The Foreign Service Journal, February 2003

The evacuation was lifted after 60 days, but because the children were settled into the new school and I had enrolled in a computer course at a local community college, we chose to stay in Seattle until the end of the school year. Others returned to post, but for our family it was a better decision to stay where we were. In retrospect, I now wish we had gone to Washington, D.C., where I could have had the support of the Foreign Service “family.” I have since learned that the FLO office is very helpful to evacuees, but being across the country made it difficult to utilize their services. Others I have spoken with talk about the support structure at some of the local long-term hotels, where evacuees from posts all over the world can gather for emotional support and share information. Should we ever experience an evacu- ation again, I would unhesitantly choose D.C. as my home base. Katherine McGifford DCM OMS Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso Evacuation Isn’t Always Awful Arriving in Tunisia shortly after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, we knew our days in Tunisia were numbered. We dropped our bags at our new house and headed straight to Carthage with our two budding historians, aged 6 and 9, and during the next five months saw as much of the country as we could before the inevitable. We prepared ourselves by talking about what might happen — to each other, to others at post, in letters to friends. We included the children in our discussions, not necessarily using “language they could understand.” Children, by virtue of being children, live in a world they don’t understand, and are generally comfortable with their ignorance — provided their parents seem confident in their ability to cope effectively with their own partial understanding. We never fully unpacked, which made getting ready to depart easy. Although we didn’t settle in physically, we did emotionally. The school was small and nurturing; the F O C U S F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 55