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.