A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Playing The Role Of Gatekeeper To America

by Dave Seminara on

There was a grown man crying at my visa window. It was my first week interviewing visa applicants at the American embassy in Skopje, Macedonia, and before I’d even had a chance to ask this man why he was applying to visit the U.S., he was sobbing uncontrollably on the other side of the bulletproof glass window.

“Why are you crying?” I asked, in Albanian.

The man said that his son in the U.S. was gravely ill and he needed to visit him right away. My computer indicated that this man had already applied and been refused for visas ten times in the past five years. The son had just had an operation and the man before me believed that his family was lying to him about his son’s condition.

“My son’s wife is a liar,” the man said, in Albanian. “I know it’s much more serious than they are telling me. I don’t know if he’ll make it.”As the man handed me a sealed letter from a hospital in the U.S., I braced myself for a heartbreaking story that I assumed would involve cancer, leukemia, a terrible car accident or who knows what else.

My eyes scanned the letter from the hospital and when I saw the worlds “soccer” and “ankle” I almost burst out laughing. As my visa applicant dried his tears in a handkerchief, I told him that his son had sprained his ankle playing soccer and would be just fine.

These are the kinds of mini-dramas that are acted out at U.S. embassies and consulates millions of times per year, as Foreign Service Officers (FSO’s) screen applicants who want to visit, study or work in the U.S. Because of the crushing demand for U.S. visas around the world – last year more than 7 million foreign nationals applied for non-immigrant visas to the U.S. – all FSO’s are required to do a consular tour as junior officers.

Doing a consular tour is seen as a sort of rite of passage – paying one’s dues, so to speak. There are all kinds of horror stories about visa work – some people who are interested in joining the Foreign Service don’t follow through because they’re afraid of doing visa work and others join but expend a lot of effort bitching about the consular requirement.

I found that visa work could be tolerable, and even enjoyable under the right circumstances. Or it can be miserable, depending on workload, whom you share the visa line with and what level of support you receive from management. Here are a few points about visa work at the State Department and surviving the consular tour requirement.

Will you be Able to Say ‘No’?

A common sentiment I’ve heard from friends and colleagues who worked at the State Department in a civil service capacity is, “I don’t think I could do visa work because it would be too hard to refuse visa applicants.”

U.S. law requires consular officers to consider most categories of non-immigrant visa applicants – tourists, students and the like – as intending immigrants unless they prove they have strong ties that would compel them to return to their home countries. In other words, most visa applicants are to be considered guilty until they are proven innocent, and in many poor countries, trying to prove that you won’t overstay your visa isn’t easy.

As a lifelong traveler, I too wondered before I joined the Foreign Service if I’d have a hard time enforcing the law. As a frequent traveler, my gut instinct coming into the Foreign Service was that almost anyone should be allowed to come and visit the U.S. But after I started the job, and saw how many people were abusing the system, my perspective changed, and I came to understand why the law is written the way it is.

Occasionally, I’d feel bad having to refuse people who had particularly sad cases, but you handle so many applications and hear so many lies that after a while, it isn’t really possible to conjure sympathy for everyone. There are millions upon millions of people who want to live in the U.S. and sadly, it just isn’t possible for everyone. If it were, our population would be 3 billion instead of 314 million.

There are some FSO’s who never really learn how to say ‘no’ to visa applicants. I know a few who had 97 or 98 percent issuance rates, but the vast majority learns how to do it with no real problem. Like anything else, practice makes perfect.

Is it Hard to Get a Tourist Visa to the U.S.?

The common perception is that it’s very difficult for people in developing countries to obtain tourist visas to the U.S. While many are denied each year and many more don’t even apply because they think they won’t qualify, or can’t afford the fees, it isn’t nearly as hard as people think.

Take a look at the visitor’s visa issuance rates in countries around the world, and you’ll probably be very surprised. In fiscal year 2011, the issuance rate in Mexico was 87 percent, in Brazil it was 96 percent, Russia was at 90 percent, South Africa came in at 95 percent and even Pakistan, Kosovo and Syria had issuance rates hovering around 70 percent. By my calculation, using the State Department’s total issuance and refusal figures, about 85 percent of visa applicants were issued around the world in FY 2011.

