient Portuguese speakers and he was one of them and Timor needed a Portuguese speaker immediately, but we were glad that it was off the table. Several weeks later Flag Day arrived. This is when the entire A-100 class and their families are brought into an auditorium to hear where they are going. We wanted all our our cuties there so thankfully my fabulous friend Kerstin took the day off work and came to help me wrangle them.

We headed home and called our families (it is sort of like a mission call in that way, everyone is making guesses and excited to hear). We of course had to make lots of assurances that the grandchildren would be safe, although honestly these were completely hollow as we had no idea what we were in for. Then we spent the rest of the night saying to each other “wow, East Timor” to which the other would respond “yeah, East Timor”, and of course the over the top web searching began! So that my friends is how we joined the foreign service and received our first posting assignment. Of course as you now know we are headed to Paris next and are currently in DC studing French… but that my friends is for another Foreign Service Friday post