The Foreign Service Journal, March 2016

14 MARCH 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Take AFSA With You! Change your address online, visit us at www.afsa.org/ address Or Send changes to: AFSAMembership Department 2101 E Street NW Washington, DC 20037 Moving? brunch with an FS friend serving in an Africa post. Before coffee was poured, I learned that at her post electricity goes out many times a day, her child’s special needs are getting barely adequate atten- tion, dust storms infiltrate her home and lungs, and work duties bleed deep into the night and all across weekends. She mentioned these things casually, as if she were ordering eggs over easy. The picture could not contrast more with what Civil Service colleagues count on: keeping children in excellent local schools; swapping telework days to accommodate a plumber; negotiat- ing comp time for attending anything outside work hours; and, certainly, not dealing with dust storms—much less Ebola or Beijing-style air pollu- tion. Another challenge, maintaining a spouse’s career, is also clearly easier if based in Washington, D.C. But members of the Foreign Ser- vice expect and accept difficulties living abroad—pollution and disease; weeknight and weekend events (plus the stress of being duty officer!); poor schools; weak infrastructure (roads, electricity, water); maybe a coup, attack or evacuation. It is the price we pay, willingly, to live in a country and seek to understand it deeply—to be good diplo- mats who build enduring ties. Civil servants don’t sign up for this same duty. What they do every day to support the department, largely here in Washington, is irreplaceable. We bring different experience and different exper- tise to the work of the State Department. And we sign up for different systems and rules. Instead of parity, let’s focus on complementarity. Kit Norland FSO, retired Arlington, Virginia Young at the United Nations Did Cecile Shea pull a punch in the introduction to her FSJ interview (“The Usefulness of Cookie-Pushing,” Decem - ber) with Richard Longworth? Ms. Shea cited undiplomatic state- ments U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Andrew Young made before and in the first six months of his two-year tenure. (His initial misstate- ments of policy prompted Mr. Longworth to write the “Primer for Diplomats.”) However, Ms. Shea failed to mention why Young was fired by President Jimmy Carter: He had met with the Palestine Liberation Organization representative to the United Nations, despite the adminis- tration’s having assured the Israelis that U.S. diplomats would not do so as long as the PLO refused to recognize Israel. Richard McKee FSO, retired Arlington, Virginia Hispanic Firsts in Diplomacy It was interesting to see the October AFSA News featuring Hispanics at State and in Congress. I remember John Jova, who must have entered the career Foreign Service about the same time as my late husband, Leon B. Poullada. My husband was the first Hispanic career FSO to be named a U.S. ambas- sador. In fact, he was the first resident American ambassador to the Republic of Togo from 1961 to 1964, when he retired. Born in NewMexico in 1913, Leon Poullada grew up in Los Angeles. He joined the Foreign Service in 1948 after commissioned U.S. Army service, includ- ing as a lawyer in the war crimes trials following the end of World War II. Quite a few fellow officers with small-town backgrounds joined the