A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Don’t Take Your Thanksgiving Turkey For Granted

by Dave Seminara on

For some Americans living overseas, finding a Thanksgiving turkey can be an ordeal. Not every American eats turkey on Thanksgiving Day, but when you live outside the country, these kinds of cherished American traditions can take on a sense of heightened importance to the point where re-creating an American style Thanksgiving dinner, even if you’re in Dushanbe or Khartoum, becomes an obsession.

My wife was the Community Liaison Officer, a job that some have described as a sort of cruise director, at the U.S. Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia, and finding turkeys there fell under her vague job description since it was considered a “morale issue.” Americans take for granted the ability to walk into any grocery store in the country and get what they need for a Thanksgiving dinner in ten minutes, but in many parts of the world, it can be a serious scavenger hunt to get the items you need.One year, when I was posted in Trinidad, I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for Karo syrup for a pecan pie recipe. (I had no idea at the time that other recipes don’t require it) I must have visited every store in Port of Spain before I finally found a bottle and felt as though I’d scored a golden ticket for Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) and their family members have one luxury that most expats don’t – the ability to order products online and have them shipped to a U.S. address. Those who are at posts with an APO address can get things quickly, but everyone else has to wait anywhere from a week to a few weeks or more to get their mail. But no matter how you slice it, you still can’t order a turkey on Amazon.com.

At the time we lived there, it was impossible to find turkeys for sale in Macedonia, and, unlike larger posts, we didn’t have a PX or a commissary that sold them, so my wife had to do some detective work and ultimately found a way to get birds from a military base in Kosovo and have them trucked down to Macedonia. It wasn’t as simple as driving over to the local Safeway but we probably appreciated them more.

With a little effort, expats can usually cobble together some semblance of a Thanksgiving meal but the hardest part of being overseas is having to spend the holiday season away from family and loved ones. I arrived at overseas posts for the first time shortly before Thanksgiving on three occasions: Skopje, Macedonia, Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Budapest, Hungary, and it’s always a little odd to arrive at a new post without any of your household effects or cookware before a holiday like Thanksgiving.

Even if you’re the most repellant jerk in the world, someone will invite you to Thanksgiving dinner. At some posts, the Ambassador will invite singles, newcomers and other strays to dinner and in others, people just informally make sure that no one is home alone without access to turkey meat unless they want to be.

In a way, it’s kind of a remarkable thing the way FSOs host fellow colleagues they barely know for this really important family holiday. Can you imagine having Thanksgiving dinner with a work colleague you barely know in the U.S.? We had kind souls host us in Port of Spain and Budapest and, in our first year in Skopje, I went to a meal hosted by the Ambassador. On other occasions, we introduced local friends to our favorite American holiday.

We were grateful for the invites we got, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it can be a little depressing to spend Thanksgiving with a collection of people you don’t know well. No matter how good the company is, you can’t help but wish you were with your real family, rather than your Foreign Service one, which can feel very much like what I imagine a foster home experience is like. And I never had to serve in a combat zone, where Thanksgiving dinner means waiting in a buffet line with a tray.

There are lots of advantages to the Foreign Service lifestyle but being away from family members during holidays and important occasions is probably the biggest drawback. Those of us who are fortunate to be with family members and near readily available dead turkeys this year should raise a glass and toast members of the Foreign Service, the military and every other American that’s serving their country and dealing with ad-hoc bird meat and improvised company this year.

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[Photo credit: US Army Africa on Flickr]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: The Petraeus Fallout – Keep Your Pants On And Watch Out For Honorary Consuls

by Dave Seminara on

In the wake of the David Petraeus-Paula Broadwell-Jill Kelley scandal, many Americans are wondering why General Petraeus felt compelled to resign. Shouldn’t consenting adults be allowed to cheat on their spouses, so long as it doesn’t impact their job performance? The most recommended comment on a New York Times story in the immediate aftermath of Petraeus’ resignation follows this line of thinking.

“I fail to see how Petreus’ (sic) private life has any bearing on his effectiveness as a public servant,” wrote a reader from Minnesota identifying himself as Skeptical.

But the truth is that there is no real work/private life separation for CIA spooks, Foreign Service diplomats and anyone else with a top-secret security clearance that gives them access to classified information. As the director of the CIA, Petraeus is a huge fish, but even much lower level government employees have seen their careers go up in smoke based upon allegations of infidelity.