There are a number of reasons why the State Department issues more visas than it denies, and I explored this topic in a research paper a few years ago. I won’t go into all of these reasons here, but suffice it to say that it’s a lot easier to issue visas than it is to deny them. Applicants who get their visas head off to the U.S., while refused ones stay home and enlist their friends or relatives in the U.S. to call and send pleading messages to the embassy to get their visa refusals overturned. FSO’s are constantly asked to justify refusals but rarely are asked to explain issuances.

Bid Carefully to Avoid Visa Mills

For those who want to join the Foreign Service but are wary of having to do visa work at a so-called “visa mill” posts, where one might have to adjudicate tens of thousands of applications per year, do your research in the bidding process. I’ve done consular work at three overseas posts and none were considered “visa mills” but the consular workload at each post varied dramatically.

It might take a bit of research, but find out how the post you are bidding on is staffed, and then look at the total number of visa applications they get per year. It’s not an exact science, but you’ll get an idea for how busy you’ll be.

Better Have a Thick Skin

Visa interviews are high stakes affairs for the applicants and while most visa applicants are courteous – even if they are refused – you will inevitably have to endure some abuse at some posts. I know FSO’s who had applicants in Haiti cast voodoo-like spells on them, toss mysterious substances at them under the document slot, and worse. If you adjudicate enough visa applications, you will have people curse and condemn you.

But the worst vitriol sometimes comes in the mail. Many applicants say nothing when refused at the window, but write letters, or have their relatives or their relatives’ congressional representatives write letters alleging outrageous conduct that never occurred. I will never forget one failed applicant who wrote a letter comparing me to a Nazi prison camp guard.

Once in a blue moon, you might receive a thank you letter from an applicant who received their visa, but for every one of those, there are 1,000 complaints and all of them require a response. But for all the negatives, visa work can also be fun. You meet a lot of people, you hear great stories and you get to practice using the local language wherever you are. In limited doses, at the right post with good management, it can actually be enjoyable.

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

[Photo by Omar Omar on Flickr]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: How To Avoid Posts Where You Might Get Eaten Alive

by Dave Seminara on

Have you ever received a phone call from someone who was hoping to entice you to live in a country where cannibalism is still practiced? I have.

“I have a great opportunity for you in Port Moresby,” said Hollis, my State Department Career Development Officer (CDO)/used car salesperson.

I Googled Port Moresby from my office at the American Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia, and the results weren’t encouraging. And when I asked a more senior person at the embassy what he thought, his first reaction told me all I needed to know about the place.

“Papua New Guinea,” he said. “Don’t they still eat people there?”In the peculiar world of the Foreign Service, diplomats are always obsessing over their next post. No matter whether you’re in Paris or Bangui, it’s hard not to think about what’s next, thanks to the unique bidding system, where State Department Foreign Service Officers (FSO’s) typically bid a year or more in advance of taking up a new post.

The practicality of this system is that if you’re in a two or three year assignment, you typically know where you’re going next near the midway point of your tour. If you love your post and are heading somewhere dreadful next, you have plenty of time for the apprehension to build, but if you’re excited about your onward assignment it can make even the worst job or post seem bearable.

If you have a one-year assignment to a danger post, you typically bid right before or after arriving in say, Kabul or Baghdad. And since serving at a post like that gives one some serious bidding equity the next time around, nearly everyone manages to go somewhere they want after serving in conflict zones. So your ticket to Afghanistan can be tempered by a ticket to Sydney or Rome that’s already in the bag by the time you land in Kabul.

If you’re a traveler who has thought about joining the State Department’s Foreign Service, but want to know more about how likely you are to be able to live in the regions you prefer, this is a primer on what to expect if you join the Foreign Service.

First tour: FSO’s start their careers in a class called A-100 and are given a “directed assignment” to their first post. Officers can express bidding preferences but whether you get what you want is a real crapshoot. If you have a foreign language proficiency, your chances of going to that country/region are good, but don’t bank on it.

