The Foreign Service Journal, January 2006

be: here in wine country, hosts would be ashamed to serve the cheap wine and dead-fish-on-a-stale-piece- of-bread fare we had become accustomed to. I admit to having “run away.” I deliberately chose a location far removed, physically and psychologically, from Washington. That has given me the satisfaction of dealing with people on a more personal level. The flip side of the coin is that almost all of the people that I come in daily contact with, even relatively sophisticat- ed and traveled ones, have little or no concept of what my life was like in the State Department. The lack of understanding by the average person of the Foreign Service is a major hurdle that has to be overcome in finding a new career. There are lots of stereotypes about FSOs (lazy government workers, dilettante cookie-pushers, etc.) After the Plamegate affair, a number of my friends are convinced that I was undercover CIA. They hope that as Mark Felt (Deep Throat) turned up in Santa Rosa, I, too, must have some juicy secret. They seem disappointed when I tell them about the real work of an FSO. Getting over that lack of knowledge about the work of diplomats is certainly something that the Retirement Seminar didn’t begin to cover. We’ve been told to write up the management experience — employers ask about profit/loss responsibility; we had responsibility for our employees’ lives. We’re told to stress organiza- tional skills — how do you write about keeping a CODEL on track despite a famous senator’s fondness for “ice water?” (OK, I was naïve enough not to know it was vodka.) So, when I arrived in the Bay area, I had to start from scratch to convince people of my skills. I spent the first few years consulting. That turned out to be a financial disaster, but it built up my resumé. I quickly realized I needed a more conventional job. Job-hunting these days is like cold- calling. You have to have a very strong ego not to take rejection personally — a hundred nos for every yes. But, there was a happy ending. I love my current work and the life here in California. The moral is that if you want to go this route, be prepared for some bumps and bruises along the way. And remember, little of what they tell you in the Retirement Seminar about job hunting applies beyond the Beltway. Chris Lynch Santa Rosa, Calif. utu Running a Bed & Breakfast Upon retiring as director of REDSO/West Africa in September 1982, I was selected as president of International House, near Columbia University in New York City. IHouse is a residential and program center for 750 graduate students from nearly 100 countries studying or interning in over 50 schools or institutions in the U.S. Our board chairmen have included Henry Kissinger, for- mer President Gerald Ford and John C. Whitehead. The IHouse appointment that just fell out of the sky made the transition out of the Service easy for me and my wife Barbara. In turn, our 25 years in the Service pre- pared us for my stint as president of IHouse. In fact, the Foreign Service experience probably gave me the nod from the nominating committee. A Fulbright fellowship in Norway, followed by 10 years in South Asia and anoth- er decade inWest Africa with USAID gave me insights for program activity and interpersonal relations with students from these three continents that were based on real experiences. After a decade at IHouse, I retired again. In 1993, my wife Barbara and I completed a 5,000-mile journey in our 29-foot boat through three of the Great Lakes, along most of the intra- coastal waterway and back up the eight rivers between Mobile and Chicago. A year later, we opened a six-room bed and breakfast in Interlochen, Mich., next to the Interlochen Center for the Arts. F O C U S 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 6 In Bed & Breakfast Journey — A Lifetime of Goodbyes (Village Press, Inc., 2005), Barbara and Gordon Evans explain the philos- ophy, process and technique of opening and running this type of small enterprise, and relate their career experi- ences to all six B&B rooms and the library.