DiploJournal
Official Confirmation
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There is a lot going on (hence the new blackberry on belt), but I’ll hold off writing until the smoke clears. In the meantime, I actually managed to read a whole novel. I have no explanation for why my adult-onset ADD allows me to read non-fiction but won’t let me get all the way through a novel. I plowed through Updike’s Rabbit series last year and have since started several other recent and not-so-recent works. They are all sitting in strategic places around my apartment with prominent bookmarks calling out for resumption. I still have great aspirations to finish Infinite Jest, but at almost 1100 pages it doubles as a work-out just lugging it around. Some day.
In the meantime, I found Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride a quick read. I know so little about Pakistani history and the various cultures at play there, that I don’t feel the least bit qualified to opine on the substance of the book. That said, it gives one (not so flattering) view of the tribal Pakistanis in the 1950s from the vantage of Lahore Punjabis and an American woman. I’m back to non-fiction for awhile, but I’m hoping my soon-to-arrive iPad will make it easier to carry a few books around so I can make more progress on Infinite Jest.
I used to claim that I spent so much time reading at work (which I did), that reading for pleasure at the end of the day was difficult. I do a lot less reading at work now so I guess it was all just an excuse to justify my TV addiction. Oh well.
I do spend a chunk of time every day reviewing cables, some of which are relevant to what I’m doing now. Others are relevant to what I’ll be doing in a year. Still others are just interesting. As I was doing my regular reading the other day, up popped this one (don’t worry, it’s unclassified and public knowledge):
SUBJECT: SENATE CONFIRMATION AND PRESIDENTIAL
ATTESTATION OF FOREIGN SERVICE GENERALIST LIST 2009 #11
1. Following are the names of 99 individuals included on
Foreign Service Generalist List 2009 #11. This list was
nominated by the President on December 11, 2009,
confirmed by the Senate on March 10, 2010 and attested
by the President on March 15, 2010. Posts are requested
to share this information with their officers.
….
4. For appointment as Consular Officers and Secretaries
in the Diplomatic Service of the United States of
America:
…
Daniel Ross Harris, of California
I guess in between passing landmark health care reform, completing a nuclear arms treaty with Russia, and overhauling the federal student loan program, the powers that be found time to confirm my class of foreign service officers. Kind of a kick to see it in print.
Tags: A-100, Bapsi Sidhwa, fiction, Foreign Service, Pakistan, reading
The Constant Transition
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I’ve always liked transition. When I was a programmer, it was starting a new project or learning a new language. When I was a lawyer, it was starting a new case or, four different times, taking a new job with a different law firm. When I was a photographer, it was the change in seasons with, for example, basketball transitioning to baseball. The foreign service is transition to the Nth degree.
Everything we touch is in a constant state of change. Our supervisors, our support staff, our duties, our substantive focus, our living arrangements, and, of course, the city and country in which we live. I arrived in Ottawa just over a month ago. The week before I left Washington, in between packing and trudging through snow to run last-minute errands, I submitted a narrative requesting assignment to a very short list of hardship posts. It was an odd request because Ottawa, by and large, is deemed to be very desirable post. I was certainly not looking to curtail my two-year assignment to Canada because I didn’t want to live in a safe, clean, extremely comfortable Western city.
I did not, however, want to leave the tough posts for others to do and, for personal reasons, the timing works much better for me and my family if I do an unaccompanied tour sooner rather than later. That said, the off-season bidding presented very few options for which I qualified. I don’t speak Arabic, Urdu, Pashtu, or Dari and I don’t have the experience of several tours under my belt. There were only a handful of jobs that I could even suggest, but they were still a long-shot given the general directive that first tour officers should not be assigned to such places. I wrote a one-page narrative on why I thought it was a good idea, organized a very short bid list, and forgot about it.
I was thus a little bit shocked (and thrilled) to get the email. My time in Ottawa will be cut short by a year. I’ll spend some time back in Washington for additional training, and then I’ll be off to Lahore, Pakistan. Although I had applied for a couple of consular jobs as part of that bidding process, my one-year tour in Lahore will not involve visas.
