Too Good to Be True?!

A little less than a year ago, I received the long-awaited "call" to join the Foreign Service. A whole new life and career instantly materialized before my eyes but that moment last May also marked the culmination of a pursuit that spanned many years and included several unsuccessful attempts. Some may think that becoming a diplomat was my destiny (cue Darth Vader voice) but I like to think that a mix of dogged determination and perseverance won out (proficiency in Arabic also helped a lot). Like Will Smith tells his son in this motivational scene, "You want something. Go get it. Period." Well, it took me about fifteen years to become a political officer assigned to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. My wife's journey, on the other hand, was considerably shorter.

Did you get that? J got a job...as a political officer...working with me! Holy dynamic duo, Batman!

Here's how it went down. Earlier this year, J submitted a nondescript application to the Expanded Professional Associates Program (EPAP). Recognizing the need to maintain morale within the home of Foreign Service Officers, the State Department created EPAP to give spouses the opportunity to obtain substantive positions at various posts. I use the word "substantive" because all too often the careers of "trailing" spouses take a backseat for irregular or less than satisfying work overseas. Truth be told, J's best options in Tel Aviv were shaping up to be either taking fingerprints of visa applicants or volunteering part time with some local school or organization. With this in mind, she was already preparing for the prospects of a two-year sabbatical in Tel Aviv.

It's a good thing she threw her hat into the ring for the EPAP position despite ambivalence about the impersonal application process. One of bureaucratic hurdles was a writing test to ensure that the applicant could put together coherent sentences in English. Mind you J attended the top journalism school in the country so she obviously cleared that one. Nevertheless, we weren't holding our breath. Who else was applying and how long it would it take for the wheels to turn?

Well, low and behold, two weeks ago I received an email from my future boss in Tel Aviv asking whether J would be interested in one of two available full-time EPAP positions! He also asked me frankly if it would be awkward to work together in the same section. I admit that pillow talk about Israeli politics might take some time getting used to but I don't foresee any cataclysmic event like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters. After all, we have been on friendly terms since the time when the Berlin Wall fell and we also spent 2004 together 24/7 traveling around the world. Tel Aviv tandem? Yes, we can!

We were dazed for a few minutes by the sudden news and then regained our senses. Was this an official offer? Were there any other steps? Would J have to learn Hebrew in a few short months? For these very reasons, we kept relatively quiet about the exciting development until J signed on the dotted line (figuratively speaking) over the weekend. She also learned that one of the reasons why she was selected for the position was because she is learning Arabic. It turns out the blood, sweat and tears (I can personally attest that she has expended the latter two) over the past 25 weeks has paid off splendidly!

We still need to receive some assurances about juggling the logistics of after-school care for our kids but the eternal optimist in me says everything is going to work out. Now all that stands between us and our first assignment TOGETHER is passing our upcoming language exams. I test in Hebrew on the 18th and J in Arabic on the 30th.

On that note, it's best that we get back to practicing our verb conjugations. I'll be back in a few short weeks with the results from the test. Wish us luck!

Pleasant Living at Oakwood's Diploville

Don't get the wrong idea from my last blog. I'm still yearning to head out to my first overseas post but I really can't complain about life over the last eight months. Several experiences over the past couple weeks have reminded me how good my family and I have it at Oakwood's Falls Church facility.

The people we've met here have been one of the definite highlights. Yesterday was my son's birthday party and almost all of his friends who attended were kids of other Foreign Service Officers. It's to be expected that six-year old-boys will act like six-year-old boys at times but I couldn't help but notice how nice and well behaved they all were. Even though these kids enjoy many spoils both here and abroad, I'd bet that "diplo-brats" in the true sense of the word are few and far between. I'd like to think this has something to do with the parents rather than some genetic predisposition.

Speaking of which, my wife and I have also also become friends with a number of diplomats through Oakwood, most of whom are newbies like me but also a few seasoned veterans. It is quite an interesting social engineering experiment, come to think of it, to stick a collection of collegial cohorts within such a close vicinity. I can't think of any instances of drama that you would normally find in an apartment complex. No fights over tennis courts, parking spots or grilles. No raunchy behavior in the pool or hot tub (at least that I know of). There is no way a reality show about Foreign Service temporary housing could ever compete with the likes of "Jersey Shore" (this is a family-oriented blog so I didn't link to any racy YouTube clips of Snooki).