I know of a few cases where Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) had their security clearances suspended for allegedly cheating on spouses but for every one of those situations, there are several others where the employee keeps their security clearance while their “corridor reputation” is essentially shot.

It might seem unfair, but anyone who has access to classified material – and that includes someone way down at the bottom of the food chain like Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks whistleblower, all the way up to someone like Petraeus – is susceptible to blackmail if they have secrets they don’t want anyone to know about.

A lot of Foreign Service hopefuls stress out about getting a security clearance. They worry that they may have smoked too many joints or their dicey credit score or a cranky old neighbor who might rat them out for some real or imagined offense. But the truth is that investigators are mostly digging around to see if the applicant is susceptible to blackmail for any reason – infidelity, debts, sexual orientation, etc.

The bottom line is that if you have a security clearance, you’d better be faithful to your spouse. (And even if you don’t, it’s a pretty good rule of thumb, don’t you think?) So if you want to join the Foreign Service, it’s probably best to forget about wife swapping, swinger’s parties, soliciting prostitutes and anything else that could spell the end of your career.

There are no hard stats on divorce rates in the Foreign Service, but there is anecdotal evidence that the Foreign Service lifestyle can be hard on marriages. In an era when our biggest posts are unaccompanied and more FSOs are being asked to live without their spouses for a year or more at a time, it’s easy to understand how respected people like Petraeus could go astray.

People who are put together in a highly stressful, claustrophobic, foreign environment, away from their families are more susceptible to temptation. That is not to excuse it, but if you read books like Kim Barker’s “Taliban Shuffle,” you get a sense that there’s a lot more partying and infidelity among the expats in Kabul than one might expect.

The other diplomacy-related takeaway from the scandal is Jill Kelley’s bizarre claim that she has diplomatic immunity, based upon the fact that she is apparently an honorary consul for South Korea.

“I’m an honorary consul general so I have inviolability, so they (the press), um should not be able to cross my property,” she said to a 911 operator. “I don’t know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well.” (See video below.)


Honorary consuls don’t have diplomatic immunity and their lawns certainly aren’t “inviolable” as embassies and consulates are, but give her credit for trying. The truth is that there are a lot of very bogus people, like Kelley, trying to pawn themselves off as diplomats. The Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger exposed the murky world of pay-for-title sham diplomats in his terrific film “The Ambassador,” which is available on iTunes, but even he might have to laugh at Kelley’s audacity.

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[Photo credits: Michal Spocko, Mike Licht, and The Tim Channel on Flickr]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Dreaming Of The Balkans From A ‘Tropical Paradise’

by Dave Seminara on

I might be the only person in human history to move from Macedonia to Trinidad. But in the peculiar world of the Foreign Service, unusual transitions across the globe are par for the course. I have Foreign Service friends who have recently moved from Ecuador to Poland, Paraguay to Bangladesh, Hungary to Zambia, and from the Philippines to Ireland. It’s a nomadic lifestyle, where Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) generally stay in each country for just 1-3 years and when they leave an obscure, hard-to-get-to post, they have to swallow the fact that they’ll leave behind some friends and colleagues they might never see again.
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Overseas tours are relatively short because the State Department doesn’t want FSOs to “go native” while overseas. The reality is that by the time you get comfortable in a place, it’s just about time to leave. This can be a good or bad thing depending on how much you like your post and where you’re headed next.When I found out I was headed to Port of Spain, Trinidad, for my second assignment mid-way through my two year tour in Skopje, my Macedonian colleagues joked that I was soon going to be leading a Jimmy-Buffet-like life of leisure with warm breezes, cold, tropical drinks and long afternoons spent swaying in hammocks on a beach. But one of the senior-level FSOs at post knew better.

“I’d never bid on Trinidad,” he said. “You never want to get stuck in a country you can’t drive out of, unless it’s Australia or New Zealand.”

And I knew he was right, but there was nothing I could do. The first two tours for FSOs are “directed assignments” and I’d been directed to Port of Spain, after being told that spending two years in Skopje hadn’t given me enough “bidding equity” to go to any of the posts I’d bid on. I grew up in Buffalo and, although I like going to a beach on vacation, I’m not a tropical country guy.

But the Foreign Service is a bit like the military in that you pretty much have to go where they send you, so that’s how my wife and I found ourselves on a flight from Miami to Port of Spain eight years ago this month, on my 32nd birthday. Arriving at a new post in the Foreign Service is a singular experience that’s hard to relate to if you’ve never done it.