Career development officers (CDO’s) take a variety of factors into account in deciding who goes where: job/career fit, family and school considerations (i.e. they are less likely to send someone with school age children to a post with no accredited schools), health considerations (if an FSO has a family member with health issues), language ability and the timing of when the job is open versus what job and language training the person would need to fill the position.

Second tour: The second tour is also a directed assignment but here’s where things get really tricky, as far as bidding strategy goes. Junior officers can only get one full language course in their first two tours, and they have to do a consular job as well. So if, for example, you exhaust your language training on the first go around, or don’t fulfill your consular obligation, your bidding options can be severely hampered.

In my case, I was given Albanian language training prior to departing for my first post in Macedonia, and since I wasn’t proficient in any other foreign languages at that time, I could only bid on jobs at English speaking posts and jobs, which didn’t require foreign language proficiency.

The second assignment is supposed to be based upon bidding “equity.” Those who are at the toughest posts – and here, toughest is defined by those with the highest hardship and danger pay ratings – have the most equity, and should get the first pick of assignments.

But in reality, FSO’s with connections or good karma sometimes manage to float by from one good post to another while others go from bad posts to even worse ones. I loved living in Macedonia, but since it was rated as a 20 percent hardship post at the time I was bidding for the second go-around, I thought I would have plenty of equity to get one of the 20 jobs I bid on for my second tour.

But then I got the Port Moresby phone call from Hollis, who explained that I didn’t have enough equity to get any of the 20 posts I’d bid on, and would have to take my chances with the leftovers. CDO’s are very much like used car salespeople, so he was trying to push the places that no one had bid on. After weeks of wrangling, I was given Port of Spain, Trinidad, which wasn’t at all up my alley, but seemed quite acceptable compared to Port Moresby.

Mid Level Bidding: Once FSO’s get tenure, the directed assignment process is over and officers lobby and interview for jobs based on their own merit. The equity system is still in play but less so. In decades past, some FSO’s managed to specialize in one geographic area, but these days, with huge missions in Baghdad and Kabul, no one can get away without at least bidding on hardship posts, and many officers are getting sent on unaccompanied assignments in dangerous places against their will.

Tips: In an A-100 class, it’s essential to try to find out through the grapevine as much as you can on who’s bidding on what. The most important thing to gauge is what jobs everyone is putting at the very bottom of his or her list. Let’s say, for example, that nearly everyone has Khartoum as the bottom of their list, but you have it somewhere near the middle of your list. Well, guess who’s got a pretty damn good shot of spending Christmas in Sudan?

In general, you want to present bid lists that make sense and that you can defend rationally. Trying to tell CDO’s you prefer Dublin, Sydney and Prague because they have good beer in each place is a sure way to get a one-way ticket to Dhaka. And last, but definitely not least, if you have high-level connections, use them, and remember that you can always negotiate.

Bottom line: Joining the Foreign Service is a little bit like joining the military, in terms of signing your fate over to the government. It’s obviously far cushier, pays better and is less dangerous, but you can’t completely control where you go and you can get sent to places you do not want to go without your family members. If you’re flexible, adventurous and not extremely risk averse, it might be a good career option for you. But if you’re just hoping for an easy way to live in Sydney or Rome, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

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

[Photos by Dave Seminara and friar’s balsam on Flickr]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: A Globetrotting USAID FSO Serving in Afghanistan

by Dave Seminara on

USAID Foreign Service Officer David Thompson has lived in eight countries in the last 15 years and has visited countless others, but at 46, his adventures are far from over. He helped reconstruct homes in the immediate aftermath of the war in Bosnia, worked to restore democracy in Honduras after a coup, and has lived through attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul while serving there as the head of USAID’s Democracy & Governance office.

Thompson has been a Foreign Service Officer with USAID (The U.S. Agency for International Development) for nearly ten years and has served in Washington, Albania, Honduras and Afghanistan. The Alexandria native and father of two lives alone in 8 by 12 hooch and is a month shy of his return to the U.S. Thompson spoke to us about his unlikely career path, the challenges of working in Honduras and Afghanistan, and the difficulties and pleasures of working overseas. Thompson’s story also offers a ray of hope to those seeking a career change.

