A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Making Peace With Malta

by Dave Seminara on

I’ve felt an odd kinship with Malta ever since I created a minor international incident with the tiny island nation by dressing up like Colonel Gaddafi in an 8th grade model U.N. exercise in 1986. When my teacher decided to throw me a curveball by assigning me the task of dressing up like a citizen of Malta, I was initially displeased. In the pre-Internet age, it wasn’t easy to ascertain how the Maltese dressed if you lived in Buffalo, New York, as I did.

I dressed up like Gaddafi because Malta and Libya seemed close enough on the map and I had no better ideas. A photo of me in Arab garb made it into The Buffalo News and once the Maltese got wind of it, they were none too pleased. In their indignant response, Mario Cacciottolo, the private secretary of the Prime Minister of Malta, told me that I should try to correct the misperception I’d created regarding their country. But I was a 13-year-old kid living in Buffalo. How was I going to do that?

My school was alarmed by the letter and sent it to the State Department. Several months later, the Desk Officer for Malta sent me a letter encouraging me to consider a career in diplomacy. I did just that in my 30’s. Over the last quarter of a century, I’ve traveled extensively in more than 50 countries, including most of Europe. All this time, Malta’s been on my radar, but I’ve been circling the place without actually landing there.Over the winter, I attempted to secure a phone interview with Mr. Cacciottolo via the Maltese embassy in Washington, but the Maltese ambassador said that the matter was closed. Mario accepted my apology but he didn’t want to speak to me. I wondered whether the embassy actually passed on my request and, if they had, why Mario didn’t want to talk to me.

In February, I watched a documentary on the Costa Concordia disaster and decided to look into going on a Costa cruise, with the idea that they’d be offering bargain rates. Perusing their website, the cheapest cruise I could find also happened to make a full day stop in Valletta, Malta’s capital. I was hooked.

Seeing the old port of Valletta, with its picturesque sprawl of shipping cranes and indestructible, uniformly sandstone colored buildings set against a perfectly blue sky had me chomping at the bit to explore the city that had been looming in the back of my consciousness for more than one-fourth of a century.

I was the first person off the boat and made a beeline for a tourist information hut in the port. It was 7.45 a.m. and 21-year-old Kathleen Polidano was having a coffee and getting ready for the usual onslaught of map-requesting tourists when I ambled in with photocopies of myself representing Malta in the St. Gregory the Great School Model U.N of 1986 and the indignant response I received from the Maltese.

I explained my story and as soon as I pulled out the photocopy of the press clipping, she burst out laughing.

“This is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

I told her I was looking for Mario Cacciottolo, and showed her the address and phone number I’d found in an online phone directory. Without my asking, she said, “Can we call him? I want to hear what he has to say.”

It rang and rang but Mario didn’t answer. I chatted with her a bit and she reassured me that I wasn’t the only foreigner who was clueless about Malta, a nation of just 122 square miles that’s been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, the Hapsburgs and the British, among others.

“A lot of people don’t even know we’re an independent country,” she lamented. “We’ve been independent from Great Britain since 1964, but I guess the news travels slowly for some people.”

I walked uphill towards the old town and immediately noticed the British influence – hotels with British names, bright red British phone booths and an entrance to the city called Victoria Gate. And most people I stopped to ask for directions could speak English, in addition to Maltese.

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Watching Valletta wake up was joy – old men labored to raise the shutters on their storefronts, women filed quietly into the St. Paul Shipwreck Church and murmured responsorial psalms, and a pleasantly quiet buzz pervaded the beautifully decaying streets. The streets are called triqs in the Maltese language, which sounds like an exotic, melodic mix of Italian and Arabic.

After a stroll through the Upper Barrakka Gardens, which offers a stunning panorama of the city, I saw a line of men outside a stall called Champ on the Old Theater Street near St. John’s Cathedral, and decided to join them. I followed their lead and ordered a Maltese ricotta cheese pastry called a pastizzi, one of the Malta’s national treats, and a coffee. They use the euro in Malta and the bill came to 70 cents – 40 for the coffee and 30 for the pastizzi.

I can’t remember the last time I had a cup of coffee for less than $1, let alone 50 cents, and the pastizzi’s artery clogging goodness was so satisfying that I ended up getting a second one. Every street I wandered down seemed to have new discoveries – a crumbling piazza, an old man in an ancient looking workshop, a time warp café that looked like a WW2 era postcard.