Is the "diplo-bubble" I'm describing starting to sound a little creepy--kinda like this scene from The Stepford Wives? I admit that living at Oakwood does feel like a compound and free donuts in the clubhouse every Sunday morning has become something of a religious calling for us. Rest assured though that the only cult the residents here subscribe to is a commitment to serving our country overseas in a professional way. There's a reason why we are called Foreign Service Officers

I've also witnessed a tremendous sense of determination and solidarity within the Foreign Service. On Friday I received a update from one of my A-100 classmates, who was diagnosed several months ago with a mango-sized tumor on her heart. She has already endured chemotherapy but now is about to face major surgery in hopes of removing it. I've been deeply moved not only by her perseverance but also the support she has received from others. So the very least I can do for her now would be to encourage other Foreign Service Officers who may be reading this blog to consider donating annual leave here (via the intranet) that she can use during for her long road ahead of treatment and recovery.

Sorry to end on that sober note. I'll be back in a month or so with a new blog as I wind down my language study. Mrs. DiploDad will also be finishing her language in the not-so-distant future. I'm still lobbying her to do a guest blog by the way. To get a sense of what she'll go through when she tests, read this funny blog by the spouse of another colleague.

Signing off from Pleasantville!        

Winter Wanderlust

Well, it didn't take long for me to fall off the wagon from my New Year's "mission statement." So much for bold resolutions about being a more faithful blogger. I won't try to make any lame excuses about how I am so busy that I can't find the time. The honest truth is that I lack the motivation these days. How could this be? After all, I've fulfilled my lifelong dream of becoming a diplomat, scored a sweet first assignment as a political officer in Tel Aviv and am getting paid to learn Hebrew for a total of 36 weeks. Why then does waking up every morning feel like this scene from the movie Groundhog Day?

I think my malaise stems from the drip-drip training for what lies ahead. I knew after Flag Day that I wouldn't be heading to the front line anytime soon but the slog of long-term training is now wearing on me. It hasn't helped that some of my A-100 colleagues are already at their posts and the initial reports, as far I know so far, have been glowing. While a few have gloated about exploring exotic locales and meeting foreign dignitaries, I'm spending my weekends in the suburbs and trying to conjugate verbs in the future tense. On top of it, I've had to listen to chatter about bid lists by newly inducted diplomats and even hear where some CNL classmates are headed for their second tour. If that wasn't enough, scores of language learners recently left the frigid confines of the classroom for short "immersion" trips to warmer climates.

I clearly need an intervention. The good news is there some light at the end of tunnel. I still have another couple months of Hebrew to go but I am making some progress. I'm now able to get the gist reading some short newspaper articles and the highlight of my speaking ability was conversing for seven straight hours during a field trip several weeks ago. My class is visiting the Holocaust Museum this week and I hope to get some good (albeit sobering) practice in preparation for my second language assessment on Friday. In next month's blog, I'll give an update on Mrs. DiploDad's strides in Arabic.

The second sign that things are moving along is that I will soon have a new passport for official travel! If you're not familiar with diplomatic passports, they bestow a few special privileges to holders. For one, I should pass through airport arrivals and customs much easier than your typical traveler (without collecting $200 though). I'll surely feel a bit heady when I whip out that black passport. Hopefully I'll never have to invoke the diplomatic immunity clause even though it sounds so freakin' cool to say. I'll have to continually remind myself of what happened in this scene from Lethal Weapon 2.

On a final note, being confined to long-term training hasn't at all stopped me from daydreaming about future posts. I'm ready to confess here in front of all you (chirp, chirp) that I have an addiction. I haven't even served one day in my first post but I'm already thinking about future tours based on reports in Tales from a Small Planet. I know there are others out there like me who do this. C'mon, come clean. What's so bad about a little planning in order to be in Qatar for World Cup 2022? For the time being, I'll be content with taking some short trips on the East Coast to get my fix. In fact, the whole family is looking forward to spending a day and night at an indoor water park in Williamburg, Virginia over the upcoming weekend.

After that, I'm hoping things will pick up and time flies by until we ship out in mid-July. By that point, my case of wanderlust will be hopeless and the only cure will be frequent travel. I'm thinking two years by the Mediterranean will be good detox for that!      

New Year's "Mission Statement"

I'm fond of the opening scene from Jerry Maguire when Tom Cruise has a moral epiphany late one night and transcribes his noble vision for cut throat sports agents. I wasn't particularly moved by what he had to say but instead liked his idea of writing a mission statement ("not a memo," as he emphasizes) to lay out a set of guiding principles. Coming up on the halfway point of my training period in DC, it's probably a good time as any for me to do the same.

First of all, this ain't your typical laundry list of New Year's resolutions. I'm not going to talk about my new diet or goal of learning a foreign language (at least I can say I'm already doing that). The contents of this mission statement also weren't hatched over a holiday fruit cake. I've had plenty of time to reflect on them. And note that I'm putting them in my blog for the whole world (okay, maybe a few dozen followers) to see may actually help make them stick.

