Diplomacy, Part 1 (hopefully…?)

Whenever I have been pregnant, we have shared the news almost as soon as we have known.  Who wants to wait to share the giddy of excitement of knowing you are about the receive the best gift in the world?

With this news, I was still ready to share immediately (no surprise there!  haha).  But the Hubba wanted to wait.  Wait until things were more certain.  Wait until we knew for sure that everything was going to be.  Wait until their was real news to share.  I’ve been wondering if this is what other pregnant women felt like–why they waited until the end of the first trimester or later when ultrasounds said everything was fine–before they made a big announcement.  Because if anything went wrong, then they’d have to face all the people they told and publicly deal with it all.

I am not pregnant.  It’s just an analogy.

But that is the explanation for why I am writing this secret post on my blog that will get posted if things work out.  Or it might get lost in the oodles of other unfinished posts that I start and never finish or publish.  I’m not even sure if there will be a part 2.  Hence the question mark in the title.

So our story starts back in mid-April.  We were dealing with the stresses of the life of an attorney.  There are many things that the Hubba loves about the law.  But there are many things that he does not love.  One thing that he mentioned to me several years ago that he disliked was that almost every interaction he had in his career was contentious.  And it was exhausting.  In addition to that, we were fatiguing of owning our own business.  In addition to his full-time job of lawyering, he also had a part- to full-time job of managing, which he never did really love and especially didn’t now.  If one of the perks of what he was doing was that we were becoming millionaires, the trade-off would probably have been worth it.  But it wasn’t.  And so in February we were feeling dissatisfied.

I was feeling stuck, too. There are many really great things about living in the state we live in.  But there are also many things that are important to me, that you just can’t find here.  And I have been itching to seriously get out for almost a decade.  He was only licensed to practice law in our state so he can’t easily take jobs elsewhere.  Plus, he had spent years building his client base here.  He was too old and experienced to get an entry level job someplace but he couldn’t easily become a partner anyplace else because his client base wouldn’t move with him.  And knowing how he felt about the law, it would be really nice if he could change careers to something he enjoyed more.  But how do you do that at our age?  What could he do without going back to school?

So this was the place we were in life at that time.  Also at that time, Wiyah was still on her mission and I was working on college scholarship applications for her.  An old college friend who is a FABULOUS (like-blow-your-socks-off!) high school counselor who specializes in getting kids to college was, thankfully, helping and counselling me.  During some of our emailing back and forth, I mentioned the work situation.  She was currently living in the United Arab Emirates and was telling me that she and her husband had been working internationally for several years.  She talked about the amazing experiences and international perspectives they had been able to give their kids and all the travelling they had been able to do on teachers’ salaries.  She asked me if we had ever considered living abroad.

We had actually.  In fact, when the Hubba was applying to law school he applied to a program at a university that I thought would be perfect for us.  It involved 2 years at a US law school and then 2 years at a law school in France.  It was very disappointing to not be chosen for that program.  We had always been open to the idea of living out of the country and I thought it would be great to raise our kids to be truly bilingual.  We even spent that summer in Belgium where he had an internship.  I had hoped for a long time after law school that we still might get some kind of international job, but as time as moved on, we chose a different career track.

My friend mentioned that in her community in UAE she knew several ex-pats, travelers, international employees and a few foreign service people and told us we should try the Foreign Service.  I looked it up on-line.  It looked interesting.  There were several different types of jobs you could have  in diplomacy.  The obvious one to me that the Hubba would excel in was the political track.  So on April 13, I just quickly shot him an email with some info and asked if the foreign service was something he would be interested in.

Would you be interested in a career in the Civil Service or Foreign Service?  I’m looking at that today…

He replied yes and we started seriously researching it.  At first he was interested in the political and economic tracks.  But after extensive reading, he decided on political.

There were lots of things that we loved about the idea of the foreign service.  The work, the travel, the benefits.  The only meaningful downsides were 1) You have to be ready and able to serve anywhere in the world–you don’t get to choose, although you do list preferences that they try to keep in mind, but your preferences are definitely not guaranteed–and some of those world-wide places are a little frightening and unsafe.  The Hubba, knowing that there are some places in the world I have not even wanted to visit was also skeptical that I would be willing to go to places that weren’t even necessarily dangerous but just very different culturally.  He was right to be skeptical because that is totally me.  But I surprised myself and him by feeling up to the challenge.  I felt comfortable being part of a world-wide church and knowing that wherever we went, we would be part of a family and have people to help us and look out for us.  And there is a lot of security also being backed by the US government.  2)  The kids.  Who wants to uproot their kids from their lives and throw them in a stressful situation that could be difficult?  As we began talking to them about the possibility, it seemed like the older the kids were, the less they liked the idea.  And none of them really liked it.

