A Traveler in the Foreign Service: Ding Dongs and danger pay in Kosovo

by Dave Seminara on

When I worked at the American Embassy in Skopje, I looked forward to visiting Kosovo. Not because I liked the place, but because I wanted junk food. American junk food. I’m talking Hostess cupcakes, Chips Ahoy, Jif Peanut Butter and the like. And trips to Kosovo, if you were crafty, meant a visit to Camp Bondsteel, a huge American military base with a P.X. that was sort of like a mini Wal-Mart.

Aside from the availability of American goodies, Pristina was still considered a hazard post with 25% danger pay, and one could collect this extra cash, on a prorated basis, even if you were there for as little as a half day of “work.” At the time, Kosovo was part of Skopje’s consular district, so it wasn’t difficult to drum up a reason to go there, and our local employees there were well schooled on the drill: make sure to set up some contrived meeting or a tour at Camp Bondsteel, so we could have lunch at Burger King and shop at the P.X.

I traveled extensively in developing countries before joining the Foreign Service but I never felt the need to hunt down American products while overseas. Part of the joy of travel is in buying unfamiliar products and eating different foods. But within a few months of living in Skopje, I found myself craving not just American products but also the American shopping experience I was familiar with. Why?

I had a local supermarket called Vero close to my apartment in Skopje but I dreaded going to the place. Aside from the fact that they didn’t have things that I thought were staples- fresh low-fat milk, lettuce and the like- navigating the parking lot was always an experience.
Upon arrival, Roma would rush over to your car and start washing it. Even if you’d protest that you didn’t need a wash, they’d ignore you. Generally they’d be satisfied with a small tip after you returned with your groceries, but on one occasion, a Roma entrepreneur balked at the 100 denar ($2) payment I gave him.

“Five euros,” he said, no doubt exhausting his entire English language vocabulary.

“You don’t want this?” I said, pointing at the crumpled bills that he was disdainfully holding up in the air.

“No, no,” he said. “Five euros.”

So I took my money back and hastily got in my car to leave. He called out to two colleagues who were washing other cars on the far side of the parking lot, and, as I tried to flee the scene, the three of them chased me, waving their sponges in anger.

When I told this story to some locals at work the next day, they howled in derision.

“See, you foreigners are so stupid!” they said. “The gypsies think you’ll pay anything for a car wash!”

And if the car wash guys didn’t get to you, the cart guys did. In order to secure a shopping cart, you had to put a 1 denar coin into a lock in the cart. After you returned the cart, you got your coin back. So the Roma would stand outside the store and accost people who looked like easy marks. I had no problem letting them take my cart to get the coin, but they also would grab my groceries and try to put them in my trunk for a fee. Needless to say this routine got old very fast.

Aside from the contrived meetings at Bondsteel, my wife, who worked as the Embassy’s Community Liaison Officer, organized monthly shopping field trips at Bondsteel. We didn’t collect danger pay for those forays, but our van would always be literally packed to the brim with Hungry Man dinners, Twinkies and various other things that none of us would dream of eating in the U.S.

Once the war in Iraq broke out, I would sometimes feel a tinge of guilt over the fact that we could collect the same level of danger pay in Kosovo that our intrepid colleagues in Iraq were getting. But in the Foreign Service, compensation is often based more on the ability of an embassy’s management officers, who compile the reports that result in adjustments to things like hardship, danger and cost of living allowances.

For example, when I arrived in Skopje, we were receiving hardship pay of 15% above our salaries and no one complained about this until we discovered that Sofia, our neighbor to the East, had just been bumped up to 20%.

“Sofia?” we cried. “They have Dunkin Donuts for Christ’s sake!”

If our Munchkin’ eating colleagues in Sofia were getting 20, we thought we deserved 25. An informal task force was developed to try to document why we too deserved more money. The key was to make the place sound as dreadful as possible, and as the resident amateur photographer, I was asked to do my part by taking photos of stray dogs, litter and peeling Communist apartment blocks. The uglier, the better. A good management officer can make Paris sound like Mogadishu and thanks to the efforts of our task force, we were soon bumped up to 20%.

The flip side is that some dysfunctional posts had no clue how to document hardship- real or imagined. After Skopje, I was posted to Port of Spain, which, by my account, was much more of a hardship than Skopje, but was classified as a 5% post, largely because we had Roy Austin, a political appointee and friend of George W. Bush as ambassador. Mr. Austin believed that everything was just fine in Trinidad, much to our chagrin.

A look at the State Department hardship and danger pay tables offers some insights into the perceived difficulty and danger of living in various places around the world. Khartoum is 25% but Vladivostok is 30. Moldova is 20% but Ciudad Juarez is only 10, the same as Reykjavik and Tallinn! Go figure.

And the poor souls in Skopje are now down to just 10%, while the danger pay in Kosovo is a mere 5%. Barely enough cash to buy a package of Ding Dongs at the P.X.

