Global Reflections

Previously: Introduction and Post Assignment

In the two or three months before the packout (the day when our stuff leaves), I inevitably make lists. A list of things to do, which at this point often becomes a list of lists I need to make. A list of questions I need answered, often because the answers will determine what objects or actions go on which other lists. A list of things I need to buy because we’ll need them at our next post. A list of things I know (or at least believe) we won’t need at our next post—which then gets divided into lists of things to give away, things to sell, and things to put into long-term storage in the United States. A list of things I want to buy from our current location as keepsakes, memorabilia, and general “treasures.” A list of things I still want to do at our current location. Lists of what will go in the air freight, the sea freight, and our suitcases—these lists must be done early.

A week or two before packout, we have the Pre-Packout Survey. Representatives from the shipping company—or companies, if two companies are bidding against each other—visit our home. I give them the grand tour as they scribble in their notepads. They make note of our pictures, our carpets, our furniture (only a few pieces are ours; the rest belongs to the embassy and stays with the house). They open drawers and look in closets. I point out items that require special handling (which usually causes tape measures to appear) or that are heavier than they look. The constant questions are “Is this going to your next post? Is this going to storage? Can I look in here?” The purpose of this visit is to allow the company to get an idea of just how much stuff they will be packing up and shipping. How many boxes will they need to bring? How many people? How many crates do they expect to fill? Will we be under our weight allowance, or do they need to be prepared for us to be over? How much will it cost them to ship our stuff—and so how much will they need to charge the Department for their services?

At some point, I start checking things off my lists. I go to all those touristy places that I meant to go to all along but somehow never got around to. We buy the paintings—it always seems to be wall art, for us; we love the lamps and quilts and sculptures that we buy, but the must-haves always include wall art—that we’ve been considering for months, and we even leave enough time to have them framed. I give away or sell a few items. Then, as the time shortens, I give or sell some more. Finally, we have a big purge … or this time, a few big purges … often interspersed with last-minute shopping expeditions. (We gave away 200 pounds of books—surely we can add two super-light, super-cute quilted floor cushions decorated with jungle animals!)

But the biggest, arguably most important, lists remain untouched until just a day or two before the packout.

In our pre-cat, pre-Alexa days, the pre-packout craziness was diluted over a period of a week or two. However, cats love to climb, jump, and perch on precarious stacks of stuff, and toddlers—particularly those who are a bit change-resistant—don’t like to see single items go anywhere other than where they belong; they especially object to the large-scale rearranging that happens before the packout, and they tend to take items away from where Mama put them and put them back where they go … or anywhere else they can reach that isn’t where Mama wants them. So this time, we checked into a hotel two days before the packout—at our choice, and at our expense; the embassy assumes that you can live in your house throughout the packout, which is possible but impractical for us—and our housekeeper watched Alexa there during the days of the packout and for the day before it, when we destroyed the house.

Ok, so we don’t actually destroythe house. We just destroy the home-like atmosphere of it.

Remember those most important lists that are untouched until a day or two before the packout? Well, those are the “what goes where” lists. As a foreign service family, we are moved from post to post by the federal government. We have allowances for how much stuff we can take with us, and if we go over those limits, we have to pay the excess cost. Most of it goes by sea, because that’s the most economical way, but we do get a limited allowance for air freight, so that we can receive necessities more quickly. The shipment that goes by sea is referred to as the HHE (Household Effects), and the shipment that goes by air is the UAB (Unaccompanied Air Baggage). The government will ship a total of 7,200 pounds of freight per family. Most of that typically is HHE, but the UAB comes out of that as well—the exact weight limit for the UAB depends on family size (250 pounds for the employee, 200 for the first dependent, 150 for the second, and 100 for each additional dependent). We also are allowed to use an unlimited portion of our weight allowance to ship items back to the United States for long-term storage, so long as the total amount in storage does not exceed 10,800 pounds. So my four most important lists are lists of what goes into the suitcases to travel with us, what goes into the UAB, what goes into Storage, and what goes into the HHE (though I never actually write out an HHE list, which would consist of only one entry: “everything else”).