But I wasn’t in town to frolic on the ancient streets; I wanted to know what was going on in Malta in 1986, when I got the letter, and I wanted to find Mario. I paid a visit to the National Library and met Carmen Muscat, a Maltese librarian who wasn’t as amused by my story as Kathleen was.

“What were you thinking?” she asked, when shown the photo of me dressed like Gaddafi.

“I was only 13,” I replied, more than a little defensive.

“But we’re closer to Sicily than Libya, why didn’t you dress up like an Italian?”

The real answer is because it’s more fun to dress up like Gaddafi than an Italian, but I let it slide. Carmen read through the letter from Mario and then called her husband on the cellphone to see if he knew him.

“My husband used to know him,” she reported back. “But they lost touch a long time ago. My husband studied Public Affairs and so did Cacciottolo.”

She pulled out the local phonebook to look him up and found a different entry than the one I found online. She was certain that the entry she found was the correct one.

“Look, here,” she said, pointing to a line in the phone book. “He has a B.A. and a Diploma of Public Affairs, so this must be him.”

She explained that in Malta, people listed their degrees in the telephone book, and Mario had a Bachelor of Arts degree and a DPA, a Diploma of Public Affairs, listed after his name. She jotted down the rest of the address to me but it made no sense. She wrote, “Il Holma, Triq Xmiexi, Msida.”

Carmen explained that “Il Holma” means “The Dream” in Maltese. His home had a name, not a number. The street he lived on was called Xmiexi, which is pronounced shhh-mee-she in Maltese. Msida was a town just outside the center of the city. We tried to call the number listed for Mario in the phonebook, but once again, he didn’t answer.

I met up with my wife and children and spent a few hours visiting Malta’s stunning old capital, Mdina, a half-hour outside of Valletta. As we arrived back in Valletta, my wife said that she had no interest in tracking down Mario, so I was on my own. I bought a box of chocolates for him and felt a bit like a nervous schoolboy heading off to first date as I alighted onto a public bus bound for Msida. But would I find Mario, and if I did, what on earth would we say to each other, after all these years?

Read Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

Read more from “A Traveler in the Foreign Service” here.

[All photos by Dave Seminara]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Bulgaria Is The Place To Break Down

by Dave Seminara on

Foreign Service Officers (FSO’s) know how desirable their post is upon discovering how many houseguests they receive. If you live in Paris, people who you once shared a peanut butter sandwich with in grammar school and long lost cousins you don’t like to begin with will come out of the woodwork looking for a free place to stay. But friends who are willing to come visit you in Niger or Kazakhstan are real friends indeed.

Macedonia is a beautiful country, but it’s a tough sell for Americans, so the only houseguests we had while living in the country for two years were our parents and one of my brothers. Flying into a small airport like Skopje from the U.S. is a huge effort and expense, so we wanted to show them everything in the region while they were in town. The first road trip I had planned for my parents was to Sofia, Bulgaria, which is about 2.5 hours east of Skopje.

It was my parents’ first trip to the Balkans, and I was behind the wheel, with both my wife and mother in the backseat barking driving instructions at me as we twisted and turned our way towards Bulgaria’s capital. Slow down! Watch that guy, he’s not stopping for you! What does that sign say!?Yet as we thundered down a rare straightaway only miles after crossing the border into Bulgaria, the backseat drivers, bless them, were strangely quiet. Out of nowhere, I saw a huge mound of dirt and rocks laying smack across the entire width of the two-lane road and tried to slam on the brakes, to no avail.

We went airborne, Dukes of Hazard Style across the mound, and the car slammed down front end first, knocking my glasses right off my face. The road, as it turns out, had come to an end with no warning. We were OK, but the car was making odd noises. We coasted into a gas station, which was staffed with very cute young girls working as pump attendants.

They seemed to think our problem was hilarious, but we soon realized that we had oil leaking from our transmission fluid pan. The girls, in their smart one-piece gas station attendant outfits, pointed us towards a garage up the street.

By this time, the car had lost too much fluid and I couldn’t even steer it properly. Luckily the road was straight and we coasted into what seemed to be a deserted mechanic’s garage. A few young people sat huddled around a space heater in a freezing cold café attached to the quiet garage on an unseasonably frigid April afternoon.