Tell us about the career path that led you to USAID?

My undergrad degree was in architecture. When I was in my mid to late 20s I was trying to sort out what to do with my life. I worked as a carpenter’s helper and built up a body of knowledge about construction. I had an abbreviated stint in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, and then I followed that with a year as a Vista volunteer in Waterbury, CT. In the mid ’90s, I was a construction manager, managing the construction of single-family homes in Northern Virginia and I wasn’t really enjoying my job.I got an interview with an NGO that was hiring people to work in Bosnia. I went into work one day and got laid off, but I went home that day and found out that I got the job in Bosnia.

I ended up staying in Bosnia for two and a half years in the immediate aftermath of the war. I learned about development and post-conflict reconstruction but what I learned was the complexity of development. People don’t just return to their houses – they need jobs and schools and health care so I decided to go to grad school. I went to Duke University’s Center for International Development Policy and got a masters degree from ’98-2000. And I met my wife there; she’s from Brazil and we had common interests.

I ended up getting a job with CHF International in South Africa as a Country Director and we moved to Port Elizabeth, South Africa in 2000. We loved it there but rather quickly we decided we wanted to be closer to home, so we moved to Brazil, where my wife is from. We switched roles in Brazil, where she had the good steady job and I was the one teaching English, and getting a few consultancies here and there.

And that led you to USAID?

I was looking at my enormous student debt and thinking, ‘I have to pay this. I wanted stability and the chance to work with the USG’s premier international development agency, so I applied with USAID, interviewed in 2002 and started with them in March 2003.

What advice do you have for those interested in becoming a USAID Foreign Service Officer?

The current program is called the Development Leadership Initiative. Getting a graduate degree is very essential for this work – especially with the level of competition these days.

I assume it’s also important to have international experience?

Yes. USAID wants to see the ability to live overseas and thrive in different cultures.

And not necessarily just a study abroad in London or Rome, right?

Exactly. It’s best to have experience in the more traditional development countries.

Should new hires at USAID expect to serve in Afghanistan or Iraq at some point in their careers?

Yes. They should expect and be prepared for that.

And if you have kids they don’t spare you, right? Do you have kids?

I do. Two girls. One 8, and the other will turn 6 next week. My wife and two girls live at my mom’s house in Alexandria, in the house where I grew up. It’s a one-year tour here and then my next assignment will be in Washington. It’s tough. It’s a challenge for everyone, not just for people with kids.

I have two kids and I’m not sure if I could leave them. It’s very difficult to leave for a year isn’t it?

We come here because it’s our duty. It’s part of our job. If I could be in Mozambique, I would but this is what the Agency decided for me and I accepted it.

How do you stay in touch with your family?

We have a U.S. phone number, so I speak to my family twice a day. We thought we’d Skype more but it’s kind of easier to call and sometimes less painful than it is to see your family (on cam).

Were you in Afghanistan during the Koran burning incidents?

I was. And I was here for the big attack on the Embassy on September 13. That was crazy because I remember being in a bunker when the attack started and all of the sudden there’s this realization, ‘Oh my God, my wife is going to see this on the news,’ so I wanted to contact her first.

Remind us about the attacks against the embassy that have occurred since you’ve been there.

In the past year, there have been two attacks – once, the American embassy was the target, that was on September 13, and then on April 15, several Western embassies were attacked. There were no serious injuries; we were taken to a safe place by the security guards. In the first incident, some local people in the consular waiting room were hit with shrapnel.

I had left the embassy just minutes before the second attack occurred. I was on my way to a meeting and we ended up having to stay at a base overnight because we couldn’t return to the embassy right away.

What did your wife say when you told her you were going to Afghanistan?

We knew it was coming. If I could have avoided it, I would have. But we get three R & R’s where we get to go home during the year. Our military colleagues are here for a year and only get one two-week R & R. So we’re well taken care of.