Okay, enough talk. It's time to show you the money! Here are four points to my 2012 mission statement:

1) Don't get complacent. I've grumbled about learning Hebrew but I have to admit that it is a pretty sweet gig. Besides getting paid to do it, I don't have to achieve the same level of fluency as some of my Foreign Service colleagues. I also get the impression that a working proficiency isn't necessarily essential for my job. That being said, I don't want to coast through the next five months of class. I need to identify the ways in which Hebrew can best serve me during my two-year tour in Tel Aviv and beyond. I'm thinking that I should focus on reading comprehension so that I can follow events in the newspapers with the eventual goal of understanding Israeli commentary on important affairs in the region.

2) Keep writing. It's been a while since I blogged. I confess that I often just don't feel like doing it but other other times I feel there's not that much to say. Gone is the anticipation associated with the call to A-100 and the first assignment on Flag Day. In its place is the ho-hum of every day life. Language training has settled into a routine and my social life mostly revolves around the Oakwood activities calendar (is it "donut Sunday" yet?). Although my literary luminosity has probably dimmed somewhat, I need to resist letting my blog "go dark" and should instead continue to use it as an outlet for my writing. This has been and will continue to be the single most important skill of my career.

3) Family quality time. As it is now, I get to spend a good amount of time with my family. My wife and I are co-eds at FSI and our classrooms are a mere corridor apart. My schedule also allows me to be with my two boys each afternoon after school. Unfortunately, I will not have these luxuries when I begin my job in Tel Aviv this July. I know the work at post will be very demanding with long hours. Even though I won't see my family as much, I need to find ways to make the time I do have with them worthwhile. Whether it is carving out time on weekends for special activities, indulging my son in some fantasy play or just talking with my wife, I need to make a concerted effort for my family.

4) Good goodbyes. I just returned from a weeklong visit to Colorado during which time I saw most family members and friends. A frequent question that came up was whether I would see them again before shipping out in the summer. This reality of life in the Foreign Service made me realize how important goodbyes will be over the coming months. I've learned from past experiences of going and returning from abroad that send offs go a long way in forming lasting impressions of people and places. For this reason, I need to make goodbye opportunities count, not only for loved ones but also also for many of my A-100 classmates who are heading out to posts soon.     

Humbled by Hebrew

Once upon a time I was pretty good in foreign languages. The key was that I got hooked on phonics at an early age. I signed up for after-school Spanish, started learning Russian in the eighth grade and dabbled in some Japanese in high school. I liked foreign languages so much that I used almost all of my electives on them. It made perfect sense in these formative years. Why bother learning life skills in home economics or shop when I could study exotic tongues in Middle America? I suppose Russian would have come in handy if the Soviet Army had invaded Colorado like the 1984 cult movie Red Dawn.

I was pretty nerdy back then (and still am) but I do like to think that this adolescent infatuation set me up for a fateful relationship with the U.S. Foreign Service. Studying Arabic didn't do any wonders for my social life in high school but it probably convinced the State Department to ask me out two decades later. I didn't mind being the back-up plan and clearly wasn't getting any better looking so I quickly said yes. Our romance blossomed this summer during A-100 orientation and, before I knew it, my princess charming proposed (Tel Aviv) to me on Flag Day. Just a week later I took my vows and here I am, a newly sworn-in diplomat, living in an apartment outside of Washington, DC and learning how to share the toothpaste. Instead of waffle makers or crystal stemware, Uncle Sam gave me some basic cookware.

Now I'm learning Hebrew. But this hasn't been like the glory days of adolescence with abundant free time and brain cells. Intensive language training has been both challenging and humbling. I felt on top of things in the beginning but the past few weeks have been a different story. As I have mentioned elsewhere, my speaking experiences have been rife with some embarrassing mistakes.

This morning I had a progress evaluation which also included a reading assessment. I knew this was the biggest weakness for me. I have made some recent strides in deciphering the mind-numbing script but I still struggled making sense of the short articles in Hebrew. I suspect that I did okay overall but it is hard to accept that nobody is going to call me a language savant here. I guess I'm just an average language learner now. Is this how former Homecoming Queens feel? Sniff. Sniff.

No more pity party. Time to get over it and get down to business. I have until mid-May to achieve the required proficiency in Hebrew. I'm still confident that I can do it and maybe get back a little of my foreign language mojo. Maybe I just need Dr. Evil's "Time Machine" to go back to the 1980s. Big hair and bad fashion, here I come!    

Polygots R' Us

Here's a snippet of a recent conversation I had in my elementary Hebrew:

Teacher: What is this?
Me: This is picture of Jerusalem
Teacher: Good, Oren (my Hebrew name). Were you in Jerusalem?
Me: Yes, I go there...um...about twenty years ago.

Not bad for one month of Hebrew, right? Well, that's what I thought I said. It turns out my seemingly innocent response raised my teacher's eyebrows because I mistakingly used the word for "circumcision" instead of "about." Oy vey!