So, as I settle in to this new routine in Ottawa, I am reading about Lahore. The capital of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, Lahore is 17 miles from the Indian border. There are a myriad of critical political issues at play in the region and, although it is not Ottawa, Lahore has a reputation as being one of Pakistan’s most beautiful and safe urban areas, as well as being the country’s cultural center.
Ah, but the transitions keep coming. I woke up a few days ago to CBC Radio doing the morning news. “45 dead after coordinated bombings in Lahore, Pakistan.” I wasn’t sure if this was a dream or real until I was fully awake and heard the whole story. No doubt things will continue to change over the next year. In the meantime, I’ll continue reading (currently one fiction, The Pakistani Bride, by Bapsi Sidhwa and one non-fiction, Dissent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid) and trying to focus first and foremost on my current transition here in Canada.
Tags: Foreign Service, FSO, Lahore, Ottawa, Pakistan, transition
First Impressions of Ottawa
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I’m now officially settled in Ottawa after my first full week. Having never been here before, I did not have a whole lot of expectations, positive or negative. The post reports I’d read focused on the negatives. Summed up simply, the reports described Ottawa as cold, expensive, and boring. So far, it hasn’t been nearly as cold as expected, it is expensive but not crazy, and I’m far from bored.
Ottawa is not a typical foreign service post in that security is not an overwhelming issue. The trend over the last decade has been to move our embassies out of downtown areas to more secure locations in the suburbs — even in Western European capitals like London. Embassy Ottawa, however, is relatively new and located right downtown on the banks of the Ottawa river. I thus chose to live a short walk away, in new building overlooking the vibrant ByWard Market neighborhood. From my balcony, I can see scores of restaurants, bars, and shops. Everything is a short walk, from the food shops in the market to the modern Rideau Centre mall. I might feel different if I were living in the suburbs, but there is a lot to do and explore downtown.
Yesterday, I walked down to Bank Street, a different downtown area across the Rideau Canal, to find an old-fashioned barber shop (complete with straight-razor shave). On the way back, I walked about a mile down the canal. In the winter, after the Canal freezes 20″ down, they open it up for skating — all 4-1/2 miles of it. It is quite common to see whole families with skates over their shoulders walking through the mall or in the Market, having skated downtown from the suburbs. I was thinking about renting some skates and giving it a try, but the line was daunting. Instead, I just walked the ice. It was packed with people of every age.
Rideau Canal Skaters
After heading back to town, I stopped in to Confederation Park to catch the last week-end of Winterlude, a winter festival highlighted by an amazing collection of ice sculptures: beautiful works of art that will eventually melt into the grass. The cold temperatures clearly don’t prevent Ottawans from getting out and about. The talk around the embassy, particularly among the local staff, is how warm this winter has been. Daily temperatures are getting up to 25-30 degrees. For a Californian, I still find that plenty cold, particularly with the regular stiff wind, but it can easily be 20-30 degrees colder this time of year. We’ll see if the warmth continues — it’s supposed to snow most of this coming week.
Before heading home, I stopped to do some food shopping. There’s a supermarket about three blocks away where I stocked up on staples last week-end, but I want to get into the habit of buying most of my food from the local market shops and carts. I visited the butcher, a couple of vegetable stands, and the patisserie for a baguette. It was so much more fun than loading up a big basket at Safeway.
I think I’ll have to add my own, more positive, post report extolling the virtues of Ottawa in the coming months.
Goodbye Arlington, Hello Ottawa
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Initially, the unprecedented snowstorms that blasted Washington DC provided a interesting diversion. After a day or two of unplanned unproductive time, however, the snow-induced Federal government closure had me wondering whether my departure date would be significantly delayed. With one lease ending and another beginning, a delay would have been a real headache.
I dutifully sat in front the computer at 6:00 pm every night last week, hitting the refresh button on the www.opm.gov website that would announce the operating status for the Federal government the following day. For five consecutive work days, the site proclaimed that all non-essential government services in the DC-area would be closed. No passports (including my diplomatic passport that was ready a week ago) would be delivered. No previously scheduled classes (including the mandatory two-day course I was scheduled to take) would be taught. No offices (includes those with whom I was required to consult) would be open.