So for days, we researched and read and discussed.  I loved finding blogs written by foreign service families to get a sense of what it was like from that perspective.  My counselor friend put me in touch with someone she knew who was currently in the foreign service where she lived in UAE.  And when we finally decided that we would give it a try, the first step in the process was not very far away.  Joining the foreign service is a long process.  The first step is that you have to take the Foreign Service Officer Test.  And it’s only offered three times a year.  You have to register for it weeks in advance and now that we had decided to move ahead, the next registration period was just a couple days away on April 26.  It was perfect timing.  So the Hubba signed up.  As part of the registration, you have to submit a resume.  The resume is really important and is used later on to determine if you progress, so the Hubba labored over this resume for a long time.  And it was stressful because 20,000 people sign up to take the FSOT every year.  There is limited testing space and so you want to hurry and get your registration in so you get a spot.  But you don’t want to hurry so much that you don’t spend sufficient enough time on your resume to make it really great (it’s not a document that you can work on earlier and upload).  The Hubba was a perfectionist but every day he took to work on his resume was a day we feared we wouldn’t get a spot in the FSOT.  So he hurried through it and on April 28, as the spots were filling up fast, he got it all submitted and registered to take the test on June 9.

I get the impression the FSOT is a lot like any other standardized test– the ACT or GRE or LSAT.  But the questions come from a wide variety of topics like US history to global implications of things, to pop culture, to math.  Some people take it multiple times without passing.  Other people don’t even study because it’s all just common knowledge stuff and they pass with flying colors.  I thought that the FSOT was the kind of test the Hubba was made to take!  He’s the kind of person who reads this kind of stuff in his free time.  For fun!  But he wasn’t on the same page as me and took the test seriously and prepared extensively.

He joined some online groups who discussed how to prepare and he ordered some recommended books and started watching recommended documentaries to help bolster his knowledge and understanding.  He made flashcards to help him memorize some things.  One of the online things he found was a huge foreign service google doc spanning several years of test, where people added in their information and how well they did on the FSOT and the other steps to becoming a foreign service officer.  He loved to analyze that data.  Anyway, after he registered we had about 6 weeks until the test.  He studied like a fiend.  The car was always full of flashcards and books and I remember quizzing him walking into the grocery store.

Finally the day arrived and…I don’t know.  This is the problem with only me blogging.  I don’t remember all the details he told me about the test.  But he felt pretty good about it as I recollect.  Then we just had to wait until July to get the results.  The results came while he was at scout camp.  He passed, of course!   He passed by more than 20 points. So it was a really good score.  We were so excited.  But finding out the results meant that that started the three week countdown until the next part was due–the personal narrative essays.

There were five or six biographical essays that he had to write about himself to demonstrate that he had the experience and qualities necessary to be a good foreign service officer.  The really difficult part for him was that a lot of the experiences he could use to answer the questions, he can’t share because of client confidentiality issues.  So it was tricky finding relevant stories from other parts of his life.  Another tricky thing was that for every essay that you wrote you had to give a name and contact information of someone who could verify the information.  And they couldn’t be a family member.  So for instance, for one essay, we thought it would be helpful to answer with a story from when we lived in Belgium when the Hubba had to negotiate in French with the Belgian Federal Police to let us and our children cross the border into France.  It was the perfect story to illustrate what they were looking for.  But who could verify it?  The anonymous Belgian police officers from 1998?  So we couldn’t use it.

Meanwhile the Hubba was gone at camp, we were in the midst of moving our office again and preparing for Wiyah to come home from her mission in just a few days.  It was crazy!  He had made a plan to work on one essay every few days and move on to the next.  But in the end, it was a crazy free-for-all in the last couple of days.  He had his essays on a google doc and his family and I edited and made suggestions.  And I have to say that it was a lot of work with a lot of opinions but I think the end product was some really tight essays that demonstrated exactly what they were looking for.  So we got those off.

And then the wait was on.  We expected to hear back on or around September 15.  But he got the email saying he had been selected for the next step on September 1.  That next step is the Oral Assessment (OA).  This is the best description I have read about what it’s like.  So starting next week, we sign up for a date for him to do that.  I think the possible dates start on October 30 and run through February.  So we need to pick a date and then work out travel plans to DC.  Or maybe we should go about it the other way and get travel plans first and then pick a date?  I don’t really know.