Such is life these days in intensive language training. I imagine that language instructors at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), where I attend every day, share other humorous sayings over lunch with their native-speaking colleagues. I can't be the first diplomat-in-training to bring up the topic of his foreskin inadvertently. I figure it's much better to make these kind of mistakes now then, say, when I'm meeting with a member of the Israeli Knesset next fall. Until then, it's back to the safe confines of the classroom.

FSI represents that protective bubble in many ways. Every day hundreds of other trainees toil and triumph during intensive language training which, as the name suggests, is all encompassing. I'm often amused seeing other seemingly deranged students wandering around campus and talking to themselves in some foreign tongue.  Chinese flashcards, not the sports page, appears to be the common reading material on the early morning shuttle bus to FSI. English may be the lingua franca in the long corridors but a retreat in the teacher's lounges will encounter Farsi, Hindi or Thai. A few of my classmates from A-100 are receiving training in even more exotic languages such as Mongolian, Somali and Tibetan.

As for me, the Hebrew department is small but packs a lot of chutzpah. My day begins bright and early at 7:40am and finishes at 2:30pm (not including several hours of homework and independent study). During that time, I have two Israeli teachers with very distinct styles but they complement each other really well. There are about a dozen Hebrew students but only three others in my section. We all speak multiple languages and often a word from a different language sneaks in. I've actually been surprised how similar Hebrew is to Arabic. This has both helped and hurt. More on that later.

The big news is that there will soon be a new language learner roaming the halls of FSI when my wife begins studying Arabic next month. Why, might you ask, would anyone want to inflict this on himself or herself? There is a very good reason!

On September 9 my wife passed the Oral Assessment and received a conditional offer to join the Foreign Service! Since the register of eligible Foreign Service candidates has become very competitive and hiring will be drastically reduced over the coming years, the only hope for my wife is to acquire what the State Department refers to as a Critical Needs Language (CNL). Just as Arabic was my ticket, it will hopefully be hers as well. Two semitic language learners will make for even more interesting internecine relations in the household. We may try arguing with each other in Arabic and Hebrew to simulate what we may hear out at our post. It may also come in handy to broker agreements among our two young children, especially if they resort to incitement and continue to occupy portions of our two-bedroom apartment.    

So don't expect to see our (much more boring and unattractive) version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith anytime soon. We have a long ways to go before becoming a tandem couple. In the meantime, I'm hoping Mrs. DiploDad will do a guest blog. She has plenty to share and a keen sense of wit that I adore. Speaking of which, we got engaged nine years ago today. Back then she probably thought that she would be marrying a future diplomat but I can safely say that didn't imagine becoming an Arabic-speaking diplomat herself. That's dedication for you!

Diplomat(s)-in-Training

Although the glow from Flag Day has faded, the horizon is bright with my first assignment in Tel Aviv on the horizon. For reasons I previously explained, I feel very lucky to have received this post and continue to hear positive things about it. The past two weeks have shed some new light on what my job will entail and the lifestyle my family will enjoy when we ship out in July 2012. I can't wait!

In the meantime, I've got a lot of nuts and bolts to learn about being a Political Officer in Israel. I have to confess that I have an urge to start making foreign policy widgets right away but, after the holiday weekend, my full time job will be learning Hebrew. Even though this is a pretty sweet gig, the road ahead should be challenging. I know exactly three words of Hebrew at the moment and I probably won't sound much better than this pubescent boy's bar mitzvah by the time Hanukkah rolls around. Maybe I can channel some of my Prussian ancestry (which incidentally may have some Jewish blood in it) so I can become halfway decent by next summer. In all seriousness, my language training should get me near fluency so I can hit the ground running in my reporting duties.

On Tuesday morning, school also begins for my two sons. It's been a long summer and they definitely need some structure and discipline in their days. September 6 couldn't come fast enough! B will make the pilgrimage to kindergarten while A will commute with me to the pre-school adjacent to the Foreign Service training center. I'm optimistic that all three of us will thrive in our new school environments. As a side note, it's ironic that I'll still be in school with them after I thought I could go no further. At least my wife doesn't need to buy school supplies for me too.

Speaking of which, J is also getting in on the school act! Beginning September 19, she'll be in a six-week consular training course at the Foreign Service Institute. Another plus about being posted in Tel Aviv is the embassy has lots of employment opportunities for spouses of Foreign Service Officers. There's some competition but completing the course will give her a leg up for working on visa applications and American citizen services. I might actually be envious of her job because the consular section apparently overlooks the best beach in Tel Aviv!

So, as you can see, us future diplomats have a busy fall schedule of training. There should be some interesting conversation around the dinner table about what new things we learned that day in math, immigration law and Hebrew!