The café was empty and the group seemed to view our entrance as an unwanted intrusion on their quiet, uneventful day. Lacking any Bulgarian language skills, I pointed to the car, which was perched at their entrance and said, “PROBLEM.” They summoned a young man with filthy, coal black hands.

The young man looked at the car and began asking us questions in Bulgarian, as we stood around looking concerned and cold. Soon, another short swarthy man came around and starting poking at the undersides of our leaking car.

“PRO-BLEM,” he said.
To which, I retorted, “BIG PRO-BLEM?” Hoping against hope he’d say it wasn’t.

He shook his head yes, meaning no, in that odd, counterintuitive way Bulgarians are famous for.

We repaired to the icy cold café and my father shouted at the lackadaisical youths huddling around the space heater, as though they were hard of hearing rather than unable to understand English.

“COFFFFEEEEE???” he shouted.

He startled them but they brewed him a fresh cup, and when they asked for the equivalent of 25 cents, my father was thrilled.

“Where can you get a cup of coffee for only 25 cents?” he said to no one in particular.

As we sat in the empty café looking out onto a tableau of heavy gray skies, I silently assessed our situation. We were stuck in a small town, the name of which I did not know, in the Bulgarian countryside. Our car had some unknown malady. None of us knew a thing about auto repairs, nor could we speak Bulgarian.

We’re from the United States. Our car has diplomatic plates. We’re rich, at least so they think. They’re poor, or at least so we think. It’s freezing cold. My dad is hollering at the staff in his friendly, gregarious way, trying to befriend them, but quite possibly also making them angry.

I was quite convinced that the men were about to gouge us. Would they demand our first-born child? My wife? Quarts of my blood? Only time would tell.

The mechanics ascertained that the pan, which holds the transmission fluid, had been sliced open in the accident. The swarthy man and his apprentice were welding and pounding it back together with a hammer. In the U.S., most mechanics would have told us that they had to order a new part and charge us a fortune for their time. But this plucky crew was actually fixing the darn thing. But would it make it to Sofia?

As we sat in the café staring enviously at the “employees” who clung to the only space heater in the place like leeches, my mother and wife broached the topic of turning back to Skopje. But like Clark Griswold in the movie “Vacation,” I was not to be deterred. One hour away from Sofia and they want to turn back? I had promised my family a Bulgarian holiday, and a Bulgarian holiday they would have.

After a little more than two hours of merciless hammering and welding, the men in jumpsuits proclaimed that the car was fixed. I followed them to the front desk to pay with butterflies in my stomach. Here it comes, I thought.

The elder mechanic punched the figure 67 onto a calculator and turned it around for my dad and I to see the digits. He looked at us as if to determine if we found the figure acceptable. 67, 67 what? I thought. Gold bouillon coins? Heads of cattle? Virgins to be sacrificed at the Temple of Bulgarian Mechanics?

This prince of a man broke the suspense by saying “LEVA,” Bulgaria’s currency. As if reading my mind, he then did some calculation and came up with a price of 30 euros. I thought that my father was going to leap across the counter and embrace him in a bear hug, but I just wanted to pay and escape before he changed his mind.

As we hopped into our car, which started and seemed to work just fine, we were all giddy with excitement.

“Boy, if I was him I would have charged you enough to retire on!” my dad said.

We barely used the car after arriving in Sofia and the weekend passed without further vehicular incident. But on Monday morning, I went out into the icy streets to dust snow off the car, and noticed that we had two flat tires.

I alerted the staff of The Hotel Meg, where we were staying, and thankfully, they felt some kind of responsibility, even though the car was parked across the street from the hotel.

An extraordinarily nice young man named Goce immediately went out into the freezing cold and began putting our spare on one of the flats. In less than an hour, Goce had the spare on one flat, and the other jacked up. He, my dad and I then piled into a battered old Communist-era taxi with the two flat tires hanging half out of the tiny little trunk.

There was something wrong with the driver’s seat and it literally hung down onto the back seat into my dad’s lap. The driver asked for the equivalent of $1 for the ride to the garage, and even offered to stick around until the tires were fixed and then drive us back to the Hotel Meg.

The little garage was busy, but the men dropped everything to deal with our bum tires. As they dipped the first one into a huge vat of awful, sludgy, icy cold water, my dad remarked, presciently, “Godammit, I’m glad I don’t have to dip my hand in that cold, dirty water!”