The day before the packout, we physically move things around the house so that instead of UAB and Storage lists, we have UAB and Storage piles. (The suitcase pile, ideally, is already at the hotel, although we inevitably find more things during the sorting—and during the packout—that we realize should be at the hotel.)

Because it’s prohibitively expensive to go over our UAB weight limits, we have to be judicious in what we goes UAB. We have to make some trade-offs: Do we put in some more clothes or shoes, or do we put in an extra trash can to use in the bathroom? (Trash can.) Do we take Alexa’s bike, or more of her books? (The bike.) Can we get by without the cats’ big scratching post, or will that just cost us in furniture damage? (Scratching post goes.) Which pots and pans are necessities, and which are luxuries? (Take half.) Do we take our Select Comfort bed, which is the only mattress in the world on which both Jeff and I can sleep comfortably, or do we leave it out and have more room for other things? (The mattress goes, although the platform has to go HHE both because of the weight and because the pieces are too big for the air freight boxes.)

I’m a bit obsessive when it comes to the UAB … I literally weigh everything and record it, ending up with a list of precisely what is in the UAB and how much it weighs. I have a food scale with which I weigh the smaller items, and we have a bathroom scale with which I weigh the bulkier items. My goal is to get as close as possible to 90% of our weight allowance, since we have to allow for the packaging materials. I’m very proud of myself with this move—once all was said and done, we were 10 pounds under our UAB weight allowance, the closest we’ve ever come to perfect.

I put the UAB on and around the dining room table. Things that are going into Storage, this time, went on and around the coffee table in the living room—except for the big items, like a few pieces of furniture from Alexa’s nursery set and a couple of papyrus paintings that were still on the walls. Those items were noted carefully in my notebook, to which I referred obsessively during the packout.

I also create “safe areas,” marked with pieces of paper with a huge “X.” Those areas this time consisted of the shelving units in the kitchen and hall, the guest bathroom, and Jeff’s nightstand drawers (which he hadn’t had time to go through). The safe areas become the temporary home of things that should not go into any shipment but that didn’t go to the hotel for one reason or another—bulky items like Alexa’s stroller or car seat case, food items we’ll still be using after the packout, Ziploc bags that we want available during the packout so that screws and other small hardware can be contained after things like the crib are disassembled. We also throw in anything we come across during the packout that we realize should have gone to the hotel—Kindles, phone charging cords, cameras, a clothesline that I’ll use in place of my drying rack.

While I’m destroying the house, Jeff destroys the electronics. He unplugs all the components of the home entertainment system, carefully notes which power brick goes with which component, what wire goes where to connect everything to everything else in the most efficient configuration. He handles the components that require some care—disconnecting the speaker wire without damaging any connectors, for example. He does some prep work on the TV console, which is specially designed for efficiency and accessibility, but which is more fragile than most similar-appearing furniture. He makes sure we save (unpacked) all the home computer network components—marking “X”s on post-it notes and slapping them onto the wireless router, the internet company’s box, the embassy’s transformers, the power strip, and all the other little boxes that I have no idea what they are. He makes sure that we have the velvet bags in which the speakers were shipped ready for re-use, and the foam that was packed around the TV (the box itself survived two moves but was judged no-longer-reusable upon arrival in Cambodia).

Finally, as ready as we can be, we head back to the hotel. It’s important to get as good a night’s rest as possible before the packout begins the next day, as the first day of packout often is one of the most stressful days of the whole process.

Up Next: Packout

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Anatomy of a Foreign Service Move, Part:

1: Introduction and Post Assignment

2: Pre-Packout Preparation

3: Packout

4: Leaving Post, Pets, and Home Leave

5: New Beginnings

Different departments (i.e., Department of Defense civilians and military personnel as opposed to Department of State foreign service officers and USAID personnel) handle each phase of work-related moves differently, and even different agencies within the same department may have some differences in how they go about things. What I’m going to talk about is what has been our experience, with Jeff’s role as a Foreign Service Specialist. If you’re part of a foreign service family, our experiences may be different from yours—but I trust that you’ll recognize the broad similarities even if a few specifics vary.