My lease in Arlington ended on Friday and I had arranged, after a planned stopover in Syracuse, NY, to take possession of my new place in Ottawa on Saturday. Thus, if OPM announced Thursday night that the government would be closed for a sixth consecutive day on Friday, I wasn’t going anywhere other than a local hotel. I would have to stay and do nothing until at least Tuesday because Monday is a holiday. Thankfully, OPM announced that Friday would a “liberal leave”, late open, day. Not a typical schedule, but offices would be open and hopefully everyone I with whom I had to meet would be in the office.
I finished packing everything I could cram into the car, and the movers arrived around 9:30 am to pack out the rest. While they packed, I cleaned. They did an amazing job and I was on my way to run a series of last minute critical errands within 90 minutes. I managed to find all the various departments up and running, procured the requisite signatures to demonstrate I had no outstanding materials, I had passed my courses, I had processed all my timesheets and vouchers, and that I was good to go.
A call to the passport office to determine the status of my diplomatic passport and Canadian visa (yep, although I don’t need one if I’m going across the border for a vacation, I need one to cross the border in my official capacity for two years) was less conclusive. It seems the visa had been granted, but was still with the Canadian embassy downtown and they had nobody to run over and get it. No problem. Off I went downtown. Unfortunately, the visa pick-up window is only open between 2:00 pm and 4:00 pm so I had to wait. Amazingly, the stars aligned and, at 2:00 sharp, I got in and, after a bit of search, they found it. Phew.
Everything checked off, I jumped in the car and hit the road North. The hardest part of the drive was getting out of the DC metro area. Traffic was backed up for over a mile. Assuming it was a snow-induced accident (of which there have been hundreds over the past week), I was a bit surprised to discover the cause to be a young woman in high heels, stomping angrily down the third lane of the highway. Traffic in both directions slowed to a crawl. The fact that she was topless might also have had some impact on the number of rubber-neckers slowing traffic.
I hit Syracuse just as snow started falling and, after a fitful night, left early this morning for the last three hours. I won’t pretend that it was no big deal to present my credentials for the first time while crossing the border. The customs officer glanced at my car stuffed to the gills and remarked suspiciously that it looked like I was moving to Canada. I was more than happy to explain my new position as Vice Consul at the US Embassy in Ottawa (nevermind that the title sounds a lot more impressive than the accompanying duties). His attitude changed immediately and, after a bit of a chat, provided the inaugural stamp in my shiny new diplomatic passport.
Ottawa is going to be a great fit. The place I rented in Arlington, VA was perfect as a home base for A-100 and ConGen training, but I doubt very much I will ever live in Arlington again. This Arlington Rap video has been making the rounds for a year but it really captures the feel of the place. Next time around, we’ll look for a place in Dupont Circle or around U Street.
After only twelve hours in Ottawa (and despite the two Starbucks I passed within 3 blocks of my building), I already know I’ll be coming back someday in the future.
Schizophrenia, Prison Visits, and the Morgue
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I was thinking after last week’s Non-Immigrant Visa exam that the tough part of ConGen was behind us and that we’d have a relatively easy final two weeks focusing on American Citizen Services. I obviously didn’t look too closely at the syllabus. American Citizen Services, or ACS, covers all of the areas in which the consular section helps U.S. citizens abroad. Unlike visa adjudication, the answers to each question are not necessarily laid out in the Immigration and Naturalization Act or the Foreign Affairs Manual.
Consular officers tend to either love or avoid ACS work. It is by far the most emotionally charged and it requires the most improvisation. Physical and Mental Illnesses, Victims of Crime, International Child Abductions, Arrests, Destitution, and Deaths are just a few of the problems we will have to address.
This week we’ve been doing a lot of ACS exercises. Although the vast majority of my legal career focused on intellectual property and antitrust litigation, while doing pro bono work in Boston, I visited a few clients in prison. The exercise, however, was something new. While others watched (and later evaluated), I spent a 1/2-hour session in a prison cell interviewing a schizophrenic who alternated between incoherent shouts at phantom voices with pleas for the return of his guitar apparently lost on a train after he was arrested for riding without a ticket and resisting arrest. Apparently, a number of U.S. citizens in prisons abroad have some struggle with mental illness so the scenario is not very far-fetched. It was just an exercise, but I was exhausted afterwards.