As we waited for the mechanic’s verdict, I sat in a tiny little makeshift café attached to the garage, watching people with dull, blank expressions drink ebony black coffee from small white plastic cups. I felt so happy that it would be my last time hanging out in such a dismal place.

I felt certain that the man would tell us we needed new tires. I was wrong. They patched them up, charged us 7 Euros, and we were back in the battered taxi, with the driver on my lap this time, heading back to the Hotel Meg.

“Bulgaria is alright!” my dad proclaimed, and I laughed.

“No seriously,” he continued, “You can get things fixed here! I wish we would bring some of these mechanics back to the States!”

Read more from “A Traveler In the Foreign Service” here.

[Photo by Sludgegulper on Flickr]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: You Say You Want a Revolution? We All Want To Change The World

by Dave Seminara on

When I meet people who are interested in joining the State Department’s Foreign Service, I always ask them why they’re motivated to serve. Everyone has their own reasons, but one common motivation shared by many is a desire to help shape U.S. Foreign Policy. Many of these same people are dissatisfied with the current state of affairs and how we conduct ourselves on the global stage, and believe that by joining the Foreign Service, they can play some role in creating change.

There’s no doubt that we all need to be informed and engaged on global issues so that we can vote for politicians who will support the type of approach to global affairs we favor. But I wouldn’t recommend joining the Foreign Service if your primary goal is to influence how U.S. Foreign Policy is conducted. Those who think they’re going to be creating policy are often disappointed and disillusioned when they realize that Foreign Service Officers (FSO’s) are tasked with implementing policy, not creating it.

FSO’s are often called Foreign Policy foot soldiers. They receive marching orders and they carry them out. This doesn’t mean that FSO’s play no role in shaping policy at all. The insights provided by FSO’s on the ground overseas via cables, memos, and in-person briefings can help influence decision-making in Washington. But how much and how often?That depends on who’s in the White House and a host of other factors, but if you enter the Foreign Service thinking you’re going to be calling the shots on how to shape the bilateral relationship with the country you’re posted in, you’re going to be disappointed. Even if you rise to the level of Ambassador, you’re still going to need to seek approval from Washington before proceeding on all matters of substance.

The practicality of this reality is that passionate, idealistic, crusaders with very strong opinions don’t always make the best diplomats. You’re free to have your own opinions and the State Department has a formal “dissent” channel whereby FSO’s can voice their objections to U.S. government policies, but as a representative of the United States government, you really have to keep your politics to yourself, particularly while serving abroad. Not all FSO’s follow this rule but the most effective senior level diplomats do.

Based on my experience, I’d estimate that a majority of FSO’s lean Democratic, and given the fact that the George W. Bush administration was at times openly hostile towards the State Department, it should come as no surprise that there were plenty of dissenters in the Foreign Service during the W years. The war in Iraq and the subsequent mass diversion of human and material resources to our mega mission in Baghdad created lots of malcontents, but only a few, like Brady Kiesling, resigned on principle.

Kiesling and others followed their conscience, but I think that when you join the Foreign Service, you have to expect that you’ll probably serve under Presidents you dislike who will implement policies you disagree with. If you’re not the good soldier type who can live with that, the Foreign Service probably isn’t a great career choice for you.

When I think about the best diplomats I know, I couldn’t say for sure whether they are Democrats, Republicans or Independents. That doesn’t mean that one has to be devoid of beliefs or passions, but it may mean refraining from broadcasting your opinions. The bottom line is that the Foreign Service is a highly structured, chain-of-command focused bureaucracy, not that unlike the military. If you’re not capable of holding your nose and delivering a message you find personally repulsive, don’t sign up.

Read more from A Traveler in the Foreign Service here.

Photo of Dean Acheson, Secretary of State from ’49-53, courtesy of Wikimedia.

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: The World Of Foreign Service Nationals

by Dave Seminara on

Imagine working in an office where all of the most experienced employees with the most seniority and institutional knowledge were the underlings. And what if all the chiefs were foreigners, many with a dodgy command of the local history, language and culture? That’s a bit what it’s like to work at an American embassy overseas.