Someone meets you at the airport, usually a driver and a family that’s been assigned to be your social sponsor, and, in most cases, you’re taken to your new home. In some cases, a post might reach out to you before you’ve arrived to see what your housing preferences are – city versus suburbs, location versus commute, house or apartment, etc. But in many cases, they do not, and on this day I had no idea where “Bird” the Trini driver who’d come to pick us up was taking us.

My heart sank when I saw our depressing neighborhood and our tacky, cramped apartment. In Skopje, we had a beautiful, spacious apartment that was 5 minutes from the embassy. It wasn’t a pedestrian friendly city by any means, but you could walk just about anywhere in town. And if you didn’t want to walk, you could call a taxi that would arrive within five minutes and take you wherever you wanted to go for the equivalent of $1.

In most career fields, you expect to have an upward trajectory in terms of income and living standards, but that isn’t always the case in the Foreign Service. You can find yourself going from a mansion one day to living in a hooch in Afghanistan the next, and your pay can go up or down dramatically depending on the hardship and cost of living ratings of each post and whether your spouse can find work.

Within a day or two of arriving in Port of Spain we were able to take stock of how our fortunes had fallen. Our apartment was smaller and much less nice than where we moved from and we were 30 minutes from the embassy in a downscale suburb where there was nothing of interest within walking distance and cabs might or might not arrive hours after you called them. My pay was reduced by more than 20% because Skopje improbably had more hardship and cost of living pay, and my wife’s pay had been cut in half because she went from a full time job in Skopje to a part time job in Trinidad.

Moreover, the cost of living in Trinidad was far higher than Skopje and, though there were beaches about 30-45 minutes away, Port of Spain had a much higher crime rate and a city center that was both shabby and depressing, not to mention dangerous after dark. (V.S. Naipaul, a native of Trinidad, couldn’t wait to leave and seldom returned to visit once he left.) I liked the local people very much, but the city of Port of Spain? Not so much.

We also went from a post run with Swiss efficiency by a career diplomat to a completely dysfunctional post run by a college friend of George W. Bush, with, well Caribbean efficiency. (The Ambassador, like several other high-ranking W. appointees, was a fellow member of Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale.) It was a post that people either loved or hated and, to be fair, there were indeed people who enjoyed the place.

For FSOs, bidding research is a serious issue. You try to gather all the intell you can on the jobs and places that appear on your bid lists. But the reality is that if you’re living in Bosnia or Mali, there’s only so much you can find out about what life is like in Mongolia, Paraguay or wherever. Sites like Real Post Reports are helpful for trying to get a feel for what a post will be like, but for many posts, like Port of Spain, you might find that the half the reviews say that a place is wonderful while the other half say that it’s awful.

And since the Foreign Service is a three-degrees of separation kind of institution, many people aren’t willing to share the negative aspects of a post with bidders unless they know the person well and trust them, for fear that people will find out that they bad-mouthed a post. The other mistake some people make in bidding, especially travelers like me, is using travel guidebooks to research countries.

The problem with this approach is that there are a lot of countries that are wonderful to visit but not so great to live in and vice versa. If I had arrived in Trinidad for a two-week vacation, my opinion of the place would have been totally different. Your perspective on a place changes depending on how long you’re supposed to be there.

We read “The Rough Guide to Trinidad & Tobago” while in the research stage of bidding and when I later brought this book to post, my local co-workers considered some of its advice laughable. For example, the book praised a tough area called Laventille as being the “beating heart” of the city but my co-workers told me that Laventille was so dangerous that even telephone repairmen and other municipal workers refused to go there.

The reality is that you never really know what a place will be like to live in until you actually go there, and a post is, in many ways, only what you make of it. In most occupations, if you like your job, your house and your overall situation, you simply stay put and enjoy it. But the Foreign Service is not like most careers, and there is no option to simply stay put and enjoy a good thing when you’ve got it.

Our mistake was dwelling on what we had in Skopje rather than just trying to make the best of the hand we’d been dealt in Trinidad. But shortly after we arrived at post, I got very sick and suddenly our complaints about Port of Spain were put in stark perspective. An illness can be both a curse and a blessing. For me, it made me realize that in life, you can lose a lot more than just a good job or a nice apartment, so you have to be grateful for what you have and forget about what’s gone.