We’ve gone through some scary times. The former President Rabbani was assassinated just a stone’s throw from the embassy but I do feel very safe here. The guards here are fantastic. Our colleagues here on the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT’s), some of them are under fire almost daily and they survive, so we can certainly survive here in Kabul.

Has your wife been able to continue to pursue her career?

That’s been the biggest challenge about the Foreign Service for us. I’ve been fortunate to live overseas and expose my kids to these cultures but it’s been much harder on my wife than it has been on me, so I would definitely advise couples to talk about the realities of this career choice.

Tell us about the hooch you live in?

It’s kind of a nice little trailer. I have no complaints, it’s about 8 feet across by 12 feet long, with a nice ¾ bathroom with a shower, and it has a nice TV with the Armed Forces Network. I find it very cozy quite frankly. We have hot water and water pressure.

And what does your job entail there?

As head of the Office of Democracy & Governance, I help manage the USG’s development assistance that goes toward governance, rule of law and anti-corruption, civil society and media development, elections and political processes.

How many USAID missions are there and where should people expect that they could be sent?

There are about 130 posts. For the most part they’ll be in developing countries. There are a few odd positions in places like Tokyo or Rome dealing with donor coordination but not many. You can be in Pretoria, Cairo, New Delhi, or you could be in Chad, or South Sudan or the Congo or Uganda. So there’s a big variety in terms of size of the mission and conditions you live in. The better posts are four-year tours, the more challenging ones would be two-year tours. The really special hardcore posts like Afghanistan are one year.

In the State Department, it’s hard to get promoted if you don’t go to the really tough places. Is it the same in USAID?

Yes, you have to show a willingness to serve in different types of situations and on different continents. People used to stay in one region, like Latin America, and now they really encourage people to break away from that.

Do USAID officers usually get language training?

It depends if their job is language designated. I didn’t get language training for Albania, but I did get 3.5 months of training in Spanish for Honduras.

You were in Honduras at a very momentous time. Tell us about the coup.

I was there in the summer of 2009. My family was in Brazil and I woke up to a coup. All of the sudden, what was known as a sleepy post turned into something else. The U.S. didn’t recognize the de-facto regime. We said, ‘No – this was not a constitutional transfer of power, this was a coup.’ When you take someone out of the country in his pajamas, it’s a coup.

So we responded that way but we didn’t entirely cut off assistance because we didn’t want to put ordinary Hondurans in jeopardy, so we cut off a variety of assistance programs, particularly the programs the government benefited from. Our office supported the embassy’s strategy of trying to help get Honduras back on track through the November 2009 Presidential elections.

Despite all the political instability, were things operating as usual in the country?

Things were pretty normal. There were clashes between police and protesters in the major cities but you didn’t see that unless you went looking for it. The schools were closed for a few tense days but then they reopened, stores stayed open. It was my first coup, so it was crazy just to experience it.

You’ve been outside of the U.S. for a long time now; do you lose touch at all with your hometown and feel rootless?

When I go back to USAID in Washington, I’m going home and that’s the most important thing. After being overseas for most of the time since 1996, I’m happy to be going home. I’ve always had my mom’s house to go back to, so that’s been some stability. We just bought our own house in the DC area, so we do want to put some roots down there. We appreciate going home. The green trees, the sidewalks, the security, the different kinds of food, the playgrounds for kids, the museums – we love it. But that said, I love being overseas, learning about new cultures, studying languages and seeing how my kids respond to that.

What do you love about your job?

The ability to contribute to the policy of our development assistance. Also, the exposure to different countries. It’s an incredible life. If you’re going to be in international development, being with AID is a home; it’s a career.

I will work for USAID for the rest of my career, but every few years, I’ll have a new job in a different place in a new office. I’m constantly learning and that’s really exciting. Even if you’re down on one job, you know that you’re next job will be different.

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

(Photos of David and his hooch supplied by USAID, photo of the Afghan sunrise in Kandahar via the US Army on Flickr, Afghan cycler via the US Embassy Kabul, and Honduras coup photo by David Nallah on Flickr.)