(Note: the hardship and danger pay allowances aren’t as generous as they sound. State Department employees in D.C. receive locality pay, currently 24%, and overseas employees do not. So, if an FSO is posted to a country with 10% hardship pay, they are actually making 14% less than they would in D.C., though they have their housing paid for.)

Read more from A Traveler in the Foreign Service here.

[Image via ohdarling at Flickr.]

A Traveler in the Foreign Service: Ciao macho man (or how to help Albanian breakdancers win a grammy)

by Dave Seminara on

I was standing on a stage in an auditorium in front of about 500 people frozen in terror at Nota Fest, which is like the Grammy awards for Macedonia’s ethnic-Albanian community. The organizers of the event had invited our Ambassador, Larry Butler, to present a lifetime achievement award and when he, and several other more important people at the embassy declined, the duty was punted down to me, a lowly first tour diplomat.

Attending b and c list events in host countries is a big part of life in the Foreign Service and the more junior you are, the more likely you’ll end up at Tajikistan’s national day (think warm, generic cola and greasy mutton) instead of Italy’s. (think prosciutto and fine wine). It was a command performance but I was assured that I wasn’t going to have to say anything in Albanian.

“All you have to do is get up on stage, smile, and hand someone an award,” said Lindita, a charming local employee from the embassy who probably could convince the Taliban’s Mullah Omar to muster “you go girl” enthusiasm for the Ellen DeGeneris Show.

I had only been in the country for a few weeks and was still feeling insecure about speaking Albanian one-on-one, let alone in front of an audience of hundreds of people, so not speaking was a key point in the negotiations.

After sitting through three hours of live performances, many of them shockingly bad, with nary an alcoholic beverage in sight, I was finally called up on the stage, ostensibly to present the lifetime achievement award. Immediately the jazzily dressed hostess handed me a microphone, sending a wave of panic straight up my spine. Please do not ask me a question, I thought.

Suddenly a torrent of Albanian words filled the air and my mind raced to understand what was being said. I froze as the sold-out crowd waited to hear my response. But what the hell was the question? I didn’t understand it, so I made some general remark about what a great evening it was, in Albanian. She repeated the question and on the second go-around I realized that she was asking me for an opinion on what had been the best performance of the night. Good grief.

The only two redeeming acts of the night were folk groups that I couldn’t conjure the names of for the life of me. In that instant of panic, the only song I could recall the name of was a ridiculous little ditty called Ciao Macho Man. The number featured a slutty-looking, bleach blond, Spice girl wannabe, nicknamed “Tuna,” bopping around the stage encircled by about 7 or 8 break dancing (yes break dancing) teenage boys wearing wife beaters and auto mechanic costumes. It was more or less akin to Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl video, only there was break dancing rather than singing into wrenches.The hostess and five hundred impatient Albanians demanded to know my opinion on the best song of the night, so I said, in Albanian, “Maybe it was Ciao Macho Man,” to a hearty round of applause. This seemed to satisfy the hostess and, thankfully, I was allowed to leave the stage.

I made a beeline for Lindita, who was accompanied by Rita, another one of our colleagues.

“I am so embarrassed,” she said, before I could speak.

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“The person who was supposed to get the award didn’t show up, so she was ad libbing,” Lindita explained.

“Well, please don’t tell me that Ciao Macho Man is going to get the award on my account,” I said.

Moments later, the hostess reappeared on stage and announced that Ciao Macho Man had indeed won the award for best performance. The three of us fled into a taxi as snowflakes began to fall all over the macho men and women of Skopje. Rita got a phone call and then gave me some comforting news.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just found out that Ciao Macho Man won because one of the Albanian political parties here fixed the contest, not because you said they should win.”

I felt momentarily relieved that Macedonia’s pervasive corruption, rather than my linguistic ineptitude had won the day for the macho men, but then my phone went off. It was Marija, one of the local employees I supervised at the embassy.

“Hey, macho man, I am so proud of you,” she said.

“Wow, word travels fast, how did you hear about it already?” I asked, totally confused.

“I didn’t hear about it, I just saw you on T.V.” she said.

Apparently I had just expressed a preference for Ciao Macho Man on live national television. I should have been ashamed but the beauty of living in a foreign country is that you can make a complete fool of yourself on television and feel safe in the knowledge that none of your friends and relatives will ever know about it. That is, unless you write about it, ten years later on a blog.

Read more from a Traveler in the Foreign Service here.

Image via flickr user Tibchris.

A Traveler in the Foreign Service: Can a guy who didn’t get high get a security clearance?

by Dave Seminara on

I was sitting at my kitchen table with a former law-enforcement official feeling nervous about the fact that I’d never taken any illegal drugs.

“In the last seven years, have you illegally used any controlled substance- cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, hash, narcotics, stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens, steroids, inhalants or prescription drugs?” the man asked, reading from a list of prepared questions.

“No, not at all,” I answered.

The man looked up from his yellow legal pad and put his pen down.

