The Foreign Service Journal, March 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2022 55 Besides used furniture, Homes Not Borders provides new beds and bedding, outfits bathrooms and kitchens, and offers final touches such as artwork and toys for kids, so the apart- ments look like welcoming homes when we are done. The apartments are in sprawling but pleasant complexes that are home to many refugees, Afghans and others. We don’t meet the families whose apartments we set up, but other Afghans already living there sometimes give us when we’re done working home-cooked lunches, which we devour. To donate furniture and purchase items on the Amazon wish list, visit homesnotborders.org/donate-items. Bill Grant retired from the Foreign Service in 2020. He served as chargé d’affaires in Qatar, deputy chief of mission in Lebanon, Israel andMalta, and head of two U.S. regional offices in Iraq. He lives inWashington, D.C. DACOR Assists NewArrivals Paul Denig In response to the collapse of the Afghan government and the ensuing exodus from Afghanistan, a member of DACOR, an organization of foreign affairs professionals, suggested to me that DACOR as an organization should try to assist the Afghan new arrivals in their resettlement in the United States. Our executive committee approved the idea unanimously. While not excluding the pos- sibility of assistance to other Afghans, the focus of the assistance was to be our Afghan colleagues, the locally employed (LE) staff or Foreign Service Nation- als who had worked for the U.S. government. Subsequent efforts on my part to obtain a list of these Afghan colleagues from the Department of State were not fruitful, likely because of privacy concerns on the part of the department. I got no return calls from an officially recognized resettle- ment agency in our region, but did manage to reach another: the Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area. This resulted in an invitation for DACOR members to participate in their “Afghan Allies Job Fair” at the Sterling-Dulles DoubleTree Hotel on Nov. 17. This event brought together Afghan refugees from Mary- land and Virginia and employers with concrete job offers. Our dozen DACOR volunteers provided advice on résumés and interviewing, suggestions on organizations to contact for employment, and explanations of regional services such as public transportation. While for Afghan refugees, in general, housing is the most urgent need, the LE staff and FSNs had already managed to arrange that. We were very impressed with the English lan- guage ability of our Afghan colleagues and with their profes- sional focus on getting employment to support themselves and their families. We were very gratified by this opportunity to help them, and we even had fun in our interactions. In the event’s aftermath, we continued to provide advice by email, some of us donated funds to a nonprofit providing halal Thanksgiving dinners to Afghan new arrivals, others helped serve meals hosted by local NGOs, and a few team members even invited families to their homes for a halal meal. We plan to continue looking for opportunities for DACOR to assist our Afghan colleagues as an organization while encouraging our members to engage in individual actions of support. n A retired public diplomacy FSO who served in Europe and Africa, Paul Denig currently works as a reemployed annuitant on the Bureau of Administration’s declassification effort for historic State Department documents. He completed his term as president of DACOR in May and continues to serve as a DACOR governor. The Homes Not Borders team conducts a move for an Afghan family in January 2022. MARYKNIGHT