Anyway, this is essentially the last substantive step to becoming a foreign service officer.  At the end of the day, they let you know if you passed or not.  If you didn’t pass, you go home and figure out something else to do with your life.  If you do pass, they give you a conditional job offer.  It’s conditional upon you passing a background check and passing a seriously comprehensive medical exam and upon their being an opening in the foreign service that they need to hire for.  That is serious business because everyone who passed the oral assessment just gets put on a ranked register.  So let’s say that 300 people made it to that point.  They are ranked from 1-300.  And if they only have openings for 52 people that year and you are number 53 or lower, you don’t get offered a job.  You can stay on the register for 18 months.  And because people are being constantly added to the list (year round testing) and maybe some people are taking other jobs elsewhere in the interim, they would be leaving the list, the rankings are constantly changing.  And you don’t even get to find out your rank ever.

But I guess that’s getting ahead of myself.  For now, we just try and figure out when we an up-end our lives and take a trip to DC for several days for the OA.  Should be fun!

UPDATE:  Since the writing of this post, we scheduled his oral assessment for November 18.  We’ve booked flights and a place to stay.  The Hubba is currently trying to juggle his full time career with studying for the assessment and also trying to improve his French (If you speak a foreign language, you get bumped up the list!)  When I first started writing this, the idea was we would only post if he passed the OA.  But he’s had a change of heart and I’m thinking we can use all the prayers and positive thoughts and encouragement we can get.

 

Si, Hablo Espanol

Last week a good friend of ours was getting married.  The Hubba was, in fact, the best man.  So we arrived at the church early.  We walked in and saw the bride who is from Columbia and only arrived in the U.S. two days earlier and who doesn’t speak any English sitting alone.  I thought of how frightening it must be to be in a new country, a new culture with no language skills where you no one and have no friends ON YOUR WEDDING DAY!

So I went up to her and started speaking in Spanish.

Now, I grew up in the southwest where Spanish was all around me everywhere.  But I mostly ignored it because I was completely focused on French.  Still, some of that stuff can’t help but sink in!

When I came home after my freshman year of college, I decided to take Spanish 101 at a local community college.  Then 18 years later when I was in my master’s program, I had to study a second foreign language.  I actually thought it would be awesome to study Irish Gaelic, but because I had to complete a 202 level of that language, that was going to take me several years.  My next choice was Italian!  But I still had the same problem.  It would take me four full semesters to complete the Italian requirements because I was starting from scratch.  However, I already had Spanish 101 under my belt.  So Spanish would be the fastest route to meeting that requirement.

I took a Spanish placement test and tested into Spanish 202!  Awesome!  One semester and I’d be done!  I went to the first day of that Spanish class and realized I was in WAY over my head.  The language program at this university was so far superior and advanced to the language program in my previous university.  Plus my class was full (and I do mean standing room only) of people who had returned from Spanish speaking missions.  I was absolutely overwhelmed.  I had only ever had one semester of Spanish!

I dropped that class and instead registered for an accelerated 201/202 combo class.  MUCH better.  I was so relieved to take that class.  It was perfect for me and my abilities and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  Spanish is not my favorite language.  But I love the phonetic spellings and pronunciation (in French you can have like seven silent letters in a row!) and it’s just fun to speak.

Anyway, that is the extent of my Spanish.  Two semesters separated by almost two decades and I’ve not done anything serious with Spanish since that last semester which was 16 years ago or so.

But I pulled up everything I know and started talking to the bride, trying to make her feel comfortable.  We talked about our children.  She has three adult boys that she left in Columbia. She told me how nervous she was and asked if I would pray for her.  I considered doing it in Spanish. I’ve heard lots of prayers in Spanish before but at the last second I decided I’d better do it in English.

Anyway, it wasn’t a great conversation and there were lots of things that I would have expressed in English that I just couldn’t do in Spanish.  I can’t even say anything in the past tense in Spanish!  But despite the difficulty, it was emotionally easier to speak Spanish than French.  There are expectations of fluency and grammatical correctness when I speak French.  That degree I have is supposed to MEAN something.  So I am always embarrassed by my mistakes and non-fluency in French.  And when you are embarrassed, it’s very difficult to communicate.  It stops my flow.

But there are no expectations for me to know Spanish.  So the fact that I could pull that out of my hat and connect to a non-English speaker is all just bonus.  In fact, as I was telling Wiyah and JJ about it they were both surprised that I knew enough Spanish to be able to do that.