Today, we spent the morning working on telephone exercises in which we had to notify husbands, wives, and parents that their spouses or children had been killed during a vacation abroad. I’m very glad to have had the experience of doing it in a controlled environment (and watching others) dealing with grief, denial, and anger. I don’t think anyone is prepared to do that the first time, but practice definitely helps.
In the afternoon, we had our last field trip, traveling to the DC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. We met with grief counselors and learned about the autopsy process so we can explain to our clients (not nearly as glamorous or sterile as CSI). Like the exercises, they also wanted us to see a dead body up close here, before we have to deal with it in the field. Nothing like a trip to the morgue to lighten things up before the week-end.
Tags: ACS, congen, consular, Foreign Service, foreign service institute, FSI, training
Telling When Someone is Telling a Lie
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I’ve spent a lot of hours trying to figure out when people are lying to me. As a litigator, one of the real challenges is leading a witness into a lie and then exposing it in front of a jury with other evidence or, preferably, the witness’s own prior conflicting testimony on video. Under the pressure of testifying in open court, some witnesses exaggerate to support their case. Most outright lie. In poker, one of my favorite pastimes, success depends on one’s ability to lie convincingly and to detect when others are lying.
We’ve been focusing this week on interviewing techniques and fraud detection.
While playing poker, I try to avoid playing any meaningful hands for the first hour, particularly when I don’t know how the others at the table play. I spend that time watching and establishing a baseline of behavior for each opponent. People have different body language when they have a big hand, when they are bluffing, and when they are not sure where they stand. I don’t just focus on the face. Good poker players are very good at not giving anything away from their facial expressions and it is too easy to get false tells. Instead, I get more useful information by watching other details: how they move their chips when they bet, body position, hand shakes, gum chewing patterns, foot tapping, etc.
I’ve heard about micro-expressions, mostly from watching the TV show ‘Like to Me‘ a few times. I have never given it much thought, but it turns out to be a very useful tool. Not dispositive in the way it appears on the show, but definitely worth developing as a skill. Aside from my fundamental skepticism about lie detection, I initially assumed that the myriad of cultural differences I will encounter in the foreign service makes the practice useless. Paul Ekman, one of the principal researchers in the field (and the scientific advisor for the TV show) did an amazing study of the isolated Fore tribesman in Papua New Guinea. What emerged was a common set of universal facial expressions: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, and Surprise.
You don’t need to be a Fore tribesman to interpret what emotions that person is feeling. We all unconsciously make these faces, sometimes blatantly, but most of the time in a flash of a second. With practice, however, you can start to see those flashes. Everywhere. Now there’s no facial expression for “I’m lying,” but those that are skilled in reading micro-expressions can quickly spot when they don’t match the words being spoken.
After the public admission last month, the New York Times ran a piece in which Dr. Ekman analyzed a 2007 Alex Rodriguez interview during which he denied using steroids, what we now know to be a blatant lie. We used the video in class, first listening to it without watching the video (ARod’s voice was strong and he sounded genuine, albeit coached). We then watched the video and had a very different reaction.
I’m not sure it’ll make me a better poker player or a better foreign service officer, but I’m going to put in some practice time.
Tags: congen, consular, Foreign Service, foreign service institute, FSI, lying, Poker
iPhone Apps
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I’m a complete gadget fanatic. Growing up in the heart of Silicon Valley made it easier as it is a very common affliction. Walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto, you’ll marvel at the latest, greatest phones, e-readers, and other electronic gizmos on display, in use by patrons of the numerous coffee shops and sidewalk cafes. The iPhone seems to have become ubiquitous just about everywhere now and I’m one of those folks that have 4+ screens of icons, filled with little time-savers (which, of course, require so much MORE time to play with and maintain).