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[Photo credits: Dave Seminara]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: When Bureaucracy Keeps Diplomats Grounded

by Dave Seminara on

If you have a diplomatic passport, you ought to be able to use the damn thing. But the truth is that way too many American diplomats are grounded in their offices, buried in paperwork. Much has been made of the fact that enhanced security has made it difficult for diplomats to travel and interact with people on the ground in the countries they live in. And while that is definitely true at some posts, the bigger problem isn’t security, it’s that diplomats don’t have enough time to get out of their offices and report on what is really going on in their little corners of the world.

In 1946, officials at the Treasury Department sent a request to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow for clarification on why the USSR didn’t support the newly created World Bank and IMF. Legendary diplomat George Keenan, then the Chargé d’Affaires (a title given to a chief of mission when there is no Ambassador at post) in Moscow, responded with a legendary 8,000-word cable on the aggressive nature of Stalin’s foreign policy.

Keenan’s response came to be known as the Long Telegram, but at the time, the length of the cable may not have been that remarkable. Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) had time to get out and explore and fire off lengthy dispatches back to Washington. But with each passing decade, as communications improved and government got bigger, FSOs have had less and less time for discretionary reporting trips.


At the State Department and at more than 200 embassies and consulates around the world, diplomats spend a huge amount of time responding to taskers. The most time consuming are congressionally mandated annual reports on terrorism, human rights, trafficking in persons, religious freedom, and other topics that must be prepared for every country, large and small. But taskers come in all sizes and shapes – emails, cables, memos, demarche requests, you name it.

In some cases, the information that’s compiled is useful and actually read by people who matter in our government. But in many other cases, the reports/cables/memos that are produced are nothing more than bureaucratic masturbation that’s read by no one other than the author.

I had some exposure to this phenomenon, serving as both a political officer overseas and as a desk officer in the belly of the beast – Washington, D.C. When I was the Desk Officer for the Central African Republic, we were still in the process of re-staffing the post after a coup, so I was stuck trying to respond to all of these taskers and I’m quite certain the only people who read many of the reports I wrote were immigration lawyers grasping for fodder to bolster their clients’ asylum applications.

Not every FSO likes to travel. In truth, there are quite a few pencil pushers in the State Department’s Foreign Service who are quite pleased to sit in an air-conditioned office, live in a tiny expat bubble and push paper without seeing or experiencing a damn thing on their overseas tours. These people have no journalistic instincts – no ability to get out and develop their own ideas of what to report on in their host countries – so for them, taskers help them pass the time until they can collect a pension.

But this lame group probably accounts for no more than about 25-30% of the service, perhaps less. For everyone else, the crushing weight of taskers keeps people in their offices more than they should be. Everyone always pays lip service to the need to “get out of the capital” more often, but in reality, the excursions out into the sticks are as brief and carefully choreographed as a televised sexual encounter with Snooki or The Situation on the Jersey Shore.

Spending a half-hour cutting a ribbon at a factory in Belo Horizonte or a couple of hours at a conference in Nagpur is just fodder for EERs – the evaluations that dictate the career progression of American diplomats – not real attempts to understand what’s going on outside the castle.

One could make a pretty strong argument for either completely eliminating or scaling back the mandated reporting requirements for all but the most robustly staffed posts. In some cases, these reports can help highlight abuses in countries and put pressure on those governments to clean up their acts. But they also rub an awful lot of people the wrong way and underscore the impression of the U.S. as a preachy, imperial power – a young country that nonetheless feels the need to lecture everyone else on how to act.

Diplomats can use holidays and vacation time to travel on their own, but much of this time is spent catching up with friends and relatives in the States. I’d like to see every FSO get many more opportunities to really get out and get to know their countries on a deeper level. Send them out to cities and towns far from the capital with no mandate other than to make contacts and report on what’s going on there and what it means for U.S. interests.

The truth is that you can learn a lot more in a café, a bar or a public park than from staring at a computer screen, sitting in a meeting or killing time a the Ministry of Pipe Smoking & Highway Construction Graft. So here’s my challenge to the Foreign Service: pack your bags and hit the road. Organize yourselves. Pick two weeks where every single FSO gets out and about for reporting trips. Not super choreographed affairs where so and so has to go to Timbuktu to file a report on counterterrorism, but organic reporting in the old-school Foreign Service tradition, where each FSO is sent to a city or region for a week and told to use their own initiative to report on something important.