Sometime early in each calendar year, the State Department publishes an internal document known as the bid list. This document lists all the vacancies (positions and their locations) that are coming open in the next rotation cycle (all the position changes for one year are assigned at the same time, so each year is one cycle). Each employee is expected to review the list and start the process of acquiring a “next post.” In our family, Jeff reviews the list and narrows it down based on position requirements—he eliminates any posts with positions that are above or below his pay grade, positions that he finds professionally boring or unsuitable, and positions that wouldn’t be a decent move for his career. He also eliminates posts to which he is not allowed to take family members for security reasons (unaccompanied posts, such as Iraq or Afghanistan, or posts where spouses are allowed but children aren’t—like Kosovo, until recently) and most likely also eliminates posts to which he would not be willing to take Alexa and me for security, health, or other reasons. He ends up with a list of (usually) 10 to 15 cities, all of which would be manageable posts for him, and he brings that list home to share with me.

Usually I read over the list and ask Jeff if he has any early favorites. After whatever discussion follows, my first stop is the computer. I get basic information about all of the cities, often beginning with Jeff’s early favorites or cities that pique my interest. I always look for information about climate, security, crime, money and exchange rate, attitudes of the local population toward Americans, and pet importation (if we can’t take the cats, we strike it off the list immediately). When we’re preparing to leave Kosovo, I’ll also have to start looking at education information: what schools are available for expat children, how good they are, and whether homeschooling is a reasonable option in that country. I also look for blogs written by expats who live there, though I’ve had little luck with any of my three such searches to date—I never seem to find the blogs until I get there and meet the expats who write them. Basically, I start trying to get information about each country on the list with the goal of forming a general impression as to whether or not I’d like to live there.

Jeff and I discuss some more, pray, and come up with our top five choices, in order. Then Jeff takes our list in to work and starts the submission and negotiation process. It’s a weird mix of bureaucratic procedure and interpersonal negotiation, and I’m happy that he deals with it and I don’t have to understand all the particulars—diplomacy and negotiation are not my strong points.

And I wait.

Weeks or months later, people start receiving official offers. At some point, Jeff calls me from work and tells me where we’re going. It’s almost always one of our top five, though not always … ok, never so far … our number one choice. Once it turned out to be a position that not only wasn’t in our top five, but wasn’t even on the bid list—a position had come open at the last minute, they recruited Jeff for it, he was excited about it, and my response mirrored his: “If that had been on the bid list, it would have been my number one choice!” And so we were assigned to Egypt for our first post.

Once we know where we’re going, we return to waiting. There are several months between the time we’re notified of our new assignment and the time when things really start happening. In the meantime, we live our lives and enjoy wherever we are at the time. We also spread the word as to our new assignment, giving people plenty of time to ask us all the questions to which we do not yet know the answers, and allowing friends and family time to decide if they’re going to come visit us and start saving the required funds if they are.

I embark on a quest for information during this time. I usually order a travel guide and read through it in these months of waiting, and I periodically search for blogs written by or about expats in the new post city. I scour every source I can find for any information that will give me an idea of what to expect. My search is almost always fruitless. Only once have I found the information that I sought: when we were waiting for our move to Cairo, a friend introduced me to a wonderful book called Cairo: The Practical Guide, which provided a plethora of information for expats moving to and living in Cairo. Unfortunately, I was not able to find such a resource for Phnom Penh or Prishtina … if any expats have lived in these cities for many years and have the skills, inclination, and time to write such a guide, let me be the first to encourage you to write it!

Toward the end of this time, I start thinking about the practicalities of the move itself: what will go with us? What will go into storage? What should simply go away? These thoughts awaken my obsessive need to plan and organize, organize and plan … and transitions us into the next phase of our moving cycle.