State Department Foreign Service Officers, (FSO’s) generally spend two years each in their first two overseas assignments – unless it’s a danger post, in which case they spend just one. After that, a typical assignment lasts three years. In many cases, it takes at least a year to really acclimate to a new country, so it’s often almost time to leave by the time an FSO really begins to feel at home in a place. And you usually have your onward assignment a year or so before you leave a post, so mentally you’re already in the next place before you leave post.

The system is set up this way for good reason – the U.S. government doesn’t want FSO’s to “go native” – essentially adopting the host country’s interests over those of the U.S. But the flipside of all the moving around is that embassies have a merry-go-round of Americans hopping on and off all year round. The local employees, called Foreign Service Nationals (FSN’s), are in many ways the foundation of each mission, because they tend to stay in their jobs for decades, if not their entire working lives.FSN’s help FSO’s acclimate to the local politics and culture, provide institutional knowledge, and serve as de-factor representatives of the U.S. government, even though they aren’t U.S. citizens. FSN’s are very much like local mentors – an odd dynamic because it’s unusual to be in the position of having to teach a new boss every few years. If they like their bosses, they’ll warn them when they’re making mistakes, but if they don’t, they might just stand by and let them fail.

For FSO’s, the challenge is figuring out how to manage people who know a lot more than you do. In Budapest, for example, I managed one woman who had been with the embassy for 43 years, dating back to the Communist era. Thankfully, she was a wonderful person to work with, but even so, it’s a bit odd to have 20 somethings managing people who have decades of seniority.

FSN’s can progress in their careers with the embassy, but only to a point, because FSO’s run each mission. In most countries, FSN’s make considerably less than FSO’s, but the U.S. government is still considered a great employer, particularly in developing countries where good jobs are scarce. During the two years I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Skopje, for example, I don’t think a single FSN voluntarily quit their job. My section had ten local employees and a decade after I first arrived, they’re all still working there. How’s that for stability?

Every American embassy has areas where only “cleared” Americans (that is, Americans with security clearances) can go. The practicality of this is that FSN’s can spend their entire working lives in a building they’ve only seen fractions of. They can wonder what’s on the floors they can’t visit but they’ll never know. (In reality, they aren’t missing much in most cases.)

In countries where stable, good paying jobs are scarce, FSN’s are often some of the most talented, best educated people in the country. It is not uncommon to find people with master’s degrees or Ph.D.’s willing to work as security guards or drivers at U.S. embassies in developing countries where good opportunities are scarce. Some are able to work there way up to professional positions at the embassy but even those who stay where they are are often grateful just to have a job where the paychecks arrive on time twice a month.

U.S. embassies have to comply with local labor laws and in many countries that means that FSN’s have a remarkable amount of leave. For example, when I lived in Macedonia, women could take a maternity leave of up to two years, much of it paid. That has changed, but the system is still very generous by U.S. standards.

I viewed my FSN’s as a kind of local family. They were more than just co-workers to me because when you arrive in a new country you’re a bit like a child. You’re a witness to all kinds of things happening around you, but most of it goes by in a blur and you only comprehend a fraction of what’s going on. Good FSN’s will help you understand more.

I was particularly close to my group in Skopje. Often times in life, you can’t appreciate a situation until its gone, but as my time in the country started to wind down I realized that I might never see some of them again. It’s an out-of-the-way country that is expensive and inconvenient to get to, and besides, it’s hard to go back someplace where you have so many memories – everything changes and you feel lost in nostalgia.

On my very last day of work, after saying my goodbyes, I decided to walk home from the embassy. I’ll never forget that walk because I shed a few tears for the first time in many years. In leaving my FSN’s, I felt like I was leaving family members behind. Thanks to the magic of Facebook, I’m still in contact with most of them. But I still miss them and some of the other FSN’s I worked with in Trinidad and Hungary.

After working for the U.S. government for 15 years, FSN’s are eligible to receive green cards. I always told my FSN’s that someday, my dream is for them to come to the U.S. because I want them to start their own businesses so they can get a taste of what it’s like to boss an American around. They deserve to have that feeling, if only once.

Read more from “A Traveler in the Foreign Service” here.

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Get Paid To Learn Languages

by Dave Seminara on

Americans are often criticized for our inability or unwillingness to learn foreign languages. I didn’t even have the option to study a foreign language until I was 14 years old and while kids these days start learning languages – usually Spanish – much earlier, most Americans never achieve true proficiency in a second language. But in the world of diplomacy, no other country invests as much as the US does in training its diplomats in foreign languages.

