It seems rare these days that the Foreign Service gets much positive press. When something is screwed up, the media is all over it, but the day-to-day actions of our diplomats is often under appreciated. I was pleasantly surprised to see this opinion piece in The New York Times today.
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I love Google’s Analytics program. It essentially analyzes every little thing about your site. How many visitors you have. Where they come from. What pages they click on. Who subscribes to the blog. What keywords they search for and subsequently end up here. Going over the data provided I have learned two very important things about this blog.
On August 7, 1998, the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya were bombed by terrorists associated with al-Qaeda. More than 200 people were killed and at least 4,000 were injured, most of these local Africans who either worked at the embassies or were just unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity at the time. To many in the Foreign Service, 9/11 was not the wake-up call. Our wake-up call had already occured three years earlier.
The Department of State finally received a little extra funding that can be used toward hiring. A State cable (or telegram…yes…we still use telegrams) came out recently announcing how the Department will use some of the funds it received from the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2008. The good news, especially if you’re looking to join the Foreign Service, is that some of that money will be used to hire 140 new Officers above attrition rates.
Life After Jerusalem has posted an interesting article about the selling of ambassadorships. The general public probably isn’t even aware that only about two-thirds of the ambassadors representing the United States come from the Foreign Service. The other third are “political appointees,” many of whom are being rewarded for their work for the political party currently in power.
One aspect of Foreign Service life that you have to quickly learn to accept is that people are always on the move. Newcomers are arriving at post, others are departing post. In between the two there are shipments constantly arriving and being packed up. You get used to meeting new people one day and then scavenging through your colleague’s left over pantry the next to see what you want.
I’m a little late in posting this, but I think it is important enough that better late than never.
Randy Pausch, the professor whose “last lecture” made him a Lou-Gehrig-like symbol of the beauty and briefness of life, died Friday at his home in Chesapeake, Va. He was 47, and had lived five months longer than the six months a doctor gave him as an upside limit last August.
If you do a quick search of what is being discussed in the blogosphere regarding the Foreign Service these days, it seems to be all Obama all the time. Foreign Service Officers in Berlin were recently instructed that they could not attend Obama’s speech because it would be seen as advocating on behalf of a candidate.
Here are some photos from our recent trip to Crimea.
I noticed recently that when one does a Google search for “foreign service blogs,” this blog is the second entry that pops up right behind the Associates of the American Foreign Service Worldwide (AAFSW). It makes me feel more than a bit guilty that there were probably people out there coming to this blog for information on the Foreign Service only to find it hadn’t been updated in months. Hopefully, it will be better now.
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