And the next post is......

The first tranche of entry-level winter bidders got their assignments a few days ago, but there was another group of people who got their assignments even earlier. It was not my intention to join this group until recently, but the reasons seemed right when the time came. I wrote a personal statement, my supervisor wrote her recommendation, and I submitted three bids to the Priority Staffing Post list. And the result is....

 

Embassy Kabul! 

I still can't believe it sometimes, but I am going to Afghanistan next. It will be a Political job at an embassy where significant things are going on, and those were my main two goals for the second tour. Now I'm starting a reading list, starting online Dari classes in the spring, learning about the usefulness of things like bulletproof sunglasses.....but mainly, I'm just praying very seriously for the ability to actually do this job well. 

 

TDY in the Abode of Peace: Epilogue/Mt. Kinabalu

I pretty much forgot this month that I have a blog and that I never wrote about the best part of the Brunei trip! November turned out to much busier than expected, with two trips to Shaoxing and one visit to the embassy in Beijing. Oh, and church activities and Thanksgiving happenings and the Marine Corps Ball. Whew! 

November 15 marked my one-year anniversary in Shanghai, and I've wanted to think about ways in which the next year could be better. I've been craving quiet time away from the city, and close to Brunei is Mt. Kinabalu in Malaysia, the tallest mountain between Papua New Guinea and the Himalayas. Climbing Kinabalu seemed bound to inspire all sorts of metaphorical thoughts about life and challenges and progress, and since time was quite short, I booked a package deal (for the first time ever) a driver, lodging, meals, and the required local guide.

The driver, a retired policeman with tatoos and a mustache, met me at 6:30am on a Sunday morning in an SUV blasting Ke$ha's "Tik Tok"....oh my word, this was going to be fun. Two hours and many dance club songs later, the humid coastal air had turned into misty cold fog, and we reached the national park headquarters.

A guide named Claudius met me, and we spent the next several hours in a slow trudge up a chilly rainy forest trail. Winding our way around the mountain, we broke into a more arid and windy piece around 3,000m - it felt more like Yosemite than Southeast Asia.

 At the treeline a collection of spartan dorms clustered around the main lodge awaited us - day one complete! Groups of hikers from Australia, Malaysia, and China steadily streamed in as the sun set. Incredibly, I found myself eating dinner next to a fellow visa officer from a European consulate in Shanghai. We all took mugs of hot chocolate and ate massive amounts of food and went to bed at 8pm for a 3am start to the summit on day two.

The march/crawl to the summit started out in a jolly mood under the starlight, everyone single-file with all our guides, and most people equipped with head lamps and climbing poles. But the last few hundred meters were so hard, one of the most challenging physical things I've ever done. The incline was so steep I had to lean on my guide the whole way, holding his arm and pausing every few steps. At the very end, struggling over boulders, I thought of Frodo and Sam climbing Mt. Doom - except with a hundred other people all struggling over their own boulder in a race to reach the summit.

And it was worth it. Not the end of the world, but the top of the world.

This was the moment my poor neglected camera was made for!

The summit of Mt. Kinabalu was sort of like being on the moon or in heaven or both. Surreal. Awesome. Full of wonder. In the beginning, it seemed impossible. And yet it was possible. That's the lesson I'm taking from this special trip.

TDY in the Abode of Peace Part 3: Jungle trek

After all the activity of the SECSTATE visit, everything calmed down very quickly. Most of the TDY crew was on a flight out of Brunei the next day, but I had postponed my flight just a little longer to have time for one more excursion - Temburong Rainforest.

Temburong is a funny little district of Brunei. In order to get there, you either have to drive through Malaysia or take a boat across open water. There's a town at the mouth of the river, and beyond that is the jungle. So I joined forces with one other TDYer lingering around and booked a one-day tour that would show the highlights of the district. The tour involved water taxi + minivan + longboat + short hike and then all back again to the city.

The longboat ride (motor-powered) was lovely - sun shining, water splashing, the jungle getting denser all the while. There is a Chinese word for forest, 森林, one of my favorite character combinations ever. Trees packed on trees packed next to more trees. Foliage so dense it blocks the sun and a jungle humming with invisible activity.

 

Once you get to the edge of the forest reserve, you sign in at a guest house and then start a short hike to the canopy bridge. Ulu Temburong National Park is 210 square miles, but only a small part is accessible to tourists. The rest is reserved for science (probably for the best, considering the rate of deforestation across much of the island of Borneo). After 30 minutes of walking up wooden staircases, we came to this:

 

A little scary at first, but a quick climb once you found a rhythm. And the reward?

A carpet of green and blue covering the land, birds in the breeze, and near silence. Just what one needs when posted in a city of 22 million.