Next up: Pre-Packout Preparation

~~~~~~~~~

Anatomy of a Foreign Service Move, Part:

1: Introduction and Post Assignment

2: Pre-Packout Preparation

3: Packout

4: Leaving Post, Pets, and Home Leave

5: New Beginnings

Alexa and I have something in common. I’ve always known it was in me, and I’ve fought against it my whole life. I haven’t won the war—I never will—but I’ve learned to hold my own well enough that I think most people don’t recognize anymore when I’m in the midst of the battle. With Alexa, it’s out there, front and center, where no one can miss it. Just as it was for me when I was a child.

What is it? Fear, in all its forms: from relatively mild anxiety all the way to full blown terror.

I’ve always been full of anxiety. Full of fear. Fear of doing or saying something wrong. Fear of looking stupid. Fear of taking risks and having them blow up in my face. Fear of not taking risks and regretting all the missed opportunities that come with playing it safe. As I grew up, I learned to fight it, to control it, to refuse to allow it to dominate me. But it's there so much more often than I care to admit.

I was a painfully shy child—my strongly introverted temperament contributed to some social awkwardness, some difficulty in interacting with my more extroverted peers. That difficulty led to social anxiety. I’m not sure if my other fears arose from that, or if something about my temperament made me more vulnerable to fears of all kinds. In any case, the fears that I recall most, the ones that still impact me most, tend to have a strong social element. Making small talk—with anyone, not just with strangers—because I don’t know how to do it, and I just know I’ll say something wrong, so I end up not saying much at all. Looking idiotic—even when everyone else around me is doing something silly, I just can’t join in without having the admittedly self-centered feeling that everyone is looking at me, laughing at me. Failing, because I wasn’t very good at getting people to like me, so I needed desperately for them at least to respect me.

I remember talking with a classmate at the residential high school I attended my junior and senior years. She told me of a conversation her parents had with my parents during orientation. Her parents said that she was wild, and they hoped that boarding school would calm her down. Mine replied that they hoped it would loosen me up and that I’d spend some time with their daughter so she could influence me. That’s how anxious I was about everything: I was so afraid to break the rules—so afraid of the consequences and of the shame of punishment—that my parents wished I would loosen up. (I’m still a rule follower, but now it’s a conscious choice to follow most rules as a matter of principle, of respect for the authorities that God has placed over me, and of respect for those whose rights the rules protect; back then, I would have denied it, but my main motivation was fear.)

But it isn’t just social anxiety that I fight. It’s overall timidity. If you look at the broad outlines of my life, you wouldn’t think that fear enters into it—people back home sometimes tell me how strong or brave I am for living overseas; long-term expats here occasionally allude to the uncertainties I face as a more nomadic expat, moving every few years. And there are occasions when I truly want to do something that most people would agree is way too risky—I wasn’t kidding when I wanted to travel to Minya province in Egypt, knowing that it was a hotbed of anti-Christian violence, and I wasn’t kidding when I wanted to get a firsthand look at the protesters in the early days of the Revolution or when I wanted to stay in Egypt rather than evacuatingwith the rest of the embassy dependents. But even in those situations, I was motivated by fear: fear of missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

If you look at the particulars of my life, the anxiety starts to become more apparent. My nomadic expat life is cushioned by a well-organized, supportive network called the U. S. Department of State, which provides a whole host of benefits to make my life overseas more comfortable and less risky than that of the average expat. And I’m still one of the most timid expats I know. I won’t try a restaurant unless I’m certain that other westerners have eaten there with no ill effects, and you don’t know me at all if you think that I’d ever eat from a roadside food stand in a developing country. I never rode an Egyptian minibus—and I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t have even if the security office hadn’t made them off-limits. I only considered riding a moto here in Cambodia for a few seconds, and even then I was amazed at the recklessness of the thought (though I am still a bit tempted … my curiosity and sense of adventure is fighting the fear a bit on that one). I don’t even like to go exploring a neighborhood—any neighborhood, in Cambodia, Egypt, or the United States—without being accompanied by someone who’s been there before or who is more adventurous than I am, unless I've mapped out where I'm going, because I’m just uncomfortable walking around looking clueless. Even the possibility of small talk still fills me with dread, and it isn’t just because of the boredom that most people complain of—I don’t do it well, though I fake it better than I used to. And just a couple of weeks ago, at a baby shower, I found myself compulsively making sure that I would be the last “artist” in a game of Pictionary, because I’m not a good artist and dreaded demonstrating my lack of skill to my friends--I hoped that somehow we'd run out of words before it was my turn!