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Making Peace With Malta (Mario Speaks!)

by Dave Seminara on

Regular readers of this column will recall that I created a diplomatic incident with Malta by dressing up like Colonel Gaddafi in a grammar school model U.N. in Buffalo, New York, in 1986. 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.

I tried to do that, 25 years after the fact, earlier this summer. (Read Parts 1 and 2 of this story.)

I never found Mario and assumed I never would but the Maltese press got wind of the story and found the incident as hilarious as I did. Daphne Caruana Galizia, a popular columnist for The Malta Independent, wrote about it on her website and the post generated more than 40 comments, including at least one from a person who believed that I’d forged the documents and made the whole story up. (My imagination is vivid but not that good.)A reporter from the same publication wrote a piece about my attempts to find Mario, which concluded with my line: “Sorry, Mario. Please drop me a line someday. I owe you a beer.”

With Malta being a relatively small place, the story found its way to Mario himself and several weeks ago he finally contacted me via email. I was initially a little alarmed, because in the first paragraph of Mario’s message, he seemed more than a little annoyed with me.

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“The affair of the Gaddafi costume had been forgotten until you brought it up again last year, and to tell you the truth I was not at all pleased to have my name and (former) address published in the international press with a repeat in a local newspaper,” he wrote. “I only hope that the affair stops here.”

But after those lines, he warmed up considerably. “There are no hard feelings, and I was really gratified by your great efforts to find me, to ‘make peace’ in person,” he wrote.

Cacciottolo, now 71, went on to explain that I had “earned” an explanation of what had transpired back in 1986 and again last year when I asked the Maltese Embassy in Washington to contact him on my behalf. Mario wrote that he responded to a series of questions from the Maltese Ambassador last year, forwarded to him on my behalf, but he was unaware of the fact that the Embassy never passed his response on to me. (In fact, they told me that he didn’t want to speak to me, which wasn’t true.)

Cacciottolo went on to claim that he didn’t understand back in 1986 that the matter concerned a schoolboy but maintained that he had “no shame or regrets for what I had written back in 1986!”

Given the fact that Mario referred to the photo of me, at age 13, in the letter, his confusion is, well, confusing, for lack of a better phrase, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But Cacciottolo also insisted that his reaction reflected no specific anti-Arab bias, but rather a patriotic response to my mischaracterization of the country.

“We may be a very small nation living in a tiny state,” he wrote. “But we are as proud of our country as anyone else in the world.”

Mario also took issue with my characterization of the mid ’80s as a time of violent protests in Malta.

“No demonstrators were EVER killed in the streets by Maltese policemen,” he wrote. “Don’t be offended or shocked, but you repeated a lot of exaggerated hogwash.”

He also insisted that the source that briefed me on what Malta was like in the mid ’80s must have thought I was a C.I.A. agent. But after setting me straight on those scores, Cacciottolo apologized for not realizing back in ’86 that I was just a 13-year-old schoolboy, and said that he’d be looking for the card I left for him with his former neighbor.

Since receiving that first message from Mario, we’ve exchanged a few more emails and I feel pretty safe in saying that we are now friends. Someday, I will buy him a beer. The only bit of unfinished business is the fact that his former neighbor apparently ate the box of chocolates I left for him. Note to neighbor: you owe Mario a box of Lindt chocolates.

Part 1 and Part 2 of this story.

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

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: No Passport? No Honeymoon

by Dave Seminara on

The day after I got married, I spent much of the day nursing a hangover. And when I was finally ready to emerge from my bed, in the middle of the afternoon, I told my new bride that I was going out to rent “Braveheart” and “Rob Roy” to get us geared up for our honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands. But when I returned from the video shop, I had some bad news for her. Our first full day as man and wife was going to be a stressful one.

After suffering through an interminable, miserably hot summer in Washington, D.C., my first after joining the Foreign Service in 2002, I wanted our mid-August honeymoon to unfold in a cool, comfortable foreign locale. My wife was lukewarm on Scotland, but I sold her on the idea of hiking in The Highlands and on the island of Skye and spending our nights in cozy pubs listening to traditional fiddle music.