 

The rest of the trip included a stop by a waterfall where we tramped upstream and got nibbled on by hungry fish (much larger and less pleasant than those Thai spas advertising fish pools) and a picnic lunch prepared by our guide's wife. Curry chicken, steamed fish, and bananas - delicious!

The best thing about the jungle day trip was being in the midst of the glory of creation. We saw how thorny rattan plants aggressively climb their way to the sky. There were black butterflies with a flash of neon green across their backs and a stream of millions of termite ants moving camp from one corner of the jungle to another. The ants were terribly fascinating, each one carrying one ant larva in its mandible. How did they know it was time to leave one hollow tree and find another? Who picked the new home, and who led the way there? 

Such grand design, such a Grand Designer.

TDY in the Abode of Peace Part 2: Game Day

"This is not a normal visit."

We kept hearing that refrain from mid-level officers over and over again as plans changed every day. In the beginning, Embassy Bandar had put everything in place for a presidential delegation with huge support needs. White House early advance was on the ground. Transportation hired over 100 cars and vans and local drivers. Secret Service was scoping out the sites. Eight days out, the control officers for the President's VIP entourage got down to work on our principals' schedules.

Except looming over our heads the whole time was the government shutdown. Would POTUS really still come? Thanks to good stewardship of multi-year funds, most of the Department of State was able to keep working during the shutdown. We had work to do and were ready to do it. But five days out, right as I'd finished a walk-through of the guest palace, the word came that POTUS had indeed cancelled. Deflation and disappointment spread through the whole team. 

Now we were in a holding pattern, waiting in place to see what kind of arrangements the Secretary of State and his team would need. Since the VIP I was preparing for also cancelled, there were about two days of trying to find ways to be useful. Need to double check the driver spreadsheet? On it. Paper to shred? Please, I'd be so happy to. Seriously.

Two days before the visit, I was re-assigned to the team organizing a round table discussion between Secretary Kerry and 25 youth leaders from the ten ASEAN nations. This wasn't my first choice assignment - it seemed like a side event, while all the excitement would be at the summits where 20 world leaders would be rubbing shoulders. But I was so wrong. The students were thrilled to meet our Secretary, and he was genuinely interested in them. It was truly inspiring.

The event itself lasted one hour but needed a team of four officers and days and days of preparation. Some of what it took to pull it off smoothly:

• Pasting directional signs all over a school building 
•  Hours of rearranging furniture for the perfect media shot (final result: see above)
• Bomb-sniffing dogs for site security
• Authoritative manner to tell media what they can and cannot do
• Dress rehearsal with students practicing passing around the mic
• At least 4 walk-throughs (15:00 S arrives. 15:02 S photo with school principal/VIPs to hold room. 15:05 VIPS enter auditorium. 15:12 S enters auditorium.)

 

Once Secretary Kerry arrived, the whole event happened very quickly. Some of the Southeast Asian news agencies stuck around afterward to interview the students, who were excited again to share about their projects and community work.

 The day before, the U.S. Ambassador to ASEAN had also come to speak with the students about activism. He shared his personal experiences as a student activist in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era and encouraged them not to be afraid of seemingly insurmountable forces. Secretary Kerry also talked about the 1960s and 1970s, but from the perspective of one who volunteered to go to war and came back with personal experience of foreign policy decisions. Two men on different sides a generation ago but who serve together in government now. That's the sort of thing that, despite the current mess in Washington, still makes our political system shine brightly.

TDY in the Abode of Peace Part 1: Bandar Seri Begawan

 Bandar Se......what? 

A few weeks ago I got a surprise email from an unknown political officer in the middle of a visa adjudication shift: Was I available for a few weeks in October to help our embassy in Brunei staff a high-level visit? Thanks to generous managers in Shanghai, YES! 

This was the temporary assignment I'd been waiting for. Shanghai has sent a steady stream of visa officers to Beijing, Chengdu, Dhaka, Freetown, and Port-au-Prince for the last several months, and now it was finally my turn to join a group going on TDY. The trip was full of unknowns and last minute changes, hurry-up-and-wait times, and game-day excitement. But first, an introduction to Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei.

 

Fact: Brunei is one of two remaining sultanates in the world (Oman is the other, and the Omani ambassador did seem to be pretty popular around town). The capital, Bandar, is quite small and sleepy, and mosques are some of its most notable features. 

 Near the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin mosque on the edge of the Brunei River is a water village, with entire neighborhoods of homes, schools, police and fire departments build on stilts. Kampong Ayer, or the water village, actually pre-dates the city by hundreds of years - it was already 500 years old when Ferdinand Magellan stopped by in 1521. 

 The main thing to do in Bandar is take a water taxi around the villages and then go upriver to look for monkeys. There's really not much else to do, so I went twice - once on my own and once with a group of other TDYers from Seoul and Hanoi.