So I still experience anxiety. A lot of it. And I still struggle with it, trying not to be as timid as I feel. And now I’m seeing it in Alexa.

It’s more than her clinginess in new situations or in social settings. It’s more than her terror at benign occurrences, like the phone ringing unexpectedly or seeing a man pushing a laundry cart for the first time. More than the long time it took her not to require my physical presence at all times after the evacuation. It’s in the small things. Her adamant refusal to dance or do anything silly in front of anyone but Mama, Daddy, or Ming Ming—and sometimes not in front of us. Her reluctance to do things which she’s developmentally capable of doing but not necessarily of doing skillfully. Her insistence that “Lexa is a baby” and “Lexa wants to be a baby,” rather than allowing me to call her a “big girl” or a “little girl” or a “sweet girl” or a “girl” of any type other than a “baby girl.” I get the distinct impression that she feels comfortable being a baby; she knows how to do that. She doesn’t know how to be a girl—big, little, sweet, Mama’s, Daddy’s, or otherwise, other than a baby girl.

And I find myself wondering how much of her anxiety is her temperament—probably inherited from me—and how much of it is learned—also from me. I stand by our parenting strategy overall; we’re careful to allow her to experience only those consequences that she can handle, and not to allow her to face that which she’s incapable of handling, and we try not to let her see that we’re shielding her from worse than we’re allowing her to experience. But I also know that I have been hypervigilant for signs of fear. Since she was a newborn, I’ve worried that she will fall prey to the nightmares that plagued me for my first two decades of life. When she’s cried, my automatic reassurance always has been, “It’s ok, baby, Mama’s here. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Even the lullaby that I made up during the evacuation, the one that she wants me to sing before every nap and before every bedtime even now, starts with “There’s no need to fuss; there’s no need to cry; Mama is here; I’m right by your side” and continues with similar sentiments—it’s ok because she’s not alone, not because there’s nothing to worry about. So one of my newer anxieties is that I’ve taught her not that she doesn’thave to be afraid, but that she does. That there’s something hovering nearby that would cause her harm if only her security forces (her father and I) were away or distracted.

And I wonder how to fix it. If I even can fix it. If I had help getting to the point where I am with my own anxieties, it was subtle, subtle enough that I can’t say with certainty that it was there. Maybe that’s because no one knew how to help, or because I hid it better than I realized and no one knew I needed help. Maybe it’s because this is one of those things that no one can help with—that a person just has to learn to manage on his or her own. Maybe the best thing for me to do is just to encourage Alexa, gently, to try new things at her own pace; to allow her to watch new skills as long as she needs to, without pressuring her to try them herself; to force myself to be silly in front of her (I still hate doing that!) so that maybe she’ll realize that it’s ok to let loose once in a while. Maybe I should just make sure she knows that I’m there, that I understand, that I’ve been through it too—and make sure that no matter what fears or anxieties she faces, she never has to face the fear that no one loves her; make sure that her father’s and my love for her is so deeply embedded into her psyche that it never occurs to her to doubt it, even when we’re disciplining her, even when we’re angry or disappointed at her behavior, even when she feels like she hates us and she’s not afraid to let us know it … of course that leads into a whole other area of inquiry, such as “how do you instill that certainty of being loved so deeply in her psyche without allowing her feeling of being loved—or not—to become her ace in the hole that she can use to manipulate you into allowing her to get away with anything, which would actually do her greater harm?”

Hmm. I guess it’s a good thing that I’ve been as successful as I have been in my battles with anxiety. Parenthood has opened up a whole new front in the war …