Some apps are kind of useful or fun, but not critical to my day-to-day life (FML, Yelp, and Fandango fall into this category). Others actually make life easier or more pleasant. I tend to use these core apps daily or as part of my regular routine as I try to maintain some semblance of regularity despite living 3,000 miles from home. Here’s a quick summary:
USAA: Other banks have iPhone apps and some are just starting to implement the same technology, but USAA was I believe the first bank to offer a “deposit by iPhone” feature. I didn’t believe it when I first read about it, but it’s been fantastic. One you log in, you can deposit a check (up to $5,000/day) directly through the iPhone. After entering the amount of the check, the app prompts you to take a photo of the front and (endorsed for deposit only) back of the check. A few seconds of processing and, voila, the deposit is made. Void the check and keep it for a record. For those of us banking long-distance (or abroad), this is a revolutionary tool. For those in, or about to join, the foreign service, definitely check out USAA. It is a bank dedicated to serving U.S. military and a few select federal agencies, as well as their families. The service has been unbelievably good.
Words Free: Really great Scrabble game that allows you to play with other iPhone users even if you are not both in the app at the same time. It prompts you when the other person makes a move so that a game can go on for a week or more with turns going back and forth whenever time allows. It also has a nifty built-in chat feature. E and I always have a game going — just one more way to stay in touch.
Path Tracker: I hate going to gym, but I love to walk. Pathfinder is essentially a fancy pedometer, but it maps your wanderings on a live GPS map, tracking your distance and speed. You can save each walk to an online site for free.
NPR News: Great free app that keeps me up to date and allows me to select which stories to hear when I can’t catch All Things Considered or Morning Edition in their entirety. It also has links to most public radio stations around the country, include my beloved KQED in San Francisco so I can listen to a live stream, as well as on demand streams of a huge list of NPR shows.
NYTimes: I dearly miss my paper NYT every morning, but this app is the next best thing. It allows me to save stories to read later, even if on the metro cut off from any signal. I use it, in particular, for long features from the Sunday Times.
Lose It!: Amazing free app that helps record what I eat everyday and how much I burn from exercise. It’s the only method I’ve found that works for me to lose weight consistently. Once you’ve done a week, it really isn’t that hard to keep up with because you can quickly duplicate entries from prior meals. It also has a pretty large database and a very easy method of providing the caloric, fat, carb, etc. data that’s on every label.
ESPN ScoreCenter: Best sports info app (although a tad slow to load). It allows me to configure it so I get updates tailored to my favorite teams (Giants, 49ers, and Sharks).
Metro Map: It’s been a long time since I’ve lived in Washington, and having an easy-to-find metro map is a necessity.
GroceryIQ: Much easier than having scraps of paper grocery lists, this app keeps track of what I need to buy, with separate lists for different stores. When something is running low, I just add it to the list so on the weekend, when I’m out and about, I can always detour on the way home and pick up what I need without having to make a special trip or having to try to reconstruct on the fly what I need for the upcoming week.
Let me know if you have your own daily-use treasures.
Immigrant Visas, check
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This afternoon, we finished the second segment of ConGen, focused on the law and procedure for accepting, approving, and adjudicating immigrant visas. As one would expect, it is granular stuff. We now have a grasp of over 30 classifications of potential immigrants. We know how to handle international adoptions, how to operate an alphabet-soup of computer applications, and how identify a myriad of fraud schemes. How firm a grasp we have on these and scores of other things we digested is questionable.
During the last two weeks we’ve completed lectures, computer practicums, case studies, mock interviews, and, today, our examination. Now it’s on to non-immigrant visas, a subject that will make up a great deal of my two years in Ottawa.
Tags: congen, consular, Foreign Service, foreign service institute, FSI, training, Washington DC
ConGen
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As foreign service officers, we are all generalists. Under the terms of my commission, I am deemed to be world-wide available and suitable for any job. Thus, although the State Department hired me as a political officer, I can be assigned any job anywhere in the world. Just about all officers, regardless of background or cone, will serve at least one post as a consular officer. My first assignment falls under this category. I will be a consular officer in Ottawa, Canada, serving for a two-year tour.
Notorious for having the best stories to tell, Consular Officers are responsible for providing all of the client services at every U.S. Embassy and Consulate. They adjudicate non-immigrant and immigrant visas, and they deal with a huge variety of emergencies that befall American citizens abroad. Since completing the A-100 course, about two dozen of us from the 149th, along with a few officers from earlier classes, have been immersed in the law and procedure that forms the foundation for work in the consular section.