Normally monkeys are not my favorite, but seeing the proboscis monkeys in the mangrove trees was a very cool experience. Like so many other flora and fauna, proboscis monkeys are only found on the giant island of Borneo.

Unfortunately for the Dutch, the Malay name for these monkeys is "Dutch Monkey," supposedly named for local people's impressions of the large-nosed, large-bellied colonizers (!).

We also saw small white cranes, a giant lizard in a tree, and bats coming out at evening.

Bandar had fantastic sunsets. Every night, the sky over the river would turn orange and purple, bringing truth to the country's name of "The Abode of Peace." 

Every evening in Bandar the call to prayer would go out across the city. Truly, we all need help turning our hearts heavenward.

Mini A-100 reunion in Chengdu

Two weekends ago was Labor Day in the U.S. - one of those holidays like St. Patricks' Day or Memorial Day that you pretty much forget when living overseas. Unless, that is, you get federal holidays off because you work for the government. Taking advantage of the 3-day weekend, a friend from my A-100 based at the Guangzhou Consulate and I converged on Chengdu (成都), where another A-100 friend just arrived at post. 

Somehow, during 2.5 years of living in Yunnan, I never once ventured into Sichuan. Chengdu seems to be all about food, culture, and pandas, so we went forth with a list to conquer. First up, food: 

Sichuan hot pot; Mapo Tofu

Delicious as it is, you can't eat spicy food all the time. Chengdu is also home to a delightful Swedish cafe called Kaffestugan, where we had perfect coffee, waffles, and smoked salmon:

And culture? Chengdu is known for parks with tea houses where people while away the afternoon. We hit up People's Park (doesn't every Chinese city have to have a 人民公园 or a 人民路 or a 人民广场?) and rented a boat:

 Also nearby was a Tang-dynasty temple:

Another unique thing in Chengdu is 变脸, or a mask-changing show. The performers switch their colorful masks with lightning speed: 

And finally, pandas! 

We visited the "Chengdu Panda Base" just outside the city on our last day. Y'ALL. There are so many pandas here. Cubs playing around. Lazy adults. Baby pandas in incubators.

The panda park was really well done, much better than most zoos in China. And there are just so many pandas. Normally in the U.S. you visit a zoo and see one, maybe two pandas. This was panda after panda after panda.....ok, you get it :) Overall, a good trip to check out another potential future post and enjoy a new part of this vast country.

Waving the flag in Anhui Province

This year was the hottest summer in Shanghai in over 100 years, but I can't say that I noticed so much. 7am, to the office. 7pm, arrive home. The work load has calmed down a lot more now, but the days were all running into each other for a time. One nice break this month was the chance to accompany our Consul General on an outreach trip to Anhui Province.

Outreach trips are sort of like waving the U.S. flag around, being the face of America in a city that doesn't see so many visitors. We learn more about our host country, and we share what the Consulate can do (issue visas, promote trade, facilitate people to people exchange). When our Consul General travels, he often invites an entry-level officer to accompany, and this time it fell to me. 

Our destination cities were Ma'anshan (马鞍山, "Horse Saddle Mountain") and Tongling (铜陵, "Copper Hill"), mid-size mining cities along the Yangtze River. Basically, in the 1950s, Beijing decided that Ma'anshan would produce steel and Tongling would produce copper. State-run companies were set up, entirely new cities were built, and thus it was so. And in case you are picturing cities full of smoke-belching factories, Ma'anshan was really quite lovely. Its two million residents enjoy hills, lakes, parks, and of course one of the world's greatest rivers running through the heart of their city.

Our first stop was a brand-new urban planning museum. Apparently not just Shanghai can do this; 3rd and 4th tier cities are in the game too. And not to be outdone, Ma'anshan's model came with a sleek video on a multi-story screen:

Factory visits also seem to be obligatory for outreach trips. This visit took us to Ma Steel group's giant steel rolling factory. Oh my word. Massive. Cavernous. Look how small we are walking through:

And in this whole kilometers-long factory, there were only about 100 workers, most notably supervising a coursing flow of silvery molten steel to be pressed into long sheets and rolled up:

Eventually this steel will be cut into pieces for auto frames. I'm really gaining respect for engineers this tour and how they make the world go round. Global economic growth, we can do it!

Our last stop in Ma'anshan was at a memorial park to the ancient Chinese poet, Li Bai (李百). One thousand years ago, Li Bai lived in this region and sat atop the hills overlooking the river, drinking by moonlight and writing poetry. 

It was blazing hot at the end of the day, my pretty new shoes were no longer comfortable, and the park was deserted of visitors. But our CG was genuinely pleased and gamely quoted some Li Bai verses he'd memorized long ago, to the satisfaction of our hosts. It was a good reminder that there is so much to learn here, so much history and culture to appreciate. And that poetry memorization is perhaps one of the most pleasant ways to further bilateral relations.