Half of the FSOs at each post would split up and branch out around the country one week, the other half the next. (No group outings to sing kumbaya and engage in Washington approved team-building exercises!) Let everyone publish their own long telegram, but make them be unclassified so Americans can read the dispatches and better understand what the hell FSOs are capable of when they aren’t buried under an avalanche of paperwork.

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[Photo credit: Flickr user Meanest Indian]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Europe’s ‘Most Beautiful’ Women And Other Reasons To Love Bulgaria

by Dave Seminara on

I had to go to Bulgaria just to see if Bill Bryson was full of crap. In his book, “Neither Here Nor There,” published in 1991, Bryson wrote, “Sofia has, without any doubt, the most beautiful women in Europe.” I was in college when I read the book, and at the tail end of the Cold War it seemed like an improbable assertion. We’d been led to believe that women behind the Iron Curtain were ugly, and, given the fact that our only exposure to them was watching the Olympics, where all we saw were women with hairy armpits named Olga who could powerlift 800 kilos, it was easy to believe the jingoistic Cold War propaganda.

But Bryson’s line about Bulgarian women stayed with me, and in 1997, when I was 24, I finally had a chance to see the place for myself on the tail end of a long overland trip that started in Portugal and concluded in central Turkey. For a young, single guy on a tight budget, Bulgaria was like paradise. In smaller cities and towns, you could get by quite comfortably on $10 per day.

A bed in someone’s home went for $5, you could eat out for a buck and big bottles of beer went for as little as 30 cents. There were cities filled with history, medieval monasteries to discover, beaches on the Black Sea, and of course, dark-haired, head-turning beauties everywhere. But were they, as Bryson insisted, the most beautiful women in Europe?The Internet is filled with contrived lists ranking the best-looking women and men around the world. A list of the top ten cities with the most beautiful women on Traveler’s Digest, for example, places Kiev at the top of the heap, but Varna, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea came in a very respectable fifth.
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Trying to quantify beauty on an international, comparative basis is, in a way, ridiculous because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But just about any seasoned traveler will tell you that they’ve been to a place where they found the locals to be simply irresistible. I’ve never heard any Western women rave about Central and Eastern European men, but there is something very compelling about the women in this region. (Traveler’s Digest’s list of top ten cities with the hottest men completely excludes this region.)

But are Bulgarian women the best looking in Europe? I wouldn’t argue with Bryson or anyone else who makes that case but the competition is awfully fierce. I’ve been to a handful of countries around the world, which I won’t name, where I didn’t find members of the sex particularly attractive, but one can make a pretty compelling case that the women of almost any country in Europe are the most beautiful. If you don’t believe me, take a long walk through the streets of Belgrade, Kiev, Zagreb, Budapest, Copenhagen, Berlin, Rome or Madrid, and you’ll see what I mean.

After I joined the Foreign Service and was posted to Skopje, Macedonia, for two years as a married man, I found other reasons to love Bulgaria. After Bryson visited Sofia in 1990, he wrote, “I’m certain that if I come back to Sofia in five years, it will be full of Pizza Huts and Laura Ashleys and the streets will be clogged with BMW’s.” His timetable may have been a bit off, but he was basically right.

Sofia is a very interesting city but living in Skopje, I was most impressed by the fact that they had Dunkin’ Donuts and Subway. (Married men can still enjoy munchkins and foot-long meatball subs.) But my favorite places in Bulgaria were all outside the capital – I loved Veliko Tarnovo’s gracefully crumbling architecture, Varna’s tacky seaside charms, Melnik’s wineries, Blagoevgrad’s youthful energy, Koprivshtitsa’s colorful houses and Plovdiv’s sense of history.

But the place that really hooked me was Bansko, a lively little town nestled in the Pirin Mountains in the southwest of the country. Bansko now hosts a World Cup ski race and it has plenty of hotels and bars, but it’s still a place where local farmers walk their cows through the streets, wedding processions take over the center on weekends and photos of the dead are plastered all over buildings.

Bansko’s bars alone make the place worth a visit. They serve the excellent Pirinsko beer on draught, dirt cheap, and feature live gypsy bands almost every night of the week. But what I liked best of all about Bansko, was the way I felt each time we visited: blissfully cut off from the wider world and all of its problems.

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(Photos courtesy of Klearchos Kapoutsis on Flickr and Dave Seminara)