I’m a risk taker by nature and had no qualms about booking most of our trip with nonrefundable bids on priceline.com. I booked the flight and four nights of accommodation in London on Priceline and made reservations at B & B’s in Scotland for the rest of the two-week trip. At the time, I was in a six month long Albanian language course at the Foreign Service Institute in Northern Virginia, and my wife was finishing up a masters program in Chicago. We were newlyweds, but didn’t live together yet.I don’t recall what triggered my memory but I came to the sickening realization that I’d left my passport 1,000 miles away at my apartment in Washington, D.C., as I drove down Western Avenue on Chicago’s north side back to my wife’s apartment. It was about 4 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon and our completely non-changeable, non-refundable flight to London via Cincinnati was scheduled to depart in 24 hours.

I dreaded telling my wife about my mistake, but when she didn’t lunge after me with a butcher knife I knew I’d made a wise choice in marrying her. I had a good woman but no passport.

A series of frantic phone calls and web prowling revealed that there were two options to get my passport: A) I could fly to Washington myself, get the passport and then catch a flight to Cincinnati to board our connecting flight to London, or B) Find someone in Washington to bring my passport to Dulles airport on Monday morning and send it via cargo to Chicago.

Both scenarios left no margin for error. If I traveled myself, I’d have to pay about $500, and would arrive in Cincinnati just on time for our flight, but the routing involved three total flights and if any were delayed then my wife would be going on the honeymoon herself. When I broached this topic with her, and opined that if I didn’t turn up at the airport, she should proceed to London on her own, and I’d try to buy a ticket for another flight, she took a stand.

“I am not leaving for our honeymoon alone,” she said. “You bought non-refundable tickets and now we just have to deal with it.”

Option B was cheaper, at about $175, but was also more complex and riskier. The routing had the passport arriving in Chicago about a half hour before our flight was due to board, but this plan meant that I’d have to find someone in D.C. who could gain access to my apartment, where the passport was, and then drive the passport to the airport at an ungodly hour on a Monday morning to catch an early flight.

I decided to ask two people to help me execute option B. I asked Mike Katula, the nicest Foreign Service colleague I could think of, to try to get my passport, and Kathy, my cousin’s wife, to drive the passport to the airport. Both immediately understood the gravity of the situation and offered to help immediately without complaint.

Katula had to go to my apartment building and do some detective work to find the super to explain the situation. I would have called to warn her but I had no idea what her phone number was, and didn’t even know her full name to look her up in the phone book. As my wife and I sweated the situation out in her little apartment in Chicago, I got a call from the super.

“There’s a tall guy here who says he needs to get into your apartment to get your passport,” she said.

“It sounds a little fishy, I know,” I said. “But, please, let him in.”

Katula got the passport, and Kathy, saint that she is, got it to the airport on time and for us, all that was left to do was chart my passport’s progress online. My passport had a connection to make in Cleveland, and even though it was August, we feared delays. We spent much of the day online, refreshing flight data pages to see if our flights were running smoothly.

The first flight to Cleveland appeared to have come off without a glitch, and the onward flight to Chicago left on time so we left for O’Hare full of hope that the passport would be there. We had to report to a cargo office on the periphery of the airport and as we entered the building, which was full of boxes and delivery people, I felt pretty certain we were the first people with a honeymoon riding on the arrival of a package.

The passport wasn’t there when we arrived at the office but the clerk verified that the flight had just landed. We had a little more than an hour before our flight to Cincinnati left and I explained our situation to the woman at the desk.

“Well, it takes a while for the packages to get here and be sorted,” she said, much to our chagrin.

About twenty very nervous minutes passed and finally the woman announced, “I have something here for you,” holding up a large white envelope. I have never been so excited to receive a package in my life.

“Now the honeymoon can begin,” my relieved wife said.

We dashed over to the airport in a celebratory mood, caught our flight and had a terrific time, despite the initial fright. Two months later, I took up my first job in the Foreign Service at the U.S. Embassy in Skopje and frequently dealt with Americans who had lost their passports. And while some of my colleagues were prone to scolding and hectoring Americans about taking better care of their passports, I was sympathetic because I had a dark passport secret of my own.

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