The Consular Training course, dubbed ConGen, lasts 6-7 weeks and feels a bit like a law school class interspersed with computer applications classes and some live fire simulations. ConGen takes place in relatively small classrooms, a state-of-the-art mock embassy, and a jail cell (where we meet with our American citizen clients). Not only do we learn the finer points of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (which comes conveniently in a 2-1/2″ thick book) and the Foreign Affairs Manual (affectionately known as the FAM), but also the legal and social structure of the Republic of Z, the fictitious country we use for all exercises.
We cover one large topic a week, concluding with a three-hour exam. The exams are not as bad as they sound, but we need to pass each one with a score above 80%. There are several different sections at ConGen working on different parts of the curriculum. On Christmas Eve, for example, while I was doing some light studying on the immigrant visa ineligibility standards, I could hear another section in the embassy dealing with a mock-Christmas Eve airplane crash. The phones were ringing off the hook. The televisions had updated news reports. Officers checked off priorities, dealt with relatives of those on the plane, and efficiently coordinated with the task force in DC. Not exactly a relaxing half-day, but crises will occur. Even on holidays.
After weeks of orientation in A-100, it feels good to be learning actual on-the-job skills that I’ll be using in a month and a half.
Here’s to the 149th
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After yesterday’s formal swearing-in, we can all sleep through today’s snow storm knowing that A-100 training is now behind us and that we are all officially commissioned diplomats. It is a bit of a cliche, but like many cliches, a truism that the State Department provides a unique opportunity to reinvent oneself every two or three years. I took the opportunity to give it a shot for the first six weeks.
Those that know me well, those who have worked with me, and those that have worked for me know I am far from shy in speaking my mind. I’m usually one of the first ones to volunteer a comment, opinion, or piece of advice and, typically, the last one to shut up. During college and law school, I was invariably sitting in the front row, ready to pounce on the first invitation for input or argument. With less than a dozen true introverts in our class of 98, I knew there would be no shortage of Type-A personalities jumping in.
So I took a back seat. I typically sat in the middle-back, on the aisle, and constantly suppressed the urge to question, volunteer, or lead. The first two weeks were difficult, but I found myself listening much more closely to what the presenters and my classmates had to say. I never really considered that one aspect of always being the one to engage diverted a lot of my attention to what I was going to do or say next. In a trial setting, this often involving thinking through my statement, the expected counter, and my rebuttal to that expected counter. All that thinking, planning, and preparing meant I was not always listening to nuance or detail.
I won’t over-romanticize the training or my experiment in quiet observation. Some presentations were taxing, and some were just downright boring. One benefit to preparing to speak often is that one tends to stay conscious. I confess I did not always succeed in that minimal level of participation. There were also times when my “approach” was simply an excuse to be lazy.
That said, I think there were moments over the last six weeks when I was genuinely impressed by each person in the class. The Foreign Service application path is absurdly long and I often questioned its substance and process. The resulting group — at least the 97 other members of the 149th — are extraordinarily bright, accomplished, and surprisingly humble. After 28 days in an overcrowded classroom, several field trips, two days bonding in the drizzle of West Virginia, and innumerable lunches, happy hours, and dinners, I thought I’d heard everyone’s best stories. Sitting in a Dupont Circle bar yesterday with an assorted collection of fellow newly minted officers, killing time before heading to the official happy hour on U Street, I was amazed to hear some new, amazing, stories. She ran a marathon on the Great Wall of China. He survived a car jacking by imitation police in Caracas. Oh, and he’s slightly embarrassed that another classmate discovered his newly published novel at Border’s and asked for an inscription. Slackers one and all.
The 149th now splits up into many smaller groups. Some will join me for a month and a half of consular training before scattering to posts around the world. Many will jump into intensive training to develop fluency in Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Arabic, Urdu, Indonesian, Amharic, Hindi, Swahili, and a host of other languages. Some of us will be leaving soon and others will have close to a year of further training.
I am so proud to be associated with the Foreign Service and our class. I look forward to crossing paths for years to come with members of the 149th. Cheers.