State Department Foreign Service Officers (FSO’s) spend large chunks of their careers studying languages full time at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). (Formally called The National Foreign Affairs Training Center.) Language courses can range from short crash courses that last just a few weeks, to a year or more for difficult languages like Arabic or Mandarin. I was in the Foreign Service for just less than six years and I spent 9 months of that studying Albanian (6 months) and Hungarian (3 months) full time, earning my normal salary.

The amount of training one receives depends on the job and the timing of when the incumbent in the job leaves post. A typical course lasts 5-6 months, and during that time period students study in small groups ranging from 1-4 in a class. Students spend 4-6 hours per day in the classroom depending on how large the class is and there’s homework and lab work to do each night. At the end of the course, students have to take a test to assess their speaking and reading skills.Typically, FSO’s aren’t allowed to take vacation days during language training and the training itself certainly isn’t like being on holiday. I studied Albanian in a class of just two students, so there was nowhere to hide if you didn’t feel like speaking Albanian on a given day. Normally I like to ease into a workday, quietly checking email over coffee, but at FSI you’re off and running having to make small talk in a foreign language at 8 a.m. That said, I was usually free to go home at 1 p.m. each day, which was awfully sweet.

Some FSO’s aren’t crazy about language training, but I still viewed it as a terrific, relatively stress-free break from the normal working grind. FSI has a collegial feel in that you can dress casually and, since family members are also eligible for language training, you see couples holding hands on the grounds. It’s a bit like being back in college minus the fake ID’s, binge drinking and student loans.

The State Department goes to great lengths to hire native speakers to teach language courses and that makes FSI a veritable United Nations. Walk down any random hallway and you might hear Finish, Dari, Thai, and Tajik all in a 50-meter stroll. Very few other countries pay their diplomats to study languages, especially obscure ones, for significant periods of time. For example, I served in Skopje and Budapest, and most of the other members of the diplomatic corps received no training in Macedonian, Albanian or Hungarian, as we did.

The fact that the State Department invests in language training is undoubtedly a good thing for employees and family members. But is it a good use of taxpayer dollars? In some cases, it’s hard to justify paying someone a salary to study an obscure language they may never use again during their careers, and might use only sparingly in their overseas assignment. For example, my Albanian classmate spent six months learning Albanian prior to an assignment in Kosovo that was just one year long. She didn’t have an aptitude or love for languages and admitted to me after her tour that she had rarely used the Albanian she learned – either on her job or during her off-hours, since she lived on a compound. There are also cases where we endeavor to teach people very difficult languages in too short a time period, or teach people obscure languages for countries where a huge majority already speak English.

In some cases, FSO’s also end up speaking English at post, even after spending months or years learning the local language, because our interlocutors speak English better than we speak the local tongue. Also, some languages have so many different dialects that it’s impossible to train FSO’s in the one they’ll need. For example, in Albanian, there are two primary dialects, Gheg and Tosk. Tosk is spoken in most of Albania, while Gheg is spoken in Macedonia and Kosovo. We learned Tosk at FSI and when I got to post, people could understand me but I struggled to understand them.

But on balance, I think it makes sense for us to invest in training our diplomats to speak foreign languages. The common perception of Americans around the world is that we’re arrogant, monolingual and generally uninformed about other cultures. By learning to communicate with people in their mother tongue, we’re showing humility and respect for their culture.

And in a practical sense, diplomats who are truly fluent in a local language can be more effective than ones who have to rely on the filter of a translator. No matter how hard you try, you can’t fully understand a place if you don’t speak the language, and if you can only communicate with people who speak English, you risk having a distorted view of the local situation.

If you’re the kind of person who enjoys studying foreign languages, the Foreign Service is one of the few careers that offer a chance to get paid to study. In fact, you can actually make more than your normal salary if you perform well in a difficult language. These days, some FSO’s are also learning languages like Arabic overseas, which probably makes more sense due to the variety of dialects and cost of training people in the US. And if you’re already proficient in a foreign language, especially a difficult one like Mandarin, Arabic, Farsi or Russian, you’re chances of getting into the Foreign Service are much better than if you’re one of the monolingual masses.

Read more from “A Traveler in the Foreign Service” here.

[Photo courtesy of Nina Toessiner on Flickr]