“You never smoked marijuana?” he asked, squinting his eyes as if struggling to see me.

I had no pony tail, I wasn’t wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt, and there were no half eaten cartons of Cherry Garcia in sight. Was my story really so unbelievable? I half-considered concocting some recreational drug use just to be a bit less boring.

I had passed the Foreign Service written exam and the oral assessment and had received a “conditional” offer of employment from the State Department. The offer was contingent upon being able to pass background and medical examinations, and having the good fortune to be invited to join an A-100 class, which is an introductory class for incoming Foreign Service Officers.

My kitchen table non-confession was with a contract background investigator who had been retained by the Office of Personnel Management to delve into my background to ensure that I wasn’t a spy, a terrorist, or a drug addict.
After the series of questions on drug and alcohol use, he asked me if I had any plans to overthrow the U.S. government by force. He was reading from a prepared list of questions, so it wasn’t like he’d sized me up and thought I was a radical jihadi, but I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone had ever answered yes to that question.

I sailed through the rest of his prepared questions without a raised eyebrow until we got to a section on my prior foreign travel and foreign contacts. I did my best to compile a list of my foreign travel over the prior seven year period, but had no idea who I should list in the foreign contacts section. I’d made dozens of foreign friends in my travels over the years but for the sake of simplicity, listed only a few as “close and continuing contacts.”

I assumed that the State Department would want Foreign Service Officers who had traveled extensively and had foreign contacts, but in the context of a background investigation, foreign travel and contacts are viewed with suspicion, and each foreign trip elicits a litany of additional questions.

After speaking with me, the investigator started knocking on the doors of my neighbors to ask about me each of the many addresses I’d live in during the previous seven years. After several of my former bosses and co-workers were interviewed, I was warned that the investigator needed to interview my current boss.

The State Department recruiter had specifically warned us against giving notice at our current jobs because our employment offer was merely “conditional” and not a done deal, so I had to inform my boss that I was quitting. Probably. But not really giving notice just yet. They were understanding, but it made me a bit of a lame duck months before I was to leave and the day the investigator came to our small office, the place was buzzing with gossip. I had to tell everyone that I was “probably” going to join the Foreign Service. Sometime soon, I hoped.

More than a year after I passed the Foreign Service exam I finally had my security clearance and a concrete offer to join the Foreign Service. A week prior to leaving for training in Washington, I asked my girlfriend to marry me. She said yes, but we had no clue what country we’d be in the next year and that suited me just fine.

Next: The List, The Call, The Flag- Assignments in the Foreign Service

Read more from A Traveler in the Foreign Service here.

[flickr image via Wiros]

One for the Road: Realities of Foreign Service Life

by Kelly Amabile on

Jessica Hayden had been married less than 3 months when she moved half way around the world with her new husband, and soon found herself in a tent in the middle of Kyrgyzstan, heavily sedated on pain killers and hooked up to a WWII style medical contraption. It sounds like some sort of extended honeymoon trip gone horribly wrong, but in fact, it was all part of Hayden’s introduction to life as a Foreign Service representative.

Her story, along with 28 others, appears in the AAFSW’s second volume of Realities of Foreign Service Life, a collection of personal experiences from members of the U.S. diplomatic community. Focusing on the “realities” faced by diplomats and their families outside consulate walls, the authors explore topics such as schooling and housing abroad, intercultural marriage and employment for accompanying partners. Those who have already served in this capacity will surely discover tales they can relate to within the pages of this book. And it can serve as an excellent reference guide for folks contemplating a possible career in the Foreign Service.

Jessica was kind enough to share an excerpt from her story, “Your Health Abroad: What you Need to Know about Medical Evacuations”:
I generally consider myself a pretty healthy person, so when I started to experience pain in my abdomen about a year ago, I didn’t think much of it. We had only been posted in Kazakhstan for a few months and I figured my system was still getting used to the changes in my diet. I had, after all, spent the last few weeks experimenting with the local fare, eating Central Asian delicacies like kazy and kumus, otherwise known as horse sausage and camel milk.

But after a few days of increasing pain, I decided to make a late night call to our Regional Medical Officer (RMO), Dr. Kim Ottwell. It would be the beginning of my introduction to the world of medical evacuations, or what most refer to as “medevacs.”

Over the next week, I’d endure various forms of prodding (some of which I’m convinced would fall under the Geneva Convention on Torture) during my medical evacuations to Manas Air Force Base in Kyrgyzstan. I would also brave surgery in a makeshift military tent by Korean doctors who didn’t speak English, spend a week of recovery on a cot, and ultimately return home to Almaty with my appendix in a jar.

Yikes! Sounds like an overseas diplomatic duty disaster, and makes me wonder why a Foreign Service reality T.V. series has not yet surfaced?! This is the next best thing — Pick up a copy of Volume Two (2007) to learn the outcome of Jessica’s medical misadventures…and consider grabbing Volume One (2002) as well.